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Source: Jimmy W – BOX OF CHOCOLATES – 2025-03-27.m4a File: jimmy-w-box-of-chocolates-2025-03-27.mp3 Duration: 00:52:35
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You're up. Thank you, Ramona, and thank you, family. Thank you, everybody, for being here. This is, this is quite the crowd. It's really cool to see, I mean, we got Alabama, New Zealand, Japan, Australia, DC, Maryland, I mean, Cleveland, Ohio, Atlanta, South Carolina, goodness, all over the place. So, that's really cool to see everybody and integrate that we have, you know, what technologies enabled us to do to be able to connect with our Fellowship of the Spirit all around the world. That's a really, really cool thing and I was, I asked Ramona, hmm, what should I share on, should I tell my story or do something else, and she said, well, she said, well, the name of the group is Box of Chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get, so just talk about whatever you want. So, I was up until I got here and I saw Satoru from Japan and I said, okay, that's it, I'm just gonna tell my story because my first drunk was in Nagoya in Japan when I was 16 years old. So, we'll we'll, we'll get to that in a minute. So, yeah, as Ramona mentioned, I live in Tennessee. I was born in North Carolina out in Fayetteville. Both my mother and father were in the Army and stationed at that time, it was Fort Bragg, and so mom and dad met there. My mother is from Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up as a Catholic parochial school girl up there, and my dad is a Southern Baptist country boy from Birchwood, Tennessee. So, here you go, here I am. It was quite the, quite the contrast growing up between my Yankee family up in Boston and my down South country family from Tennessee. So, anyway, I think I might have been destined for alcoholism from a young age. As Ramona mentioned, I do get to, I get the privilege, and I call it a privilege, you know, some people might cringe at that word, but I get the privilege of serving our fellowship as a, as a sitting delegate for Area 64, which is happens to be the state of Tennessee, and this year will be my last conference. I was at conference last year, so this year will be my last one here in about a month, actually. We'll start doing this, and it's been, it's been a really amazing journey, brought with joy and frustration and opportunities for growth and just so much, it's so rich and so full, the experience that I've gotten to have in Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, and it all started and was built on this foundation of recovery that's embodied in our program, right, in our 12 steps out of our big book, and then it's, it's like when I first got here, my butt was on fire, right, I'm a drunk, I'm dying from alcoholism, I just want the consequences to stop, please, somebody help me, stop the consequences, it's like my vision, that was so short-sighted, I couldn't see any further than that, you know, please just make the consequences stop, and if I could figure out how to make the consequences stop and keep drinking, I'd still be drinking, but I couldn't do that. Let me back up a little bit now, born in North Carolina there, and age of four, we decided to move to Tennessee, obviously, you can tell by, I probably got a little bit of an accent, you can tell I'm not from Boston, so definitely grew up down here, and you know, I was, for all intents and purposes, I guess I grew up as a normal kid, you know, my parents were, you know, we grew up lower middle class, we were working, hard-working people, you know, I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, and I like to joke, I was in, I grew up in church all my life, and I went to church growing up in these old-school Southern Baptist country churches, like where the whole congregation is like 30 people, and they all got blue hair, and that's kind of the kind of church I grew up in, like we prayed for the Catholics, because they drink, you know, and the Catholics pray for the rest of us, because all the rest of us ain't doing it right, so that was some of my upbringing, if you will, and so I
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had the, I had great examples growing up in my parents, you know, they taught me the difference between right and wrong, and not to lie, cheat, and steal, and the value of a good work ethic, you know, and earning your teeth, and that kind of thing, so, you know, I had a good foundation when it came to values, and in the family unit, if you will, but there was, from my earliest memories, there was always something in me that was just off, it's like somehow, everybody else, they got put together, they got put together the right way, and somehow something didn't get put to fit together the right way with me, and so my whole life, I just felt like something was off, and then when I'm eight years old, I had a situation happen where some older boys in the neighborhood took advantage of me, and that planted these seeds of a lie in my mind, and that would grow eventually, and block me off from the sunlight of the Spirit, be part of what blocked me from the sunlight of the Spirit, contributed to it anyway, in a big way, and around that same time, my father had a heart attack, and he was 31 at the time, and he had five bypasses, and open-heart surgery, and lost 60% of his heart muscle, and had chronic post-surgical pericarditis, and arteriosclerosis, and it was a bad deal, and so that really turned our world upside down, because my dad was, you know, he was sick, and when I was eight years old, he's 31, he's a young man, too young for that kind of thing to be happening, and then, you know, fast-forward when he's 38 years old, and has to retire on full disability, because he can't physically do anything anymore, and then he would go on to pass away when I was 23 years old, my dad was 46 when he passed, so that was a tumultuous time, along with some other deaths in the family that happened around the same time as that, so there was a lot going on when I was eight years old, and then, you know, after that, I'm going to school, and I'm a really curious kid, you know, I always did well in school, and I didn't have to study real hard, and I made good grades, and the things that I was really interested in, like math and science, I tended to excel at, because I just I've always loved math, and love numbers, and things like that, and I'm a mechanical engineer by training, so I guess that was a good fit, but again, this nagging insecurity deep down inside of me, this feelings of inadequacy, and insecurity, like something was just not right. When I'm 13 years old, or 12 years old, I find out, well, 13, I found out I have a sister.
