Audio
Transcript
Source: Kent C – Steel City Woodstock (2022) – Steps 4 and 5 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: kent-c-steel-city-woodstock-2022-steps-4-and-5-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:04:51
============================================================
Good morning. My name is Kent C.. I'm an alcoholic. Sobriety Day, this is Mach 5, 1892. I'm a member of the Venice Group. I have a sponsor that has a sponsor, and he knows he's my sponsor, which is kind of an important thing. And I have the privilege of sponsoring some people in Alcoholics Anonymous. It is, my parents raised a mannerable young man. I want to demonstrate that. I want to thank the committee for the invitation, for your hospitality to Janelle and myself.
It is an honor and a privilege to participate in the Life-Giving, Life-Changing, Life-Saving Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous at any level, whether it's sweeping up, cleaning up, it ain't about getting behind podiums doing this. Door greeters change lives here. Well, I tell the people that I sponsor, get in where you fit in. Whatever gift God has given you, bring it to Alcoholics Anonymous. We want it and we need it. And that's what goes on here.
So thank you so much for the invitation. We got in a little late last night, had to work yesterday. Got to work yesterday. See, I got to keep that straight, right? The had to get to thing, right? And I was talking to Rich about that earlier. How differently, as a result of the application imperfectly of these principles in my life for the last 29 years and 11 months or whatever it is, how my thinking has shifted.
And not all the time. You scare me bad enough. I'll go south in a hurry, all right? But you know what I mean, right? I can't control what comes in my head. I love Mos Yoder used to say, I can't stop a bird from flying over my head, but I can stop him from building a nest on my head, right? And so what do I do in the moment? That's what I talk to my sponsors about all the time. Life is lived in the moment. Don talked about where fear comes from. Down the road, right? I start looking down the road, buddy. I start spiraling down, right?
And to live in the moment, to have the opportunity, to have this gift, to be able to live in the moment. And now I get to talk about steps four and five. I remember coming to Alcoholics Anonymous and I've always been an observer, a watcher. My first sponsor told me, you learn best with your eyes, just watch. How many people, I could stand here now and give you a roll call of the dead that stopped after step three?
When Don was talking about finding them big books, how many big books do you find where that's where it stops? That's where the notes stop. That's where the highlighting stops. And there's a couple people when Don was talking about came into my mind that I just could not or would not, whatever the deal was, when it came to this step and it destroyed them. I love inventory. I love inventory. And I'm going to tell you why. The book talks about a commercial inventory. And I am a buyer. I've been a buyer for many more years than I am going to stand up here and admit.
So I'm a buyer. And so the places I buy for take inventory on a regular basis. It is a fact finding and a fact facing process. Shut everything down. Count what's there now. What do we have within the walls now? We're looking to get rid of what is damaged, unusable, unsaleable, so we can get it out of the building to make room for the good. Am I making sense? Right? Because that's what we do. My friend Ralph, I think Ralph, is Ralph going to be here next year?
Ralph W., my road dog, always tells this story about having a Best Buy. And if I got a Best Buy and the big white truck pulls up, I like to call it the God truck, and it's full of all the good stuff.
[00:05:03]
The 85-inch TVs, right? The latest iPhones and Samsung and all that, right? I've got all this good stuff, the new stuff. We're going to put it in the store. Okay, Kent, let's fill up your store. But let's go in here first because we've got to make room for this. Let's take a look at what you've got. And you come in my store, and I've got 8-tracks. I've got reel-to-reels. I've got cassette players, right? And Richard looks at me and says, Kent, ain't nobody buying this stuff, man. Right? And what is my response? But it's mine. And it works for me.
Right? And so I start looking, right? I want to say something else about inventory from my perspective as a buyer, right? I make decisions based on inventory. And if the inventory is not right, then I'm not going to be successful. Did that make sense to you? Okay. So we want to get into some inventory. Don led us to this point, and he killed me at the end with that third step, the spirit of it. Because I got to that point, right? I'm not going to touch one and two. Don, I can't do it better than I can. But I got to that point, and my sponsor, I was raised in AA by Bill Finley and Kenny Bombalicki, both of whom are deceased, and a whole bunch of people in this room know who they were.
I have long been the victim of dictator sponsorship. And Bill used to tell me, I do not care what you think. He said, this is what I'm going to do, big shot. I am going to train your feet to move against your head. I thought to myself, oh, you got a job, buddy. And you know how it is, you get off work, you're tired, you come home, I am not going to the meeting tonight, right? Get on that couch, I'm going to, hey, look, I deserve a break. I need to stay home tonight. I need some balance in my life.
