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Source: Bob D – North Coast Woodstock 2017 – Steps 6 & 7 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: bob-d-north-coast-woodstock-2017-steps-6-and-7-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:55:07
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God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Hi family, my name is Patrick Godfrey. I am an alcoholic. My home group is the Saturday morning men's meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We meet there at 830, so if you're in Ann Arbor and you're a man, we'd love to have you. My sobriety date is August 18th of 2013.
And Bob would like me to read a couple paragraphs from Into Action. Another blessing of sobriety, I never thought I'd live long enough to need these. If we can answer to our satisfaction, we then look at step six. We have emphasized willingness as being indispensable. Are we now ready to let God remove from us all the things which we have admitted are objectionable? Can he now take them all, everyone? If we still cling to something, we will not let go. We ask God to help us be willing. When ready, we say something like this, my creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me the strength as I go out from here to do your bidding, amen. We have then completed step seven. And now with no further ado, I'd like to introduce Bob Dee from Las Vegas.
I would have liked a more complimentary introduction. My name is Bob D., I'm an alcoholic. And only through the grace of a God that I was afraid to believe in, that I have accessed and maintained in my life through a process outlined in a book entitled Alcoholics Anonymous, the ability to remain sponsorable in a persistent and consistent effort in this primary number one purpose of trying to forget ourselves and help others. Consequently, I haven't had a drink or any mind or emotion-altering medication since October 31st 1978. That's the great miracle in my life. I'm delighted to be here. I'm a member in, I think, good standing of the Connect the Dots group in Las Vegas. I'll tell you one thing, the people there know I'm a member of that group by my actions. My sponsor knows he's my sponsor by my actions. And I hope God knows that I try to rely on him by my actions. Because actions is all I have here. I'm delighted to be here. This has been a great conference. You know, it started out last night, the first kickoff speaker, Sandra. I'd known Sandra for a little while but I'd never heard her talk. So I listened very closely and it became very apparent to me that she shouldn't drink. That's, it was bad for her. It really, it was a bad thing. And then Howard, Howard just makes me laugh. Howard is, Howard's brilliant.
Some stuff he talks about goes over my head because I don't, I don't have all the education. But he's funny and he's insightful and I appreciate that. And Chris this morning was very good. I enjoyed her a lot. And Sheldon, I know more about Sheldon than anyone should ever know. And I love him anyway. And now there's me. So it's been a good conference up to now. I'm supposed to talk on step six and seven and boy I'll tell you it's, that's an evolutionary process. This, my experience with step six and seven, it has changed dramatically over the years. You know when, when Chamberlain used to say that this is a disease of separation, conscious and unconscious separation between me and you and me and God, I think it's also that I am separate from myself. I am asleep. I don't even know who I am here. Which is odd because prior to coming to Alcoholics Anonymous I'd spent years in therapy with some great psychiatrists and the more we studied Bob, the more confused I was about who I was. By the time I got here I don't know who I am. I've tried to be so many things to so many people and I go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings after this final surrender I had after my suicide attempt in 1978. Now that's after almost just
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about seven years of relapsing, seven years of failure, seven years of swearing
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to myself and meaning it that I'm never going to touch that stuff again and always going back to it. And I had this surrender experience in the detox and which was nice. In and of itself wouldn't have kept me sober if I hadn't followed it up with a lot of action. But I came out of that with a different mindset. I think the view looks different from the bottom and all of a sudden I could hear things in meetings I could never hear before. At first I thought well just oh my god it's just the VA in Nevada is evidently more brilliant than it's been in the other states I've been in. It wasn't that at all. The view looks different from the bottom and I had enough of me kicked out of me that I could hear you. And you started to not only introduce me to God through the actions you would suggest but you started to introduce me to me. As I would sit in meetings and I would hear people that I don't even know that are not educated. They're not like these psychiatrists I went to. These are normal carpenters and salesmen and bartenders and cocktail waitresses and plumbers and they're talking about themselves and I'm finding out who I am. As I sit there and I do that thing we all do, nod our heads and go oh my god that's me. And when you have those little revelations it's not like you just became that guy. You've been that guy all along you just couldn't see it until you could see it. And all of a sudden now you're introducing me to me. And then you had me take actions that started to introduce me to God. I came here an atheist or well kind of. I