My dad had been married, he was in the Army for longer than my mother, he had gotten drafted, and he was married prior to, and had gone to Korea, and to serve, and came back, and that marriage split up, and so I end up having a sister, she's three years older than me, and I think, man, this is the coolest thing ever. I got an older sister now, I had a younger brother, who was four and a half years younger than me, and typical older brother, younger brother, sibling rivalry stuff going on there, but now I have an older sister, and then when I'm 15, right after I was a freshman in high school, my sister is 18, and we get a call that she had been shot and killed, and she was five months pregnant, so here again, now I'm 15 years old, I am, you know, finishing up my freshman year in high school, I've been going to church all my life, and I've had in the last seven years at the time, this series of events, these tragic things that have happened, that have really started to make me question this whole idea of God, and everything that I've been learning about God, and everything, church, whatever, growing up, and so I'll stick a pin in that, after my sophomore year in high school, I went to, applied for, and was accepted to go to Japan as an exchange student, and so here I am, 16 year old, 6 foot tall, blue-eyed American boy, flying halfway around the world to go and hang out in Japan, and so when we got there, we spent a week at the National Youth Center in downtown Tokyo, and then for some cultural orientation, and to help teach the students about, you know,
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Japan and the Japanese culture, and to give us instructions on how we should get around there, and so after that, I went to the host family, and the host family lived in a little fishing town, Kiracho, and so I was there, and some of the locals invited us to the disco, and the disco was in downtown Nagoya, and so I had to ride the bicycle one mile to the train station to take the train for about an hour and a half to get into Nagoya, and we went downtown, and then here was the disco, and it was, I walked into this place, and it was as like you would imagine, that there was a disco ball in the middle of the room, and the music was going, and the lights were on, and our hosts, our Japanese friends came and brought us, they looked like raffle tickets, but turned out they were free drink tickets, and so I'd never drank before, I might have snuck a sip of a beer or something, or a wine cooler when my parents were playing music or something, but there wasn't a lot of drinking going on in the house when I was growing up, so it just wasn't as available, I guess, and so I went here, and my new friends, my Japanese friends said, Gaijin, where are you from? And Gaijin is the terminology for a foreigner in Japan, and I said, well I'm from Tennessee, and they said, oh Jack Daniels, so my new Japanese friends knew Tennessee because of Jack Daniels, and so that was quite the highlight, and so I began to partake with my new friends, and goodness gracious, when I walked out of that disco, and at the time, I'm not sure if they still have it, but there was a game called pachinko, it was very popular, and so when I walk out, there's the pachinko parlor around, and you can hear the bells going off, and you see the lights and everything, and hear the sounds, and there's neon lights all over the place, and I walk out into the square in the town, and I go in, and it's like a Pink Floyd light show, so I'm so drunk, and so somehow make it to the train, and I get on the correct train, and I get to the train station, and I get off, and I get on the bicycle, and I'm starting to ride to the host family's house, and if you're ever in Japan, and you see a sign on the road that looks like a yield sign, it means the same thing there, you should yield when you see those signs, and I did not do that, and so I rode right into the middle of an intersection, totally ignored the signage, and got hit by a car, a lady hit me in with her car, I'm on the bicycle, so I get up, and I pushed the bicycle, it was mangled, and I probably did not get hurt as bad as I could have, because I was so drunk, and so I pushed this bicycle home, and I get home, and the host family is hysterical, they're worried about me, as well they should have been, and at the time, I hadn't been in the country very long, and so my host family was very excited, and they were speaking Japanese very fast, and I still did not understand very well, and I was drunk, so I was as politely as I knew how, I said, please let me go to sleep, and so I climbed up into the loft, and I went to sleep, and I ended up, you know, urinating all over myself in my sleep, and I came to, and I had a terrible headache, with all of those consequences, this strabbing headache, and I'm all wet, and the bicycles ruined, and I'm thinking, wow, that was amazing, what a night, for the first time in my life, I finally felt like things had connected, whatever that thing was in me, that had been disconnected all my life, got connected, when I was in that disco, with my new friends, and I wasn't afraid to talk to people anymore, I felt comfortable in my own skin, for the first time in my life, I felt like I could finally breathe and exhale, for the first time in my life, here it was, you know, this was the thing, well I came back, and because of my upbringing, you know, I was taught that drinking is wrong, right, because we prayed for the Catholics, because they drink, so what happens in Japan, stays in Japan, so I come home, and I get back on the straight and narrow, if you will, and my dream was to go to West Point, my parents