While I'm getting the keys and going out the door, because Bill Finley trained my feet to move against my head. Right? And you know how it is, you leave the meeting and say, oh, thank God I was there. If you knew in here, recovery is experiential, it ain't theoretical, and it ain't intellectual. Nor is it complicated. But I met this third step thing, we're going to do this third step on Saturday, and we're going to say the third step prayer, and it's like Thursday, and I told Don, I said, you know, I was thinking to myself all week, you know, I'm real confused about this God thing.
I was raised in the church and all that, but I bought several old ideas, all of which, none of which I was taught, all of which came from up here, right? And like, how could God want anything to do with me after the life that I've lived? Right? I got all this. Like, I'm not thinking of this all loving God, love you, regard, right, God is love, that's all. I ain't thinking about that. I was taught those things, but I'm at this place where I got all this stuff in my head, right, where I just don't know how this can work.
I just don't know how God could forget. My mom, right? You know how when your mom, I don't care how old you are, your mom look at you, there's light in her eyes. You know what I'm saying? You still, it's like, see, I saw that light leave my mother's eyes. I saw my mother look at me and there ain't no light. That inflection in a mother's voice, right, that loving, caring, it's going to be all right. See, I saw that leave my mother.
My mother would say, whatever, Kenny, whatever. How is God, right? Don't forgive somebody like me, right?
[00:10:01]
I got on my knees in the bathroom at work and I said, God, I can't do this no more. Do with me whatever you want to. I'll do anything. Please help me. I cannot live like this no more. And I got up and I walked out of that bathroom and something had changed. And I'm going to tell you something else, because I hear this all the time. I turn my will and my life over to the care of God and then I take it back. Really? I've never taken that back. Have you done a reverse third step prayer?
Okay, God, I'm done. I gave you a chance, right? The kid is back, right? I have never done that. What I have done is be a human being and I've made mistakes on a daily basis because I'm human. I have never, ever taken that back. Try to take something back from God. And so now it's inventory time. The book talks about resentment as the number one offender. Now, I'm not here today to necessarily get into the mechanics. I would do that in a weekend workshop. I'm not going to get into all the mechanics of this inventory.
We're looking to talk about the spirit of it. I have been in meetings of alcoholics and non-alcoholics, and I bet some of you have too, where an entire hour when some new person could have been helped has been wasted by an argument over three or four columns. Have you had that experience? I have. Here's what's important, that every question here, everything that we're asked to do is done. Nothing left out, nothing extra added, that that information is done.
Now, if I sponsor you, you're going to do it just like it is in the book. That's the way I do it. But I'm not here to argue whether there's three or four columns or whether we're recovered or recovering or whether God is male or female. This is not a debate society. How much time do we waste doing that? Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. That's what this here is.
It's not a debate society. But we're going to get to resentment. Y'all see Bob tell him I was behaved today, would you please? So we're going to list. We're going to make our columns, resentful at, the cause affects mine. And we're going to work down in the columns, not across. The director said we listed. So when I list, I go down. So I was an inquisitive young fellow when I got here, so I said to my sponsor, how come I can't go across? I'd like to go across, please.
Don was talking about how his sponsor would get that look, and Bill would get that look at me, and his face would start getting red. And he said to me, look at Mr. Brown. I said, oh yeah, I'll look at Mr. Brown. He said, so what's the deal with Mr. Brown? He's mad at his wife, got resentment, and he's mad at Mr. Brown. Just take Mr. Brown. What if you go across? Tension to my wife, trying to get my job, and all of this affects my personal relationship, sex relationship, security, all that. He said if you go across, you ain't going to be able to figure out who's next because you're going to be getting your pistol going to look at Mr. Brown.
How true, how true. How true, how true, right?
[00:15:01]
So if you go down, it's the, I call it the synchronicity of alcoholics. There is a rhythm, there is a flow of spirit in these steps from one to two to two to three, three to four, and within the steps. It's an, again, it's an experience. You got to do it to know what I'm talking about. But you start working down. And I started working down and the name started to flow. And then I moved to the next column.
And I want to say this because I said that deal about inventory, how we shut everything down, okay? Probably the most common question I get from people that I sponsor, people they sponsor down, so down the line, is I'm trying to work with somebody and they're dragging their feet on this inventory, right? And where does that come from? Well, everything usually is fear-based, right? But this notion that this has to be totally perfect, like this got to be an exercise in perfection.