wanted to be an atheist because if there wasn't a God I thought that's a better bet for me because if there was a God I suspected that I was in a lot of trouble and it's better not to have one. But you told me it didn't matter that I didn't believe in God. You want me to take certain actions. You want me to pray. You want me to do things that I didn't want to do. And to my amazement God started showing up. From the moment I was willing to turn my consciousness towards this thing as if it might be a possibility. It went from a possibility to a reality in my life. Experientially. Not because you said it. Not because it says it in a book. But because I started to experience these this endless series of coincidences in my life. And I started realizing it was almost as if the whoever was choreographing the universe all of a sudden noticed I was here and was trying to help me. And it was it was a great experience. And then right on down through the steps. And when I got to you know I did a couple attempts at step four. I did one of the year sober that I did. It was very popular back in the 70s. There weren't there was not a lot of big-book consciousness in those days. People were trying to figure out the steps from the twelve steps and twelve traditions. And even more common than that you'd go to meetings and you'd listen to people talk about what they did in step four. And it was like a confession of their life. Of all the things their secrets and things they were ashamed of. And you had to be honest. And I was honest. I wrote 40 pages of of all my deep dark secrets. And I mean I don't know that it's possible to have an exercise any more narcissistic than this. I don't I mean it was just it was like it's it's the big all about Bob thing. Forty pages about Bob. And then I punished my sponsor for eight hours until his eyes glazed over. Talking about Bob. Bob's shame and Bob's failure. Bob's being mistreated. And I was honest. All my secrets were out there. Nothing changed much. I did another one using the twelve steps and twelve traditions. There's 30 some questions in there. I answered each one as best I could. And I wrote a good part of a page I suppose on each of the seven deadly sins. Did that one with someone. And nothing really changed. And I was suffering from alcoholism. And I had my defects. I was starting to develop defects that I don't think I had before I got sober. Or if I don't know. Or if they were there they were dormant. Maybe I just didn't have enough self-esteem to act out on them yet or something. I don't. You know what I mean.
But I started all of a sudden. Like I had never. I could give you a whole list. But by the time I'm four years sober. I'm in a lot of trouble. Sober. And I'm going to
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two meetings a day. I can't hold a job. And it's never my fault. I worked nine places in four years. Everywhere I worked they did it wrong. Some of those places are still doing it wrong successfully today. As my friend Jimmy said. He said I was always the guy that was leaving. And nine jobs. Four years. I was trying to outrun a continual plaguing depression. That I seemed to insulate myself somewhat from. By doing what Bill Wilson discovered. By throwing myself into helping others. And a lot of H&I. And a lot of 12-step work. And a lot of committees. And a lot of service positions. And it kept me. It didn't keep me happy. But it kept me free enough from that stuff. That I could stay sober. Walk through it. And eventually a little over four years sober. I did my first legitimate four step out of the big book. And it was transformational. I came out of that with knowledge. And insight. And being awake to things that I had never imagined. You know all the other earlier ones. If you would ask me when I was done.
What was the exact nature of your wrongs Bob? You know I would have said. Well I stabbed that guy. And I stole that. And I lied about that. And I used those people. I would have had that stuff. But if you asked me after coming out of the one of the big book. I would have said. You know I was really wrong about my mother and father. I never looked at it like we looked at it in that step. I was really wrong about my sister. I was really wrong about my bosses. I was really wrong about the women in my life. I was really wrong about the police. I was really wrong about everything. And it is extreme ego reduction at depth to go through your resentment list especially. And also your fears. Because those are all judgments. And to dismantle each one of them. My first sex inventories were kind of pathetic. Because when I drank. I drank. I mean you know. I mean I'd have opportunities to have sex. But I was. I couldn't put down the drink long enough to go home with her. You know what I mean. I mean I had big intentions. Not a lot of action. And I made up for it at about 10 years sober. But that's a different story. Actually about 12 years. So I come out the back side of that with tremendous insight into my life and the nature of all of this. I was told to do step six and seven. And I went and read the prayer. Page 76. The seventh step prayer. I missed the sixth step prayer. I missed it. It was in there. But I didn't. I don't know. I don't know if I missed it conveniently. Or I just really missed it. I don't know. You know the word ignorance comes from the word ignore. I tell you one thing. I ignored it. If it was there. I ignored it. I didn't see it. I didn't say it. And I went about conquering my defects of character with the sheer effort of my will. Which and knowledge. Because I've always thought that power could be found in knowledge. Now that I know. Now that I know I can't be that guy. I can't be that guy.
