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Source: DICOBE-00279 – Lynn C – STEP 5-A MENTAL HOUSECLEANING.mp3 File: dicobe-00279-lynn-c-step-5-a-mental-housecleaning.mp3 Duration: 00:41:03
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The 8th tape in Mr. C.'s series on alcoholism and drug dependence deals with step number five of Alcoholics Anonymous. He has entitled it, A Mental House Cleaning. Mr. C.. When we arrive at step five, it seems to present a lot of difficulty to many men. Five is admitted to God, to ourself, and another human being, the exact nature of our wrong. To realize what alcoholism is, it's not just drinking or giving up drinking. It's a complete change of your attitude towards life and your responsibilities. And until that takes place, I don't think a man is going to recover because most of the alcoholic thinking is negative. And alcohol is negative by its very nature because it's an anesthetic or a depressant. So it requires a great deal of change in your life if you are to find a happy and contented life. The basic element involved in this step is deep personal honesty. And I think you can lie to almost anyone. But when you start and continue lying to yourself, you certainly are the worst sucker in the world. At least I was. And we have to accept this step in its entirety because half-way measures won't do. There are two, actually, weak links in the chain of alcoholic recovery. One of them is the failure to make a good fifth step, and the other is poor sponsorship. And the failure to make the fifth step, we have found, is one of the cardinal principles involved in men returning to liquor. And I've heard two men say, yes, I made a fifth step. I made it at my sponsor. Or you have the distributor type. I told Bill a little bit and Jack a little bit and Harry a little bit, which is a complete lie. Because I don't think an admission is going to be made, a proper fifth step, to anyone except a clergyman who is bound by the oath of secrecy and a clergyman who is a humanitarian and knows something about this problem of alcoholism. Because if you're going to place it on the basis of a moral fault, you've lost the alcoholic. It's a mental obsession combined with a physical allergy. But half-way measures won't do. The book tells us that all the way through are steps. And if you notice, they're written in the past tense. It said, these are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery.
And all 100 of the original alcoholics had to take every one of those steps. And the purpose of it is obvious. We've been living in a mental home that has been cluttered up for years, and to clear it out is very, very important. And the purpose of the fifth step, the major inventory, is to bring into light the excuses, the fears, the cruelties, the injustices, the all-moral faults which make full consciousness unbearable. That's why most of us were drinking, is because we could not live in our mind with a sense of the complete bankruptcy of life, in all areas, mentally, morally, spiritually, and financially sometimes, that comes with the excessive use of any drug, whether it's alcohol or pill. And this honesty that is required, well, they say that the honesty that's required in AA is if you catch a nine-and-a-half-inch fish, it stays nine-and-a-half inches, not nine-and-three-quarters, and that's pretty rigorous for the fisherman. But I know the inclination to make ourselves look good. So I say that if you're going to admit that you stole a rope, don't forget there was a horse on the end of it. And that's the way we do it, you know, just tell a little bit and think we can get by with it. In my particular case, looking back over, it was cleaning the Aegean stables of one alcoholic mind. You remember that was the task of Hercules.
They had seven tasks, and one of them was cleaning the Aegean stables, which hadn't been cleaned for 40 years. They opened the doors and turned the Jordan River and cleaned it out. And that's what we're trying to do here, is to save your own life. Dr. Hobart
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Maurer, who is a research professor at the University of Illinois, said that all human
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illness stems from the unuttered. And I agree with him. The things that we conceal tell sometimes about the people who are scrupulous. And he said they give the appearance of being honest, but they are concealing something. And you have that article that we have in the kit. You are your own secret, he tells of the necessity of bringing these things out into the open. I disagree with Maurer that this admission should be made to significant persons, such as your wife and everybody close to you, and I think that would be a disaster if some of us were to tell some of the things that we did. But to tell it to one human being is very, very important. But anything that we do in this program, or do in life, must have meaning and purpose, and must become a reality in our life. And I know that admitting to God and to yourself isn't a difficult thing, but to admit it to another human being, we're blocked off this false pride that we have. You know, you might not think that, or I don't want you to think that I'm not a nice person, I've never done anything wrong, and of course with that attitude you're going to ruin your life. And pride is one of the serious blocks in this field. But any problem will be open to solution if you take it out of your mind.