No, no, we shut everything down and count what's in the walls right now. If there is something else, we got steps to address that later, okay? When I get somebody to this step, depending upon their situation, I give them a certain amount of time I want it done. I tell them when the fifth step is. I don't leave it an open-ended thing, right? If you ain't working, I'm going to give you a few days. That's it.
If you're working or you got something family-wise going on, I might give you a little extra. But I'm not going beyond that. Why would you delay your own recovery intentionally? Don talked about running out of steam, running out of gas, right? No, we're going to keep the engine going. So that's how I do that. I don't wait. I'm not looking for it. I wrote my inventory sitting in my mother and father's family room on a Saturday afternoon.
That's it, that's all. One of the best days of my life. I did not spend weeks meandering over, I wonder if I should put the, no. I was given explicit directions before you write a thing, get on your knees and say a prayer to that God that we made that decision. Because what the third step decision is is a promise to submit to the rest of the process. Don said that, right? This is what fuels the rest of the process.
That's why them first 63 pages get us, right, get us going. But get on your knees and ask God to reveal to you what needs to come out in this inventory here and now. Anything else be taken care of later. And I got up and the pen just started flying. Just started flying. And it took me a few hours and then I laid the pen down and I knew that I was done. It was like watching a movie and the screen went blank, okay, I'm done.
Right? And then I went on and I did my fifth step and went on from there. But, so we make our columns, right? Resentful at, the cause, affects my, right? Now that affects my column is one that when I'm given directions, I like to spend a little bit of time on. And the reason that I do, yep, thank you. Now, I want you all to know something, and nobody better tell Bob about this. I do a lot of weekend workshops with my spouse and I could, but this is the book that I got in treatment at Green Hall, okay?
Now, I made another one. I've had a couple since then, right, as you grow, you know, you work on a new book, right? But when Janelle and I moved, I can't find it. I don't know why. I had it. It ain't nothing that somebody would steal. Right? We moved, how long ago we moved, Janelle? Two years ago? I still haven't found it. So, I bought this one out of retirement. I used to do weekend workshops with Bob and I would have pages all over the floor.
And he, Bob makes this noise when he's annoyed with me, right? It's like a grunt kind of thing. It's kind of like, right? And so, that's what fueled me into starting another book, right, but so anyway, thank you, Janelle, for telling me where it was. No wonder I couldn't find Mr. Brown. I played that off, y'all didn't really know, right? I played that off, you didn't really know, right? If people wasn't here, they wouldn't believe this stuff,
[00:20:06]
would they? But then it affects my column. I just use the ones that are here. I don't really, I mean, I suppose you could probably expand on that, I'm sure there's some workbooks that expand on it. I went to a conference when I was new and I asked, they had workbooks for each step. I was impressed by that. And I went back and I made the mistake of telling Bill about it. And I said, should I get some of those?
And his face started getting red and he said, son, he said, you need to know something, that in 5,000 years of recorded history, this is the only successful treatment, long-term treatment for alcoholism and there's a lot of people who want to put their thumbprint on this, right, by changing it, by creating their own versions of it. Let me share something with you. If I come over to your house and you give me a piece of cake and I say, that's the best cake I've ever had, I want to make a cake like that, I want to, I want what you got on this here cake.
And you give me, here's the recipe and it's clear cut and it's, you know, six eggs, this much flour, right? So I go home, I'm going to put three eggs, I'm going to double up on this flour, right? I got another icing that I want to put on it, right? What happens? I get a different cake. So you get a different cake in here, it cost you your life. Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed.
Thank you, thank you. So I use these and then of course, self-esteem, sex relations, security, I have found personal relationships, I have found, I have not and I've worked with a lot of people, I've never found that insufficient. It's always covered everything that's needed, right? So we make our columns, we do our writing, we work down each column, OK? Then it says, we went back through our lives.
Nothing, nothing counted but thoroughness and honesty, OK? So remember, just like taking a commercial inventory, right? I'm not going to say I got five of these when I only got two, right? It has to be accurate, thoroughness and honesty that I don't intentionally leave anything out. No, I hear a lot of people say, well, you know, put the worst ones first and if that works for you, that's fine. Here's what I'm saying, don't leave nothing out.
That's what I'm saying, right? And I do ask people when they sit down, is everything on here? Is everything on here, OK? Because sometimes, it's not, right? So I do want to ask that question. But we work down our columns. Number one on my resentment list was the Sandusky City Police. That number one, wasn't mama, wasn't daddy, wasn't my boss, it was the Sandusky City Police. Harassed me, followed me, arrested me, right?