Now that I know I'm going to conquer this. And I went about it. I don't know how many years I struggled and suffered with that. There's a passage in working with others where Wilson talks about alcoholism. I should read this. It's a brilliant thing. A lot of what I've found in AA is like spiritual physics. It's cause and effect. And when you start to understand the cause and effect you can save yourself a lot of grief. And Wilson on page 101 he says in our belief any scheme of combating alcoholism. Which to me that's everything that's left after you take away the alcohol. Right? Any scheme of combating alcoholism which proposes to shield the sick man from temptation is doomed to failure. If the alcoholic tries to shield himself he may succeed for a time but he usually winds up with a bigger.
time, but he usually winds up with a bigger explosion than ever.
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We have tried these methods, these attempts to do the impossible have always failed. And it started to, I started to have this experience of the things that I'm willfully gonna suppress, it's as if sometimes my willful suppression of them would give them torque. And then I would have this, I would go like a reformed smoker for a while. I'm gonna do that, I'm not gonna do that, I'm not doing that, do you notice, I am not doing that.
And I'm judgmental of everybody who's doing it. Feeling smugly superior, right? And then I'd run out of power, lack of power really is my dilemma. And I would have a little incident where I've acted out on whatever I was willfully suppressing and I was sitting in a meeting after another one of those episodes where I just did something, I told myself, I'm not gonna do that, I'm not gonna do that, not even a little bit, not gonna do it.
I did it. And I'm in a meeting and they're reading the steps and I'll tell you when they got to step seven, when they said humbly, when they said the word humbly, I sat there and I went, oh, of course. And how do you get humbly, how do you get to humbly, how do you get to entirely? How do you get entirely ready to humbly? I don't know about you guys, how did I get entirely ready to come to AA? Through failure, through pain, through a lack of options.
And I started to understand that I've been, I forgot the decision I made in step three when I said to God, I offer myself to you for you to build with me and do with me as you will, what I was really trying, I'm trying to take this position of making my life none of my business and I'm asking him to relieve me of this bondage because I'm shackled to this obsessive self-concern so that victory over them would bear witness to those I would help.
And I'd undone that and taken the reins again, now my life is my business. But I have a good cause, it's to grow spirit, my spiritual growth now has become my business. When I said to build with me and do with me, I'm taking it back, now it's me building with Bob. It's me building with Bob spiritually, it's me being in charge again, I didn't even know that. Sometimes I think it's the stuff I don't know that seems to hurt me the most at times.
And I think that's a lot of what we experience in Alcoholics Anonymous, we wake up, but like all waking ups, it's not an instantaneous thing. You know, the alarm goes off in the morning, you kind of wake up and you hit the snooze or you shut it off and you're sort of awake, but 20 minutes later after a cup of tea or cup of coffee and maybe you exercise, maybe you're moving around a little bit, maybe you're a little more awake and then you get in the shower, get out in the world, you're even more awake.
And it seems to be a process of waking up. And I think that waking up to who I am and waking up to God's grace is a process that seems to, that takes a while. And I started to realize that some of this stuff just doesn't budge, it doesn't budge. Or if I suppress it enough, it just comes out in a different form. You know when I was a little over four years sober and I did my first fourth step out of the book, you know I made this large resentment list, well I was over four years sober, so almost all the resentments on that list are people in AA.
Because I notice things, you know I'm just good at that, I just, I can walk into a room of 50 people and if somebody's out of line I'll notice them quicker than anybody in that room because I'm good at that. You had four cups of coffee and didn't put any money in the basket, uh-huh, yeah I get it, uh-huh. So I had this long list of resentments and they were, and they were pathetic. I'll tell you the kind of guy I am.
I can resent you for something that is so childish, that is, it's so pathetic and childish, it really has to do with you're not doing things my way, really. But I can't put that out, I don't even want to put that out there to me, so I have to watch you until I find other reasons to resent you, to justify that I really hate you because
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you said something I didn't like or you're not doing things my way. So I got to build a case on you, right? And it was, I remember looking at this after, you know you're supposed to go home for an hour and looking at all these judgments and just getting disgusted with myself, you know? It's one thing to kind of admit in a general way that yeah, I'm judgmental or opinionated, yeah, yeah, but when you look at it on paper and it's everyone you know just about in your home group, you know, just about everybody, you found something wrong with them, right?