That's one of the oldest psychological factors known about the human mind. Why do you have to do it? For your own survival. I'm the one that's benefited from my fifth step, you are the ones that are going to individually benefit from your fifth step. And make it as soon as possible. I've heard men say, well, I'm going to make it. Read the book. So that must be done as soon as possible. If someone isn't available, if there's an understanding person, it's all right to wait, but you must be willing to make it at the first opportunity. Those are other alcoholics, and I'm one, so I have to follow that rule. I don't know of any other thing in AA that has caused as much trouble as the failure to make a good fifth step.
I remember a man we had who was 15 years dry, and he'd been out of his church and he came to me one time, he happened to be up there as a visitor when we were on the fourth and fifth step. He told me that he wanted to get back in the church and asked me about it. And I said, have you ever made a fifth step? He said, oh, sure I have. I said, who to? Well, it was a psychiatrist, incidentally one that had little to do with me. And I said, hogwash, you never made a fifth step.
Oh, yes, I did. But we had him over to a clergyman that was understanding. When he came back, I said, friend, did you ever make a fifth step before? He said, hell no. There you have it. So until we recognize that this thing is part of our recovery program, we're not going to get the success of the serenity and peace of mind that this has to offer. And a lot of people think that, oh, I shouldn't tell this or that because no one has ever done what I've done. And of course, that's a great fallacy. We all think we're new and original, and I doubt if there's been a new sin committed in 5,000 years. I remember one man that we had, and he met a Jesuit friend of his, and he said, Dennis, he said, you better get that fifth step out of the way. And he thought, well, you come to me. And he was an old friend. He said, oh, I don't want to shock you. He said, now, Dennis, he said, I've trained for 17 years to become a priest and hear all the faults and weaknesses of human nature. And for the last 18 years, I've been trying to teach other young men how to receive confessions and all the wrongdoing that human beings do. He said, I don't think you've thought up anything new.
Dennis has his face full of telepathy because he thought that no one had ever done some of the things that he did. And don't kid yourself. I often admire and respect the men that hear the fifth step because, to me, it would be the most boring thing in the world. They're the all-common faults of all human beings. Some of them are serious, some of them not very serious. But this attempt at concealment is one of the most disastrous things in the world. They're writing books now. Why am I afraid to have you know me and all this and that? It's simply that we don't want to destroy this image that we have conceived of ourself back in our adolescent years and is
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completely false. We depended a great deal by saying, well, after all, I'm only human, excusing some of the wrongdoing we've done. And I heard that so many times that I looked up several things about being human, and here is the best one I found. To be truly human, to be truly human, means to realize one's weaknesses, but to have confidence that it can be overcome. Means to be humble, yet not lose confidence. To be aware of man's pelican state on earth, but to stretch out towards the eternal. To be bound by time, yet a neighbor to eternity. To be restrained in one's strength, yet to be determined to accomplish deeds of transcending consequence. That's what it means to be truly human. But until we clear out this mental home, here, to illustrate the point, if you and I were confined or lived in a home where the windows were filthy, you couldn't see out, if the debris was all over the floor, would you feel comfortable? You can't feel comfortable in this mental home until you have the place cleaned up and all this sense of failure, of life, has been left behind.
And we hope that you leave it behind when you leave here. That's why we try to impress on you the importance of doing it. Don't think you're going to conceal something, get away with it. Now if you think that this is just my idea, I want to refer you to page 56 and 57 of the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions book. This book was written 12 years after the inception of AA. And it's written from the experience of our founder, who saw thousands of people come in and knew what was the cause of the failure. And he points out that everything that we do in AA is contrary to human nature. We're in our immaturity, we want what we want when we want it, no one should question that. But that frame of mind is dangerous. It's so intense, so is our fear and reluctance to do this, that many AAs at first try to bypass Step 5. We search for an easier way, which usually consists of the general and fairly painless admission that when we were drinking, we were sometimes bad actors. Then for good measure, we add dramatic descriptions of that part of our drinking behavior, which our friends probably know about anyhow. But of the things that really bother and burn us, we say nothing. Certain distressing or humiliating memories we tell ourselves are not to be shared with anyone. They will remain our secret. Not a soul must ever know. We hope they will go to the grave with us. Yet if AA's experience means anything at all, this is not only unwise, but actually a perilous resolve. Few mental attitudes have caused us more trouble than holding back on Step 5. Some people aren't able to stay sober at all. Others will relapse periodically until they really clean house. A thing that we found so frequently here that men who have been dry for a period of years go back to it. Why? Because they cannot live in their own mental home. They will tell how they try to carry the load alone, how much they suffered of irritability, anxiety, remorse, and depression, and how, unconsciously seeking relief, they would accuse even their very best friends of the very character defects they themselves are trying to conceal. They always discovered that relief never came by confessing the sins of other people. Everyone has to confess his own. There you have it in a nutshell. And Maurer talks about the many people that are walking around with a great deal of insight to no avail, and he said future treatment of the emotionally ill will be like Alcoholics Anonymous. Take confession and sin, confession and expiation seriously, and will involve problems of or programs of action rather than a mere groping for insight. You're going to have a great deal of insight to no avail.
