My name’s Hal Hill, and I’m an alcoholic. Hi, Hal. And it’s a real privilege to be here to share in another Clarence Snyder retreat, and to report on one more year without a drink. And anything I say is strictly not my opinion. I stole it from a bunch of drunks in AA. So if it varies from your own experience, well, that’s good, because we share our experience, strength, and hope with each other, that we may solve our common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. That’s the, uh, short form of our prologue. And I’m just sorry you couldn’t have heard the whole story of my bride-to-be, the previous speaker, Liz, but you can read her whole story in our new book back there, The Impossible Takes a Little Longer. And in the short three hours that I have to speak tonight, I’ll only be able to cover a little bit, so you can read the rest of it. I’m glad I’m an alcoholic. And when I say that, it probably sounds as flaky to you as it did to me the first time I heard someone say it.

But everything considered, in my life as it is now, the best part of it being due to being an alcoholic, I have to say I’m glad that that’s what set in in my life a long time back that finally developed into a spiritual lifestyle that I was totally unacquainted with. I’ve got the earliest recorded disease on record, and the most easily treated, and the most often neglected: alcoholism. And it shows up in the front end of the Bible, in the book of Genesis. And here’s a man who could certainly not have been blamed for being a dirty old drunk, and his name was Noah, and he was real close to God. He was on a one-on-one basis with God. In fact, God told him a certain thing had to be done, and he carried it out. Didn’t question, never deviated, never argued, never did anything but strictly obey instructions. God told him, “Build an ark to ride out the flood.” Well, those were strange words, because it had never rained on Planet Earth.

The water was, the, the water of the Earth came from dew every night. So when Noah was told there’s gonna be a flood, he could have well have said, “I’m hallucinating.” “I had too much toddy for the body last time.” I don’t know if there’d been a last time or not, but what the record does show is that after he carried out his assignment and landed that big old boat, he planted a crop, fermented it, drank it, and got bombed out of his gourd. There he is laid out naked drunk on his bed of pain, cussing the kids. Is that familiar? Yeah, a rummy’s bedroom scene. Right up front in the Bible, in Genesis. So if I wanted to blame my disease on anybody, I could say, “I picked it up from Grandpa Noah. He had it when it first came out.” So you see, he didn’t plan to get drunk when he took the first drink, I’m sure, because a man of God doesn’t plan to get drunk. But the first drink took over, and he drank too much, and so did I. And that’s how it happened to me.