Parked and ate lunch outside my house. Took pictures of everybody going in and out of my house. It was, right, right. Affected my everything, right? Security, personal relationships. That was the first one. So, the book talks about, it is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. I'm just going to do this. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that have been worthwhile.
But with the alcoholic whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We have found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feelings, we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. OK, so now we get the first warning, right? They talk, what is it, Gorski, symptoms of relapse and, you know, they got scientific stuff.
[00:25:00]
We got our warnings in the book. We are told explicitly and clearly when we will drink again, right? So, if I shut myself off from the sunlight of the spirit, if I live a life contrary to the life that God would have for me to live a life of usefulness and service to others and obviously resentment is the total opposite of God's will for me, then God has shut out the house. I'm shut out the sunlight of the spirit.
I will drink again. This is what happens to people who do not write an inventory. This is what happens to them. So, it says, if we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They are, they may be the dubious luxury of normal men but for alcoholics, these things are poison. I think they're poison for everybody and that includes normal men. But that's just me.
But we give them the benefit of the doubt. So, now we get to the change. OK. Now, we get to the change. All my life, I have taken inventory. I didn't know I was doing it. I always say the first three columns are stuff that really you already know. You already know. You already know who you're mad at and you know why you're mad at them. And you know how it affects you. And if you're anything like me, it ain't never your fault.
I have a rationalization, a justification, an excuse for everything on here, right? For everything on here. I accused the police one time. They come down to Brownlee's Tavern. I was arrested for disorderly conduct and I told them, I said, I'm tired of you all following me. And the dude looked at me and said, Ken, we ain't never followed you wherever you go if somebody calls us. That unfortunately is a true story.
So we need to look, I need to start looking at this differently. This is what I like to call the paradigm shift. The paradigm shift from illusion, delusion, and dishonesty, right, to truth and honesty, OK? The paradigm shift, OK. So here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to try to find the right page here. This was our course. We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick.
Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they like ourselves were sick too, OK? Now this would be in the case of being wronged by somebody, somebody who have done something to me. Ninety percent, I would say even more than that, of the resentments I had were I was mad at people for their reactions to something I did. I'm the one who starts the ball rolling. And then you react to it, right?
I don't come to work. And I was alone and I did not. I was a member of the United Auto Workers Union of America when I was a young man. And if it wasn't for them, I would have never been able to keep a job. And so I didn't come to work a lot. And as a result of that, I got suspended a lot. I got time off from work a lot. And I hated Ford Motor. See how they treat me? See how they treat me? They react into what I did.
Had I come to work every day, none of that would have ever happened. Are you following me? And that's what 90 some percent of mine look like. In the cases where I encountered somebody like me, and I did, who did things to me, okay? Because later on, we're going to find out the only thing we can do with this stuff is either amend or forgive. So we talk a lot about the amend thing. We don't talk a lot about the forgive thing.
But they give you, they start giving me the tools for that here. How to start looking at this stuff truthfully. Because this is a lifelong process. These are the tools. This is the, that's why I say at the end of this, this is a beginning. This is a beginning of learning. And what I love so much about this, and this was something I was talking to Rich about, is how differently I see these same directions if I'm consistent and persistent in pursuing and doing this, how differently I see this same information.
Differently I see this same information now than I did five years ago. It is
[00:30:00]
amazing. And I always learn through my selfishness, not thinking of others, making mistakes, hurting and harming other people. That's how, unfortunately, I wish it wasn't that way, but that's how I end up learning, right? Walking around here thinking, you, oh, no, I'm, you know, I don't, I don't think about other people. And it's not like out of malice, but Don said, it's this subtle thing, the resurgence of the ego, right, and taking that position, and then I end up doing stuff like that. So we are going to look at this. I don't know how I'm going to put it up here now. We're going to look at this from an entirely different angle. And we realize the people who harmed us were perhaps spiritually sick. They like ourselves. See, there's this, they like ourselves, right? Now, I've written all this stuff. I know what I've done, right? But I want to hold you to a higher standard. I want to hold you to a higher standard, right? My entire life was spent like this. I'm here, you're here.
This is the position of judgment. This is the position of judgment. What this step does for me and did for me and hopefully will continue to do for me is to bring me here to a position of empathy. To a position where I am what you are. I'm not better than you. I'm not worse than you. God don't love me no more than he loves you. God don't love you no more than he loves me. But to move from here to here. All right, I'm going to have to find it.