And all these character defects that blocked us off from happiness are part and parcel of our trouble. And until we have a mental home where we can live in peace and ease, I think we're going to have trouble. It's been our experience all the way through, so you can take it for what you want. There's an old adage of sea captains that I think applies to this step, and one of the best reasons that I ever heard for making it. The days of the sailing vessel, the adage used to be if a The adage used to be, if a ship is in a storm and in danger, dump the cargo and save the ship.
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And that's what you and I are trying to do, is to save our own life. And to do that, we have to relieve our mind of all the sense of wrongdoing. If you understand human nature and understand this problem at all, you recognize that every person starts to build a mental home from the time that they get the use of reason. A child that is raised in a home where there's warmth and love and security, figuratively speaking, builds a mental home with wide windows and wide doors because of the necessity that every human being has to look out on others and feel that he belongs to them and they belong to him.
That's what the scientists call the herd instinct. We want to belong. If anyone came in here and every one of you people turned your back on them, they couldn't stay here. We need that sense of belonging. And we had it at one time when we were young and eager. But as we continue in our alcoholism, we know we're being criticized, we're self-critical, we start to board up all two avenues of communication with other people.
The thing that we hear so commonly in this field, I'm unable to communicate with my spouse or my husband or wife simply because no one enters this horror chamber of the alcoholic mind. We're afraid of it. Until that's cleared up, we're going to have trouble because eventually the last slap falls in place and you're a prisoner in your own mind, which is the most horrible type of imprisonment. Until we break out of that tight circle of self-centeredness and selfishness, which the book tells us we must rid ourselves of, we must, it will kill us.
I don't suppose any of us will ever lose it all. Basically all human beings are selfish, part of our immaturity. If you ever watch kids, they go over to someone else's home, there's some toy that they're attracted to, they'll grab it and hold on to it, long beyond their capacity to get any enjoyment out of it, simply because they're going to have it a short period of time. And I think the alcoholic is a great deal like that, and I don't think we differ one eye over from other human beings except our physical susceptibility to alcohol.
I don't think we're the only people that believe that one crowded hour of joyous life is worth an age without a name. This age that none of us can properly visualize, and we can't see the rewards that come from living the right kind of a life and to be outgoing to other people, which we're commanded to do. The last commandment that Christ left to us was love one another. Look at the hate that's going on in the world today, it's an appalling thing.
But this adage of dump the cargo and save the ship is an excellent reason for step number five, to save your own life, your sanity, and your freedom. And I haven't the words to describe the freedom that comes from living this program. You're as free as the ocean. When we're drinking, anyone who becomes emotionally ill loses the sense of true love, which should be outgoing. That's the first demand of choice that love always makes on anyone.
We don't seem to get through that through our thick skull. It's the changing of your thinking away from self and self-centeredness to others and the service to them. The more outgoing love is, the deeper the love is. And enthusiasm instill is only the outward manifestation of inner conviction. And when that is thorough, it becomes dedicated. When we build this isolation around ourself and we become selfish and self-centered, actually there's nothing the matter with selfishness.
You hear that word so many times and people always think of it as a grasping idea. AA is the selfish program. I have to put that above everything else. You may think your job, your home, your family is more important than AA, but I can promise you this, that if you don't accept this program and you're an addicted person, someday you're not going to have your life, you won't have your home or your family.
I've seen it too many times to ever question that. But it's a unselfishness. Certainly my family has benefited from the selfishness that I have concerning my own sobriety. And selfishness is not a virtue or a fault unless it concerns you and you alone.