It's pathetic. So I was disgusted with that and one of the first things I decided I'm going to correct in me is I am not going to be judgmental ever again. And I almost instantaneously became very aware of the judgmental people in AA. I became intolerant of the intolerant because my ego has to have some, it has to grandize itself with someone's expense and it ain't going to be my expense. So I have to find fault in order to puff me up, right?
And it was like, it's like that game in the kid's arcade, whack-a-mole, where you hit the mole down over here and it pops up over there, it just comes out in a different form. And I struggled with a lot of things for a number of years and I don't know, I can't tell you when this happened, but gradually I started to realize how much I need God. I was at a retreat one time and this Catholic priest that was putting it on, he said that he was talking about the Benedictine view of spiritual growth and he said that their view was an increasing awareness of our own limitations along with an increasing awareness of God's incredible generosity.
Or as it says in the book, the Father does, I am of myself, I am nothing. The Father doeth the work. And God does all the heavy lifting here. And you know what I do? I try to take credit for it, basically. I'm that guy, I'm the guy who conquers, you know, I got free of gambling and then went around and told everybody what I did and how spectacular it was. I'm that guy, I try to take credit for stuff.
And really the truth is that God does all the heavy lifting here. There's an old adage, an old cliche I guess, I don't even know where it came from, it might have come out of my head, I don't know where it came from. I can't figure out where I heard it. But somewhere it's in my mind that without Him I can't, but without me He won't. And I started to take a look at what this thing is in step six that interferes with my becoming entirely ready.
Why do I hang on to things that I know I should be free of? I even at times convince myself that I'm willing to be free of them, or that I'm entirely ready, but in actuality I'm not. And one of the things I started discovering is that what I was really entirely ready to have God remove was the consequences and the bad feelings in the aftermath of these self-indulgent behaviors. And it really is all manifestations of self, selfishness, self-centeredness.
I mean for God's sake, why do I have resentments except I need to grandize myself and uplift me at your expense by pulling you down? Why am I harsh with people? Because it's a defense mechanism because I'm scared and I'm afraid. Why do I have lust because I'm just lustful all the time, or is it because I'm afraid of a life that's lonely, that's boring? I'm afraid of my own inability to make a connection.
So I settle for sex because it's as close as I've known. What is anger except a defense mechanism to keep people off my back? I mean, if God really removed some of this stuff, what would become of me? What if God took away all my anger once and for all? I mean, who would stand up for me? Who would defend me when some guy's trying to take advantage of me, or when you're trying
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to punk me out, who's going to stand up for me? And you know, the old timers will tell you, oh, God will. Not so sure. You know what I mean? Well, what if God took away all my lust? Oh my God, what would that look like? Sure, make things a little dull in life, I mean, right? What would it look like? Would God replace it with something better? Is there something better? You know, all these things go through my mind.
Because my character defects are defense mechanisms I've cultivated for years against a life that's kind of scary, and kind of empty, and kind of lonely, and I don't measure up, and I feel very, very inadequate here. And I got a big secret, and the big secret is I'm not enough here. And so I've cultivated these defense mechanisms in a futile attempt to shore my life up so I can feel a little more comfortable, and a little more secure.
But they're defective. My anger has brought me more problems in my life. I almost went to jail at, I don't know how many years, over seven. I don't even want to go into that story. I just did somebody some little bit of physical damage, and thank God it was a couple of my employees pulled me off of him. Because I was scared. I was scared on a lot of levels. My pride was threatened. My finances were threatened.
My security was threatened, and this was my reaction to that. My defense mechanism against it. And you know, if you have experiences like that where you act out on stuff, and you're like me, you get to places, because you're not asleep at the wheel as much as you were when you were new. When you're brand new, you can get away with a lot of stuff because you don't know any better, and you're numb, and you're dim.
But as the light starts to get brighter in your life, and you start to wake up, the road kind of, it's not that it gets narrower, but it's almost like you can do anything you want, you just all of a sudden are awake to the prices you're paying. Your options are minimizing. It feels like the roads are getting narrower, in actuality I think it's getting wider. But it feels like, because the options are getting smaller.
And so you get to those points, man, you act out on something that you know, you're not deluded anymore. You know this was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. And you get to places where you can't stand yourself. I mean you can't stand yourself. And you have those moments, those dark, dark moments. And I think maybe that sometimes brings guys like me to a place of entirely ready, right? I want to change because I don't want to be Bob like that anymore.