Just a minute. Referring to our list again, putting out of our mind the wrongs others had done. We resolutely looked for our own mistakes. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking, and frightened? Though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely. Entirely. Disregard the other person involved entirely. Where was I to blame? Now, after 32 years of blaming, finger-pointing, rationalizing, justifying, this was like a curtain being raised. Like I never, ever took responsibility for anything. Ever. Ever. I was never wrong. I was never to blame. I will somehow twist and turn this thing. Some of this is insane to make it your fault. I was arrested and convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol seven times in the state of Ohio. If they had the laws then that they have now, I'd still be in prison and rightly so. My fifth one, I decided to act as my own attorney. Now, the reason for this was simple. I have no money. There was nobody left on this earth that would give me any money, right? And I didn't know rich who I could get to come represent me if I could get him to, right?
So I showed up to courthouse. I had a white shirt and a tie on. It was Friday afternoon. When I came into the courtroom, the prosecutor, who's still a prosecutor today, said, Mr. C., I don't think this is a good idea. That's what he said. I told him, I went to college. I have a degree. Thank
[00:35:05]
you. The Honorable Judge Stacy sat the bench that day, a man who I was to become extremely familiar with over the years. And Judge Stacy said, well, we'd like to call Mr. C. to the stand. Now, I had a defense. My defense was entrapment. I left the tavern. They're sitting across the street. They followed me. You can't do that. I said, I didn't do nothing. So I got up there. Mr. Baxter got up and raised my right hand, did all that. Mr. Baxter said, I got two questions, Mr. C..
He said, we're going to make this quick. He said, on the evening in question, had you been drinking alcohol? I said, yes, sir, I was. He said, okay. He said, on the evening in question, were you driving? I said, yes, sir, I was. Judge Stacy hit the thing and said, in this court, that's called a confession. Get this idiot out of my courtroom. Shortest trial in the history of the Sandusky Municipal Court. Sandusky Registered Newspaper had a field day with this one. And back to the workhouse, I went. So, but you have to understand something, and maybe you guys will get this. Before I went in court that day, if you had put a lie detector on me and asked me if I was guilty, I would have told you no. It's their fault. Anybody get that? Anybody get that? I mean, that colors everything in my life up to that point. Everything. Nobody could tell me nothing. So now, we got this entirely different angle. I can see truth. I can be wrong. I can admit when I'm wrong. And even if I got nothing to do with it, this person is like me. They're not perfect. They're sick, too. Don talked about spirit, okay? And at this point, and going forward through the steps, is a combination of action and prayer. Have you noticed that? Have you noticed that Don said, you know, God ain't got no business hours. This ain't a morning and night thing. So every time I say in this book, we ask God, do you realize that is a prayer? Okay? So how many times is that in here? And I'm not talking about morning, night, right? We know what we got to do there. But what am I doing in the moment?
What am I doing during the day when my head starts telling me things that it shouldn't? I really didn't like the way he said that. You know, I've noticed that I'm really not appreciated around here like I should be. As a matter of fact, so-and-so up the hall ain't doing nothing, right? How quickly my head can go there, right? What do I do? This is what I thought. I got people in this room I sponsor. What do I do in the moment? That's why they gave you all these prayers. What do we do? We turn to this power that we made this decision in step three to turn our will and our life over to. God, please save me from being angry. How can I be helpful? Thy will be done. We ask God, to remove, right? So it's, yes, I have to move my feet. But the book, when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous, I don't know where I live at. They told us prayer is the most important tool in your toolbox. See, people act like they don't want to say that no more. And we got a book that is rife.
It literally is a continuous prayer through these steps. This is not a self-help program. This is a God-help program. God, as you understand, I'm not trying to tell you what your conception of God is. The books say it just had to make sense. So I begin to get these tools available to me,
[00:40:09]
many of which I paid lip service to for a lot of years in a year and never used, and paid a price for it. Was not that nice guy at work. Was 12 years sober. I tried to strangle an area manager at the plant. I would have strangled him if I could have got to him. I'm 12 years sober, and I'm Mr. Don't forget the Mr. A&A. I was 12 years sober. I was already getting on airplanes and going around the world and telling people how good God is. Right? And two guys got to tackle me at work to keep me because of the resentment that I had built toward this man. And then one day he came down here and said something, and it just boiled over.