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But if through your selfishness other people benefit, it's a virtue. Any more than unselfishness is not a virtue unless it's fortified by self-respect. You can't respect a person who will not stand up and express or hold on to their ideals. And you can't expect a person that's like a doormat. You have to have that sense of self-protection all the time and to have the right and the conviction of your own ideals and ideas.
And the only thing that I express is my own convictions. And I have a right to do that. I don't question anybody else. They have a right to their own thinking, but I've had enough experience to know that we have to rid ourselves of this selfishness or self-centeredness. And as the book says, God can help us do this. That's in the AA book, I think on page 62. Paschal said years ago that all men's troubles stem from their inability to live quietly in their own chambers.
There's so much truth to that because looking back over my life, all the trouble that came to me came from me. I made all the bad circumstances in life by the wrong attitudes that I had towards others, by this demanding attitude that is so characteristic of the alcoholic, which is part of our immaturity. We gamble with life all the time, and I think the alcoholic is the greatest percentage player that I know.
You're taking gamble with your life every time that you take a drink because I've seen so much of it that I'm not kidding myself that I'm different from any other human being, and I've seen some 70 to 90 men lose their life as a result of drinking their pills. Men and women died horrible, avoidable deaths. I don't say it can't happen to me. I know it's going to happen if I ever return to drinking. That same thing is true in many other illnesses.
We have to limit ourselves. We have to live according to the rules of recovery. Step number five clears out the mess of the past, and I think that many of us were walking and talking like an automaton after we made a good fifth step because we'd cleaned out this debris of many, many years, and then you start to bring in some good material. In the reconstruction of anything in life, you have to first find out what has to be removed and then bring in good new material.
Another thing that I remember a man telling me that he had been in AA, he had a great deal of trouble and never made a good fifth step, and after he got through, he said, well, it reminded him of the Army where he went on a long love march with a heavy pack on his back and came back at night and laid it down. The sense of freedom that comes from relieving yourself of this burden of the misdoing of years, and we must learn the right attitudes to our life, and the best one is the curiosity of our life, an attitude of learning.
I sometimes think we ought to have many signs up in the clubhouse, and one of them is, it's what you learn. After you know it all, it pays off. We seem to think that when we get through school, that that's the end of the learning process. As a matter of fact, they used to have over some of these school auditoriums, a Latin expression, I forgot it, but it means this is the end, and nothing could be more false than that because it's just the beginning, and you can learn as long as you live.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was on the Supreme Court of the United States, stayed on the court until he was 93, a brilliant mind, and when he was 90, Roosevelt visited him on his birthday. He changed protocol. Instead of inviting him to the White House, he went over to Holmes' apartment, and he found this aged man studying from a Greek school book which you find a kid in college or in the last days of high school studying from, and he was surprised, and he asked him why he was doing it.
He said, I want to complete my education. That's why he kept his mind. You can be gray in the head and young in your heart if you have a curiosity about life and are willing to learn, but you can't do it with a cluttered up mental home
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that is concerned with all the wrongdoing, the sense of the failure of the past. You learn through that, too, to accept life as it is. Some of the things, the wrongdoing that we've done occurs to stress you until you get it out of your mind, and once you must encourage to face any problem, it doesn't require any courage at all. It requires action. You always, too, have to consider that the alcoholic is the perfectionist.
We would like to have a perfect home, perfect wife, perfect friends, perfect world to live in, but the world is not like that and never can be perfect. You have to accept it as it is as a realistic thing. I've got a life to live. I've got to handle today. I'm not worried about tomorrow. I can plan for the next ten years. I have an assurance that I'll see tomorrow. But this day is mine, and I can live it and live it well, but I can't live it cluttered up with all the recollections of the past.
There are a few things that I do keep in my mind that I can throw up in front of myself. I never dwell on them. That's my last drunken drinking Christmas, and I'd rather be dead than ever go through those two experiences again. This is a time of the year when we should review the past year and see the mistakes and failures that we've made. I try to make another inventory between Christmas and New Year's and see all the errors that I made in the past year and make some attempt at correcting them, and it's a continuing process all during your life.
Well, once this first step is made, it's going to deepen your insight and let you live a life of peace and ease and enjoy your sobriety. And we want to know then how creative this new way of life can be, and it's a very creative life because you hear in AA they're talking about the adventures of every new day. What is an adventure? An inconvenience that you rightly consider. That's all an adventure is.