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service in my family. Both grandfathers had served in World War II, a couple of uncles that served in the Navy. My other uncle, my dad's brother, served in the Marine Corps. So that was what I wanted to do. And I was in ROTC in high school, and I got to serve as a battalion commander in my senior year. We had 176 cadets in my battalion, and General Colin Powell had retired as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He'd just done that. And he came down to my little high school in Harrison, Tennessee, and inspected my unit.
And for a 17-year-old young man who's got dreams and aspirations of going into the military, going to West Point, to have the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs standing in front of and telling him how good a job he's doing, you can imagine where my head was, and my ego, for that matter. I was on top of the world and felt like I was headed where I was supposed to be going. And I worked at a local hardware store, and we were closing the store down on one Sunday evening. And prior to this, I had gone through the application process and received congressional letters of nomination from both state senators in Tennessee and our Congresswoman. So three congressional letters of nomination, and my senior Army instructor, Colonel Kerry, was an alumni of West Point, so he had also written a letter.
I was essentially in. I was down to the last step in the process, which is a DOD medical exam, Department of Defense medical exam. That was the last step before a formal appointment. And so we're closing down the hardware store, and the guys call me out on the back loading dock out there, and they fire up the doobie and start passing it around. Now, mind you, I'm the young man who grew up in church all his life, and you know, the only thing I knew about drugs was that Nancy Reagan said, just say no. That was the extent of my knowledge of that. So I partook, and I proceeded to go the following day on Monday morning to Memorial Hospital for that DOD medical exam. And so the first time I ever touched anything in my whole life, it was smoking pot for the first time, and it cost me an appointment to West Point. Three weeks later, I got the letter in the mail, said the appointment had been denied for positive delta-9-petrihydrocannabinol.
It was all spelled out. I've known how to spell that ever since. So here was a proverbial fork in the road for me. The only thing I can remember to this day from that time is my parents, my senior army instructor, and the cadre there at my school, the principal, all my teachers, everybody that I looked up to was just so terribly disappointed in me, and I was terribly ashamed and disappointed in myself. But my new frown buddies said, man, don't worry about those people. You can come hang out with us. We'll love on you. And so that's what I did. I fell in with my new friends, and I found alcohol again. And that magic elixir that had solved my problems when I was 16 years old, halfway around the world in Nagoya, that magic elixir worked again in Tennessee when I lost my dream at that time. And so that started me off on that journey of alcoholism. And it's, you know, there's a couple things really, and it's spelled out really well in our big book that make me a drunk. I've shared some things with you about, you know, my family growing up and some tragedy and stuff that happened with me and with my parents and then my sister passing away. Like, there was a lot going on in there. I went over to, you know, to Japan and I got drunk one time. Did that make me an alcoholic? Well, I don't think that in and of itself made me an alcoholic. But something happened to me when I took alcohol, and it's the same thing that happened to me when I was 16 and did it. It happened to me pretty much every time after that, and that's when I drink alcohol, I get thirsty, y'all. That's the easiest way I know how to describe it. Dr. Silkworth, in the doctor's opinion, referred to it as the phenomenon of craving. I've simplified it because I'm from Tennessee, and I call it thirsty. So I get thirsty when I drink alcohol. I like water, I like fresca, drinking a fresca, you know what I mean.
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I love coffee. None of those things makes me thirsty like alcohol does. So then I drink too much and my problems pile up and become astonishingly difficult to solve. And so, for me, that looks like turning my will and life over to the care of the sheriff's department. Done that several times. Involuntarily, I might add, I didn't set out to go that way. It just kind of ended up that way. So that kind of stuff happens, and it doesn't just happen once.