I went home that day. I called my sponsor, and he said, you know, you got some tools that you love to talk about, Kent, but they never been out of the box. He said, what is your purpose in life? He said, I'm curious. What is your purpose in life? This is Bill Finley said this to me, and I said to be a maximum service to God and the people around me, right? Because I know how to read, right? And he said to me, how can you do that when nobody can stand to be in the same room with you and hung the phone up? Boom. Okay. Maybe I need to start paying some attention to this. Maybe I need to start paying some attention. Maybe I need to actually start doing some of this, right? I mean, I know how to sponsor people. I've been sponsoring people since I was five months old. I know how to do all that. But what's in here? You hear it all the time. Inside job, right? What does that mean? We were talking the other night about all the stuff that we hear in here that don't make any sense when you're new. You can start your day over anytime you want. You know what I thought that meant? Go back home, get back in the bed, get up and start over. I was not the brightest guy to come to AA. I didn't know what that meant, right? Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from any selfish, dishonest, or self-seeking motives. That's how you start today, and that's how you start it over again with that prayer. See, nobody talks about that stuff. I have all this, but do I do any of it? An entirely different angle. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking, and frightened? We get this all down on paper and look at it. So what I do is I have when they got their column, number them, and then on a separate sheet of paper after we've done our column work, we start with one and then we answer those questions. That's the way I do it. You can do it any way you want, but just to make sure that everything that's asked is written down, right?
And when I hear a fifth step, sometimes they need a little bit of guidance on what was selfish, right? What was self-seeking, right? I do have a thing that kind of defines them. Context is important here, because there could be a word that could have three different definitions, but the context in which it's used in the book is going to fit one of those definitions. So I do try to spend a little bit of time talking to people about that to make sure that they got it. When you're real new, that stuff's kind of hard, right? And that's where sponsorship comes in, right? And so I talk them through it, and then we say, okay, this is what self-seeking is. Can you see it here, right?
And so that's just kind of walk them into it, and then they start to be able to understand it. them into it, and then they start to be able to understand it. One of the things that I always want to do before I turn people loose to sponsor is to make sure
[00:45:03]
that they got at least a rudimentary understanding. They'll get better at sponsorship. It's like everything else. The more you do it, the better you get at it, the more experience you have, but just that they have a rudimentary understanding of what this is, because this is obviously life and death, right? And so I do that. Now we got fear and the enemy, the enemy. It was bracketed alongside that third column, right? And it's something that Bob says to me all the time, and it's something that I truly believe, that everything is—Bill Wilson says self-centered fear is the chief activator of all my character defects, and I think it's the only one of mine. I'm scared of not getting something, scared of losing something, scared of not having—my whole life was that. Everything. What's going to happen to me? No faith, no trust in God, no relationship with God. I didn't have none of that. I had a lot of knowledge and information about God. If you raised the way I was, you would have that, but it was not—there was no substance. I had no relationship with God, because I didn't do any of the things that I was told to do. There's nothing in this book that I was not taught in my house. Nothing. Nothing. There's nothing in this book that I was not taught. I never did any of it. So when I came here, it was as new to me as it was to anybody else. The only problem was that I had dragged a whole bunch of Kent into it to confuse it even more, if you know what I'm talking about. But I just had never done any of it, right? So fear, right? My mother used to make me memorize Bible verses about fear, right? And how God and faith in God—I knew all that, right? But with no relationship, it didn't make no difference. It was just words. We asked God to remove our fear and direct our attention to what he would have us be. When I made my fear list, I mean, it was pretty extensive. Fear of the future, fear of dying, fear of my parents dying, you know, the usual stuff, you know.
Fear of not having anything. And so I went over the fear list with my sponsor. And the book says the reason we had these fears is because self-reliance failed us, right? Like, if I look at that fear list, are these things that I have any control over? No. I cannot have no control over when somebody's gonna die. I have no control over any of that. What is the answer? The answer is to begin to develop some faith. How do I begin to develop some faith? I begin to develop some faith by taking some baby steps with these principles and applying them to my life. God always responds. God always—it is amazing how I went from, I say a prayer and hope God hears it, and hope he ain't mad at me, and hope maybe he just might grant, to I'm gonna stand here right now and say it. If it's in accordance with God's will, it's gonna happen. And it may not happen the way that I want it to happen, and I may not understand how it do, but I can stand here today and I can make the point-blank declaration that God has done for me what I could not do for myself, and God has walked me—I have survived a hundred percent of my worst days. All of the things that I feared, you know how it is, especially when you—well, this is it. This is it. I know I got through that, but this is it. This is the end of the line. All right, I guess I go to the meeting tonight, tell everybody bye, cuz I ain't gonna survive this, right? And I stand here today and I can't even tell you what this was, you know what I'm talking about? What was that traumatic experience that we talked about? You know, I can't remember, right? I am filled with and surrounded by the peace and the presence and the grace of God, and that is the truth. My friend Al McCauley used to say that. Fear, right? So when somebody calls me and starts talking to me about a situation, okay, the first thing we want to do is we want to walk that thing back, and we want to see what is it you're afraid of. What is it that you're afraid of? And once we get to that, then we got some tools we can start to apply. Obviously, faith is the answer, right? And for me, it's a process.