And then another thing happens to all of us, and this is really where I tell you I've woken up more. I heard, I think it was Bill Cleveland was the first guy I ever heard say it. And the minute he said it I thought, that's exactly right. He said that we say in AA, you can't keep it unless you give it away. He said, I don't think you get it until you give it away. And that is exactly my experience. I have changed more in my life through the people I sponsor than through the steps, through anything.
Because when you sponsor people, now this may not happen right away, it took me a while before I woke up to the reality of the situation I was in with these sponsees, that I am the primary example of how to live a spiritual way of life in sobriety to these guys. Now I may not want the responsibility of that, but it doesn't matter, you end up with it. It's yours. There's no one you can hand it to. I mean, wouldn't it be great if we could have some kind of service, charge an outrageous amount of money for someone who will take the responsibility for everything you do sober.
You could pay them to make amends for you and all kinds of stuff. It would be a wonder. We'd be billionaires if we could do that. But there's no one who will take any of that stuff. So you realize I have this responsibility. These guys turned to me as an example. Now it doesn't mean that they're going to do everything I do, but I'll tell you what it does put in my heart. It puts a desire. It puts a desire, a desire to be better because I don't want to be a bad example.
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Now I know I'm never going to be perfect, but I think my willingness to grow along spiritual lines has come not so much from the pain of being the guy at times in my sobriety I can't stand as much as it comes from the inspiration and the reality of what I am to you and that I want to be a better example. A lot of this stuff has to go back to, Sheldon touched on it in the Fear Inventory. You know Wilson said it, he said it beautiful in Step 7 in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, he said that self-centered fear is the chief activator of all our defects. Fear is the muscle of the ego. If your ego wants you to act out, it wants you to play God, it wants you to take charge, wants you to be in control, wants you to put those people in their place, it's got to scare you.
It's got to scare you until you feel so threatened you'll do exactly what it's pushing you to do and it punks you out. I bet you I'm not the only person in this room that's quit a job because you were afraid of what they were thinking about you. Or quit a job because you were afraid they were going to fire you. You're not going to fire me, I'll quit. Now they may never have fired me, I don't know, I didn't stay long enough to find out. So fear really is the muscle of the ego.
And self-centered fears, it's an insidious thing. So what's the answer to that? Trust God. What does that mean? It's easy to say, but what's it look like? I had a guy tell me a story 35 years ago. I was at a retreat and he said, I was talking to him about anxiety and about some of the problems I was incurring in my abstinence. And he said, well, do you pray? And I said, I pray every morning, every night. He said, do you believe in God? I said, absolutely.
I know I'm sober longer than I've ever been since I took my first drink and I know God did that, it's not me. I knew that. He said, but do you have faith? But do you trust God? And I must have looked at him like, well, what's the difference? He said, well, there's a big difference between faith and trust. He said, guys like you and I can have all the faith in the world, pray fervently and still die of alcoholism. And he told me that before I actually saw a man who was clergy, drink himself to death with more faith and more prayer than most of us would ever have.
And he said to me, he said, I'll tell you the difference. He said, you got to have trust. And I said, the difference is if you went to a circus and you sat in the audience and you watched a tight wire act and you watched a performer come out on the edge of the platform where the wire goes across the top of the tent and he's pushing a wheelbarrow, you could sit in the audience with absolute faith, this is a professional, I bet you he's crossed that tight wire pushing that wheelbarrow a thousand times, absolute faith, he can do it, he's a professional.
But if you had trust, you'd get in the wheelbarrow and let him push you across. Well, come on. I mean, you know, I understand what you're saying, but let's be realistic here because I'm scared. If I ever turn myself over to God that much and become that vulnerable, I don't know what's going to happen. If I ever got in that wheelbarrow, I'm sure I'll get about 10 feet out over that abyss and I'll hear that voice, is that Bob?
Oh, and my whole life would flash before my eyes everything I ever thought or did that was wrong. And oh God, because I don't trust, the truth is I don't trust God. When I was a little kid, there was a TV show on called Rescue 8 and it was about these paramedics that worked out of a firehouse and they would go out on distress calls when people are in trouble. And this one particular episode, they were called out to the scene and there was these two parents were there and this little girl, and the little girl has her arm wedged up into a vending machine and their parents have been trying to get it out and they can't get it out.