And an inconvenience is an adventure that you've allowed to go wrong in your own mind. The proof of that to me was that many times when I was disturbed because events didn't happen as I wanted them to or I had car trouble or something else, they were an inconvenience. Yet I was like a lost knight in the woods, bored the ears off of everyone, telling them what kind of an adventure that I had. Fundamentally, what's the difference?
It's a state of mind. But neither time did I arrive at a point where I planned. One was because I made it so in my own mind. The other were inconveniences. The basic purpose of the first step is the release of that haunting sense of guilt and remorse that certainly hung over me like the sword of Damocles. I knew that sooner or later I was going back to drinking and it was going to destroy everything in my life and yet the compulsive urge never left me for a long time.
The name was fears and anxieties that almost drove me up the wall. The purpose is to remove what is wrong. And certainly you don't have to be a genius to find that out. You know the things that are disturbing you. The things to bring out first is a consciousness of the worst thing that you've ever done. The rest of it is easy if you'll do that first. My wrong attitude towards others, the immaturity of it, it must be my way.
My wife has to be just exactly the way I think she should be and this inconvenience of old people is very, very strong in all of us. The loss of ethical values. Every alcoholic of whatever degree has lost the ethical values that we had early in life. There was a time that I couldn't possibly have done some of the things that I did later after my mind was stultified by drinking. The loss of love. It's either been lost or damaged because love compels you to be outgoing to others.
A jealous possessive selfish love isn't love at all. And I think jealousy is one of the worst faults of human nature and I don't know the solution of that. I've seen it so many times that it's pathetic. It also restores the good that was lost and gives us a sense of freedom. We all had high ideals early in life. They're going to be restored to you but on a sensible basis where you can live up to the ideals that you had at one time or want to have.
And it revives these ideals that have been clouded or obscured and gives us a sense of complete freedom. And gives us a sense of complete freedom, of love and respect, and all of us need that in life, I need to respect myself, I need the respect of other people, without that none of us could live in peace and ease in this world, you can't have it when your mind is cluttered up with all the sense of the failure of the life.
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This is where you can live up to the ideals that you had at one time or want to have, and it revives these ideals that have been clouded or obscured, and gives us a sense of complete freedom, of love and respect, and all of us need that in life, I need to respect myself, I need the respect of other people, without that none of us could live in peace and ease in this world, you can't have it when your mind is cluttered up with all the sense of the failure of the life.
I think that perhaps the greatest antidote for sleep is a clear conscience, you can go to bed at night with a recognition that you haven't deliberately harmed anybody by your actions or your speech, which is an extremely difficult thing for any of us to do, but if you are able to do that, you'll never have any trouble sleeping. It also helps us revive the ideals that were lost or obscured, this sense of integrity, and honor, love, and self-respect. Integrity is simply, well, it's honor, it's the strictness that you have with yourself in meeting any and all obligations to life, once a person has that, he has one of the greatest things in life because he masters himself, he meets obligations not because they have been placed on him, but because he has accepted them. This is my job, it may be unpleasant, but I have to do it because I've committed myself to it, whether it's in marriage or contracts of any kind.
I often think of a Roman statement, assume that thing in the fist up that you have, the poem that I used to put on our Christmas cards, I put a different poem on every Christmas and we're all a little bit sick about the fact that they didn't send out those cards this year. Let me still remember the bright hours that found me, trudging over the silent hills of my childhood, or dreaming on the margin of a quiet river, when a light glowed within me, and I promised my early God to be faithful in the tempest of the changing years.
What happened to me? What happened to you? Booze or pills took us far away from the ideals that we had when we were young, I suppose some of them are a little too high, but at least we could have lived up to them reasonably well if it hadn't been the interference of whatever addiction you had. It enables you too to resolve what has to be done and a willingness to do it with a gratitude towards God for the valuable and usable things that we have in life, and that's one thing that I think that has to be practiced.
What's important to me? One of the greatest discoveries of life is the things that you can do without. We clutter up our life with all the extraneous things in the world that have very, very little value. Strip those away from you. Travel on this journey of life lightly and well. The failure to make this first step will block you off from living in AA in its entirety, and my contention is this. I know that there are a lot of men that have not made the first step. They are incapable of proceeding further in this program. They'll never reach steps six and seven, which is we are ready to have God remove all these defects of character. Seven is humbly asking to remove our shortcomings.