[00:50:07]
It's a process. There was a lady that used to come to the meetings where I went to treatment, and she used to always say, if you take one step toward God, he'd take two towards you, right? Little simple things like that, and I have found that to be absolutely true. I got to take a step, too. I have to participate in my own recovery. And then the last section on the fourth step is what we call sex conduct or relationships. What it really is about is selfishness. Really, you boil the whole thing down. But the context of it is relationships and sex relations, because obviously that's for many a big problem.
Real or imagined. It's a funny thing how, you know, like people would say, I wrote my inventory, and I took it to my sponsor, and he said I didn't have enough resentments on it. How do you know that? Did you ask him to pray before they did it? I sponsored a guy who literally was a hermit. He lived in the woods. He was an educated guy. He was an engineer. But he lived out in the woods by himself. He had no family. He had no relationships with nobody. He worked pretty much on his own, on his own projects. He had a couple on there. He didn't have many. I didn't say that's not enough. Bring me back a hundred. Write down everybody you've ever known.
Where did this stuff come from? Ain't in our book, right? What I ask them to do is pray before you do it. Okay? I said, did you pray before you did it? Yep. Okay. If any come up later, we got some tools for that, right? I'm not going to impede anyone's recovery. If they do this to the best of their ability, then we're going to move on. Okay? So in talking about the sex conduct, right, it talks about we don't want anybody to be the arbiter of our sex conduct. Everybody got problems. We want to get some things down on paper, however. We reviewed our conduct over the years past. Where had we been? Selfish, dishonest, or inconsiderate? Whom had we hurt? Did we unjustifiably arouse jealousy, suspicion, or bitterness? Where were we at fault, and what should we have done instead? Do you see how with each section of this, we're getting a solution for fear. We ask God to remove our fear and direct our attention to what he would have us be, and once we commit, I'll grow fear. And I'll say this, and then get off of fear, what God would have us be, now what God would have us do is a big difference. What would God have me be? Because from the being will flow the doing. Okay? I can do something for Don with a totally selfish motive, because I want Don to go tell people, look what Kent did for me. Right? That's not from my being, that's from here. Right? That's selfishness and self-centeredness. So what would God have me be? Loving, kind, forgiving, understanding, faithful and trusting in him, or whatever your conception of God is. Right?
What would God have me be? And from that state of being will flow, God is love. That much I know. And so from there, that will flow. Okay? So we write down, and what I do is I'll have them write a name, and I'll tell them I don't care who the name is. You can put, you know, X. I don't care. Right? The main thing is what's in here. Were we selfish, dishonest, inconsiderate? Whom had we hurt? And with the whom had we hurt, what I tell them is you really need to take a look at that.
Drop a pebble in the water, how far did the ripples go? Were children involved? Grandparents? Parents? Right? Who was involved? Right? Let's take a real look at this thing. Okay? An honest look. What we're doing is we're building an ideal going forward, and we do that by how? Looking back.
[00:55:10]
To see exactly what it is we're done. We want to get better going forward, we first need to take an honest look at what we've done. Right? And the book goes on and tells us, we earnestly pray for the right ideal, for guidance in each questionable situation, for sanity, and for the strength to do the right thing. If sex is very troublesome, we throw ourselves the harder into helping others. We think of their needs and work for them. This takes us out of ourselves. It quiets the imperious urge when to yield would mean heartache. If selfishness and self-centeredness is the root of the problem, unselfishness has to be the root of the solution. This ain't rocket science. Right? And for any problem in my life, Don said earlier, I used to call my sponsor with my daily list of grievances. And when I was new, it was pretty long, because I worked at Ford, there was a lot of people over there that really got on my nerves.