And it just hurts her to try to pull it out. And the paramedics, they try to move it around, it won't come out. And it just hurts her to try to get it out. And so now the fire trucks are showing up and the firemen are unloading like electric saws and a settling torches and they're discussing cutting the door around the girl's arm, which is freaking her out, making her even more
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scared. And the one paramedics watching all this, and the other paramedics watching, and the one paramedics watching all this, and he comes over and he kneels down next to the little girl and he says to her, sweetheart, do you got something in your hand? She goes, uh-huh. What do you got in your hand? A candy bar. Would you let go of the candy? No, it's my candy bar, it's my gossip, it's my anger, it's my lust, it's my porno, it's my gambling, it's my candy bar.
She won't let go. And he gets it and he backs away. And he stands there for about a minute, he's pensive watching her and he comes back over to her. The minute he starts coming towards her, she's on the defensive, you can see it in her face. It's like, what do you want? That kind of thing, right? And he comes over and he just kneels down next to her and says, sweetheart, I'm just here to make you a promise, that's all. And she said, what? He says, I want to promise you two brand new candy bars if you'll let go of that crumpled one in your hand. And she said, really? And he said, I promise. And because she trusted him, she let go of the candy bar and her arm slid out of the vending machine. So the deal is, what's your candy bar?
I don't hang on to destructive, objectionable behavior because I'm self-destructive. There's a candy bar. There's some little, and it may be an illusion of value. It may be something that had worked 10 years ago. Maybe 10 years ago, my anger backed off some people that were threatening me. Maybe when I was a little kid and I would have a temper tantrum, my parents would eventually get worn out and give in and get my way. That's cute when you're three. When you're 30, it's not, temper tantrums aren't cute when you're 30. And so maybe it's a defense mechanism that at one time worked, but I have to look, wake up to reality. And the reality is this stuff's killing me. But the question is, do I trust God enough? Do I trust God enough?
Sometimes in some things, yes. Sometimes some things not so much. And the only way you can tell is by my actions. I know there's, there's been things in my life over the years that I know I need, I need, I need to become entirely ready, entirely willing, but I'm just not there yet. And it's okay. In the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, it says as long as we don't rebel against it, as long as we say to ourselves, okay, honestly, I'm not quite ready yet, but maybe someday, maybe someday. It says, uh, rebellion can be fatal. My sponsor has a great saying. He said, people don't, don't drink from, again, from making mistakes. They drink from defending them.
And that is really true. You, you can, you can do almost anything in Alcoholics Anonymous, no matter how heinous it is. If you're willing to stand up in front of your home group or your sponsor, your peers and go, man, I, I just, I screwed up big and I'm scared. If, as long as you can be transparent with that, that stuff, you got a shot. It's when I wall, when I use that thing to wall me off, that it'll kill me. I don't want to talk. I got an example of that, but I don't want to talk about it. It's too much personality. There's a couple of us up here and we're debating what to talk about. I got a great example, but I know too many people in this room know, would figure out the guy I'm talking about. So I'm not going to do it. So what happens is if I can act like someone who's entirely willing, I was hiding some misconceptions about stuff.
You know, sometimes in AA, you have these immediate and overwhelming shifts that Wilson talks about. And they talk about it in the back of the book. These like these epiphany things where all of a sudden you've kind of hit a little bottom with something and you go, Oh, I can't stand this. And God, please take it away. And it's gone. Now that does happen here, but a lot of times it's different than that. A lot of times it's, it's a continued persistent presentation
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between me and life itself of a guy who's entirely willing, entirely ready. And so what does that look like? Well, we all kind of know what entirely willing and entirely ready looks like because most of us were that way. When we got sober, if especially if you were like me and you just on your last run, tried to kill yourself and you had been swearing to yourself for seven years, you're never touching any of that stuff again. And you kept going back to it and you're dying and you're on your last leg and you get finally get sober. And what, what, what do people like that do when they finally get sober? My God, they go to 20 meetings a week.
If they can, they go to every meeting that's humanly possible without, without disrespecting their job and their other responsibilities. If they can go to 20 a week, they'll go to 20 weeks. They'll get a sponsor. They'll become sponsorable. They will share everything with their sponsor that they can. They'll do service commitments. They'll do the inconvenience stuff. Like when they, when they tell guys like me to turn myself in and offer to go to prison for two years and we do it.