You cannot reach those steps, nor can you give good sponsorship to anyone else. You can't give what you haven't got, and yet we have men trying to make sponsorship. You'll notice in some of these talks that men will start with the first three steps and go down to the twelfth. They never mention the core, the roots of our trouble. Why? Because they never made the fifth step. I was up on a retreat in Canada, and a man was there, and of course I always stress the fifth step because I know the necessity of it. He said, I've been driving for years, and I haven't made the fifth step. I said, what kind of sobriety have you? He said, I know you can have a first rate or a tenth rate or a fifteenth rate sobriety. He said, if I tell anybody, I'll get drunk.
So you can tell how he missed the fifth step. I talked to his wife, and he said he was one of the men that never lived a day at home, and yet he was kidding himself that he didn't need to do it. And I've heard that many a day. Oh, you don't have to make the fifth step. No, you don't. I agree. You don't have to do anything. You can keep on drinking and die drunk.
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But I just don't happen to want to die that way because I've seen too many men die from alcoholism. Paul continued about a man that he called on when he was on a trip to Florida, called up here a week or so ago, and wanted Paul to come down and drive him back here. And he didn't hear from him. He called again. He died in the hospital from alcoholism. That's only one of the hundreds of cases that we know of that people think that they can get away with this thing or that they can make a half-hearted gesture at it. And you can't do it. The book means something. Read it. And those are people just like you and I. They have the same trouble as you and I. They have to do it. They have to take every one of these steps.
And yet you'll hear so many times there are, and I must say there happen to be 156 of them, and you don't have to do this. You don't have to do that. I even heard one jackass get up and say, oh, the book don't say nothing about chasing out those women. A married man. Either that guy never looked at the book or he couldn't understand English, one or the other. Step six is we were ready to have God remove all these defects of character which would show anyone that this is a lifetime of work. But the start is made after you make a good first step. Then you're in a position to build a new type of home where you're going to be comfortable the rest of your life.
And there's no way to avoid the mental home that we live in. I'm going to be there and confined there until the day of my death. And I know that in terms, you know, I have this geographical escape in mind that if I can only get the east or west coast, then I could start anew. I overlooked the fact that I was carrying the mental home with me wherever I went. That is the thing that has to be satisfying to you.
Or you can live, but you're not going to live happily and contentedly. And any time that you do wrong, which many of us have done on many occasions, you pay for. You have to live with self first. That's where life begins and finishes. That's why this old adage that I knew from the time that I was a kid certainly is so true. Know thyself. What kind of a person am I? Not what I try to be, but what I actually am. Control thyself. Improve thyself and accept thyself. But you can never accept yourself until you are willing to change it. And of course, the biggest change that will take place is in the fifth step.
Until you acknowledge that, you're going to have trouble. And I think maybe I've told you that story that often comes to mind of a young policeman we had. And he went out after hours one night. I don't think he drank on the job, but he went over to somebody's home and they were playing Russian Roulette. You know, this idiotic thing where you put a bullet in a chamber of a revolver and spin it and put it in your head and pull the trigger. I don't know what you're trying to prove by it, except you're an idiot.
He put a bullet in his brain, leaving a widow and four children. And everyone was appalled that anyone would be stupid enough to do that. What have you and I been doing with our pills and our booze? Gambling with old John Biley corn or with any chemical addiction? And I've seen too much of it to know that I didn't know it. Live this life in its entirety. I haven't the words to explain or to try and convince you what it means. The only thing is that I know and know well is what I have today is compared with what I had in my drinking days. Life to me is paradise and music and poetry resounds along the streets.
I couldn't have said that when I was drinking. The unhappiness that comes to anyone who violates his moral ethics. And until we bring that on into the open, admit it to God, to ourself and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs, we're going to live in this cluttered mental home that has caused us so much trouble in the past. So read this page 56 and 57 based on the experience of the founder of AA who knew what was necessary for recovery as did the first hundred original alcoholics who compiled this book Alcoholics Anonymous. Study it. Read it 5 to 15 times, you'll have a slight understanding what it's all about. Then you better study it.
[00:40:17]
And also read the 12 steps and 12 traditions, which is 12 years of Bill's experience and the dealing with alcoholics. Give it some thought this morning. We'll close with a large prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.
Amen.