And so I would call my list of grievances for the day, and Bill would listen. And he would say, he'd get real quiet, and he'd go, who you helping? And I'd say, Bill, I mean, did you hear what I just said? You ain't listening. Let me run this down one more time, because I need you to really get with me on this. And I'd read them again. And he would say, who are you helping? Click. And when he hung the phone up, I learned real early, you do not call him back. He is done.
He has told you what he wants you to know. Right? So the conversation is over. Right? And now I got to sit. Who am I helping? I ain't thinking about helping nobody. I'm sitting here thinking about all this grievances and all this. I'm sitting here thinking about me. I'm sitting here thinking about me. Right? I'm going to say this about inventory, and I'm going to get on from here. To live an inventory life is a gift. To have these tools is a gift. It actually, even though sometimes painful, is fun. It's fun to see the truth, to become a better person, to become more useful to other people and to God. Because in the end, you're going to find out that that's all it was anyway. It's the only reason I'm here. I'm not here for me. My needs have already been met. My needs will be met. I know that because of my experience, not because it says it in the book. You know what that does? That frees me. It frees me from the bondage of self. And when I'm free from the bondage of self, guess what? I can actually see you. I can actually hear you. When I go down the street, I can see need. Who you helping? People that I sponsor, no, you better not never say to me, I ain't got nothing to do. You only say that to me one time. Every day that I walk out of my house, I am surrounded by need. Every day in the parking lot of the grocery store, I'm walking past people, elderly people struggling, trying to get their stuff in the car, thinking about Kent. Every day I go to work, somebody has a look on their face that says, I need something. And I walk past you. I learned. I worked at Ford. I was an MPS in paint for the Econoline vans worldwide. And it was the biggest paint shop in Ford. And I used to walk through every morning and say hello to every single person and look them in the eye.
I got this from my sponsor. He said, look them in the eye and see what you see. I saw red eyes. I saw black eyes. I walked up to a lady one day, her eyes were red and swollen, and I said, hey, you okay? And she looked at me and she said, no, I'm not.
[01:00:00]
She said the dog that I had and that's all I have, I don't have any family left, died last night and I don't know what to do. And I said, go home. Go home. Take care of this. She said, I don't have any vacation time or personal time left, go home. I take care of it. See that's why I'm here, to have faith in God and know that all is well and that I have a purpose and it is to be of maximum service to God and the people around me and if I can get free enough of me, I can actually do that and be that.
And that's the beauty of inventory. After that, we had the fifth step and I don't have time to get into the fifth step in the detail but I want to say is this, I sat down with my sponsor and I came clean. First time in my entire life I told somebody the truth and I did not know how he would react to that and he just lit up and he told me about himself and Bill had killed two people and gone to prison in an automobile accident and he told me about that and we talked about a lot of stuff that day and we had a bond that I have never had with another person.
When he was in hospice, I could come and sit with him and not talk. He had Parkinson's and had taken his ability to speak and he could sometimes kind of mouth a little word but I could come and he would look at me and I could sit next to him and we would just sit there and it was cool, you know. What a wonderful way of life, what a gift. After the fifth step, and I felt like this, I heard all these people at the club talking about fifth steps and I hadn't done one and don't, hey, hey, if you don't want something known don't tell nobody.
I slipped up and told somebody at the club I was doing my fifth step that evening and when I come down to the club the next morning for the morning meeting, all those people who had done the work, the people who inside I looked up to, but on the outside I just like y'all ain't got nothing going on, you know, because I'm all front and no back, I ain't got nothing going on. They was in a line to greet me when I came in the door and a dude named Dave, and I just saw Dave, Dave was sober like 34 years now, he was like three years sober then, and Dave said to me, you in the game now man, you in the game, right.
I heard somebody, I always used to say that was the day that I really felt like I moved from visitor to member, but I heard somebody say and had talked on our sponsor meeting the other night that that was when they felt committed, and I thought about that because it's even more, it's like now not only am I a member, but I am in this thing, I'm going to do the rest of it, I'm going to do whatever, I am in this thing, I want to live this life.
There's promises after the fifth step, and yes, I did experience some of those. Bill Wilson used to say, we got to stop living alone, we got to stop living alone, and my mother always used to say, a problem shared, because a problem solved, right, and Don said this is a disease of isolation, and it most certainly is, and I was surrounded by people, some of them on a daily basis who had no idea who I was, and I didn't know who they were, but because of Alcoholics Anonymous today, I know who I am, I know what I am, and because of this inventory process, and I have you in my life, and I can share with you whatever it is I got going on, and know that it's okay.
What a wonderful way of life, God bless and thank you.