That's, if you would have watched me in my first year of sobriety, you would have seen a crazy guy just bouncing off the walls. But what you would have observed very clearly is a guy that was entirely willing because I looked like that. I presented myself to the universe. And for some of us, it's a presentation like that in order to receive God's grace. It's I have to become the receiver of God's grace. And I can only make myself that receiver by the actions I take.
So it would be great if everything I ever, everything I ever came up against, if I could have instantaneous transformation just by realizing this is not good and asking God for it and I'd become different. Well, you know, no time at all. I'd be so heavenly minded. I'd be no earthly good. I mean, I'd be, I'd be, you wouldn't be able to stand me anymore after a while. So some of us struggle with stuff sometimes for years and years.
So I've discovered, and I rely on this, that if I can present myself to God and the universe consistently day in and day out, as Scott used to say, make this a piece of spiritual business. Don't keep it on the table. And every day I bring it to God and I talk to God about it. And I talk to my sponsor about it. I talk to maybe my sponsees about saying, you know, I'm struggling with this. And become transparent. And I start presenting myself to life the way someone would who was entirely ready or entirely willing. What I think happens in time is I turn myself through my actions into a receiver of God's grace. And then it changes. There have been several things in my sobriety that it's taken six months of prayer and discussion, six months of actions before God did anything. Six months. Gambling was one of them. Stock market was another one. Cigarettes. I don't have the power. In order to catch enough grace to get free of that stuff, I had to present myself to God like a guy who means that. And I had to do it day in and day out. And there are some things that I would keep it a piece of business and it would become almost robotic and routine.
And then all of a sudden, like seven, eight months later, things have changed. And I don't do that anymore. And I don't know when it changed. I mean, I look back and you can't see the moment that the transformation is. Now you're just seeing a situation where you always were that way and you're not. And how did that happen? And when did it happen? And you don't know. It's often God's graces like that marijuana they had in the 70s called Creeper Pot. And if you ever had Creeper Pot, you'd go out and buy a lid of Creeper Pot and you'd smoke the hell out of it and it was nothing. You knew you were ripped off. You get, oh man, I'm going to go over to that guy's house and I'm going to beat the crap out of that guy for ripping me off for this. And you start over to the guy's house and about halfway there, you find yourself sitting on the curb watching the colors. And when did it hit you? I don't know, but I'm pretty messed up right now. I mean, it's good now. When did it hit you? I don't know, but somewhere.
Good Now? When did it hit you? I don't know, but somewhere on the way over here, the whole world shifted, and somewhere on the way over to this place right now with this different reaction, somewhere, there
[00:45:05]
was a transformation, and I didn't do that, I just presented myself to God for that. When I was a little kid, I wasn't that little, I was probably, I was 16, I got sent away. Back in those days, if you were, this is my third time in front of this same juvenile court judge, and back in those days, they didn't have treatment centers for kids. If you were in trouble, and alcohol and drugs were involved, or just disciplinary things for that matter, you either went to the juvenile detention place, and you were locked up there until you were probably 18, and those places had horrific reputations for abuse for kids, horrible.
My mother and father loved me, and I hadn't burnt them out yet, and they were still willing to do anything, anything that they could, and spend anything that they could to keep me okay, and so they argued with the judge, and they maneuvered, and they got me into it. In those days, a lot of the juvenile courts would agree to put you in a military academy, with a lot of discipline. It was like the treatment center for delinquent kids of the day for the people who could afford it, and that's where I went, and I went to this place in upstate New York called Lake Mont Academy, it was on one of the Finger Lakes, and if my parents would have known all the deviant kids in the country were grouped there, they wouldn't have sent me, but it felt like home to me, and I wasn't there that long, and we were on this big lake, and this was a lake that in the wintertime would freeze solid, and they'd have the ice boat races on that lake, because down this particular lake, down the center of it, there was a wind stream that was pretty intense, it was pretty amazing, so you could get, those ice boats could get up to like 50 miles an hour on this lake, but it's like October, there's no ice yet, it's not that cold, a little cold, and me and one of my buddies were smoking pot and drinking wine, and even though none of us had ever been on a sailboat, we knew we were sailors, and the resort next door had sailboats and motorboats and stuff, and so we stole a sailboat, these two-man sailboats, like a sailfish I think it was called, and we paddled out to the middle of that lake, and we got out there, and we caught that wind, got that sail up, we don't know what we're doing, but we got that sail up, caught that wind, and we're zipping across that lake, it's unbelievable, and we're like yee-haw, I mean we're zooming across this lake, we're like stoned, you know, and it's amazing, well after a little while we realized that the shoreline, it's kind of rocky and looks kind of crazy, is coming at us at a fast rate, and there's no brake pedal in this sailboat, there's no brakes, we don't know how to stop it, right, so my buddy who saw it on TV one time and knows he knows, even though he doesn't know, he said well we have to come about, well what's that, well you've got to shift the sail and the rudder, and well we don't know how to do that, and that wind that was so powerful that would have taken us anywhere we wanted to go, also if you don't know how to set your sail and maneuver that boat, it had the power to turn you upside down, and we're in that 55, probably 50, 55 degree water in upstate New York at the end of October I suppose, and we're going to get hypothermia, one of the teachers had been watching us, I guess he was, we were his entertainment for the day, and got the motorboat and came out and saved us, the point being that I think God's grace is much like that wind, it's always been there, and it's always been available to me to take me anywhere I would ever want to go, ever need to go, but I got to go with his grace, I can't control the wind, but if you tell me and teach me how, I can set the sail, the problem with me is my sail is originally is so full of bob, it doesn't catch any wind, it's just all it catches is more bob, right, it's just a, it's bob heavy, it's a bob heavy boat really, and what you've done is you've helped me to empty my sail and my boat out of me somewhat, not completely, but enough that I can catch the wind and then you can tell me how to tact, as I get problems in my life, and I need a sponsor, I will always need a sponsor, I know there are people in AA that work and work and work these steps to the point where it's just God's their sponsor, that wouldn't work well for me, because I
[00:50:02]
would be like James, I'd be like Jim Jones or David Koresh, I think, God's will would start to look like a lot of very selfish, self-serving stuff to me after a while, so when I'm in trouble, what happens is I don't, I can't see, when I try to look at my life and look at what I need to do, the clamoring inside of me from the fear because I'm scared is so loud that I can't see the spiritual action and principle to pull out of the hat, but my sponsor can, and I'll call him and he'll come out with something that is unexpected often, like why you need to go make amends to that person, I was looking for more something that would maybe show him how he needed to make amends to me actually, that would have been more, or it's something that I would not see, right, I might not see it, and even if I do see it, and sometimes I call him up with stuff and I'll tell him, here's what my sense is, and he'll go, you know something, that's right, because as what it says in the book in step 11, and I'm not on step 11, but what it says is as time goes on, this intuition becomes a working part of the mind, but in the 12 steps and 12 traditions it said that even the most spiritually advanced will always check this thing with someone else, and I always check it with someone else, and you've taught me how to change my experience in the world, my life's good today, it's almost the mirror image of what it was, I'll tell you prior to Alcoholics Anonymous, prior to that decision in step 3, prior to my commitment to this program, I was a bad luck magnet, I'm telling you, I could snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory with a consistency that most people never dreamed of, I mean I just, I had a big L on my forehead, just a big loser, and I just like to sit around with other losers, just talking about losing, you know what I mean, the fellowship of losers, and when you guys started to encourage me to take my hands off my life, and you started to encourage me to seek God's grace, and you told me that the best way I can keep my hands off my life is to divert my attention to someone I can help, and in that, in my absence, when I'm no longer monkeying with my problems, and I'm over here helping this idiot, God seems to be the most effective in my life, and isn't that what it says in the 7th step prayer, it's not, this is, Alcoholics Anonymous is not a self-help program, we're asking God in the 7th step prayer to take away the things that stand in the way of my usefulness, because I've been pulled out of the alcoholic pit, and I've been given a purpose that's greater than me, it's to help other people, and everything I think we do in Alcoholics Anonymous serves that end, and I want to grow to be a servant, I want to grow into usefulness, and I want to do that because I get it, that when I'm helping you, I don't need to help me, my life's in perfect order, and if I can just keep in this state of self-abandonment and service, my life's good, and over the years we all learn, we look at the bad times, and we all, if you sent a CSI team into the bad times, they're only going to find your DNA, they're not going to find anybody else's, so we abandon ourselves to God as we understood God, we give freely of what we find, and in this process of trusting God, cleaning house, and helping others, I seem to come into my inheritance, and it's not a great inheritance, it's a perfect inheritance, God gives me exactly what I need, exactly when I need it, he gives me more than I want, most days, and I owe for that, so I have to say yes a lot in Alcoholics Anonymous, because I got here more than I deserve, and that's the truth, I really do.
Thank you for listening.