It continues to happen. We start to develop a pattern with this. This is my life. This is what's happening in my life. Really quickly now that I've started this career as an alcoholic, and I'm just getting in trouble, and I keep getting in trouble, and I keep getting in trouble, and I keep getting locked up, or I'm ruining a relationship, or I'm having conflict and confrontation with somebody else. All of this happens. Well, all the evidence points to, Jimmy, there's a common denominator here, and it's your drinking, and that might be a problem.
But that's where the mental obsession kicks in, and it tells me, but Jimmy, that's not it. We'll change the recipe just a little bit. We've just got the recipe off a little. If we tweak it just a little, it'll be okay. And so that's what I did. I tweaked it just a little, and I believed wholeheartedly in better living to chemistry. So if I can have a little alcohol and mix it with something else that helps me drink more alcohol, hey, all the better. You know, if I've had a little bit too much of the stuff that helps you drink more alcohol, and we think we need to go the other way, cool. Let's do that too. No matter how you sliced it, alcohol was always a common denominator in my life, and it was a constant, even when other things were not reliable anymore.
And that was the pattern of my life until, and I mean, there's a lot of just ugly stuff in there. You know, I fancied myself an entrepreneur for a while. It turns out that when you're that kind of entrepreneur, it's really difficult to have a profitable business when you consume your product. Found that out the hard way. So I'm fast forwarding here to destruction in January the 14th of 1999. I've been up all night drinking and doing the things that help you drink more, and we ran out. It's about eight o'clock in the morning, and I head out to go get more to drive, and I had a head-on collision and hit a lady, and her name is Nancy, and she was driving her husband's F-250 truck, four-wheel drive truck, that morning instead of her vehicle, and I was in a little Honda Accord, and the accident scene investigator said that the cars kind of went like this, and that that actually saved us. It broke her back and neck, and she had a hematoma on her breasts, broke my ribs, and ruptured the spleen. Really fortunate that no one was killed in that accident. I would go on, that was January the 14th of 99. On May the 10th of 99, my dad passed away, and then on May the 15th, I went to court for this accident, and Ms. Nancy came in in a wheelchair, in a turtle suit, you know, neck brace and everything, and the DA wanted to charge me with aggravated vehicular assault, which would have been a felony, and rightfully so, and Ms. Nancy came in there and pleaded for mercy for me. She said that I was young, and I'd made a terrible mistake, but she did not believe my life should be ruined because I made one terrible mistake, and she believed in forgiveness, and her pleading with the judge and the district attorney resulted in me walking out of there with a mandatory minimum 48 hours in jail, and lost my license for a year for a first offense DUI, and that was it. Here was Grace showing up in my life, and I didn't see it for what it was. I made lots of promises, I wrote cards and letters telling about how I was going to, you know, straighten up and go back to church, and all the things that we say when the jig is up, you know, and we need to do something different, and we're convinced, you know, you could have put me on a polygraph in that moment, and I would have passed it. I meant it when I said that I wasn't going to drink anymore, and I was
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going to change my life, but then the weight of the consequences starts to lessen a little bit, and for me, it's like, well, you know, maybe change the plan a little bit, and that mental obsession starts to kick in again, and it starts telling me, you know, never drink again ever. Things like a bit much, you know, it was the drinking and driving that really got you in trouble, so you should focus on that, you know, as long as you're not driving, the drinking is not that big a deal, and I'll save you the boring details of the progression of that line of thinking, but suffice it to say, it ends with I'm drinking every day again, you know, because that's what I do, and so in relatively short order after that, I'm right back doing the same thing, living the same way again. Fast forward to 2006, and I got arrested again, and this time I've got seven charges on me, and three of them are felonies, and I'm looking at five years in prison, and my attorney says, you got to go to the treatment, and so I did, and I ended up in an outpatient treatment facility, and one of the requirements there is you had to go to an AA meeting, it was, they held it there, the local group was there, excuse me, the Menton group, 8 p.m. on Monday nights, and so I don't know exactly why, but sitting in that AA meeting, I had been to an AA meeting previously, and it was in an old church fellowship hall, and it had the brown paneling on the walls, and the brown tables in the middle, and there was smoke hanging about halfway, you know, because they're in a bunch of old men and overalls, and I thought, you know what, that's probably not for me, and you know, what I know now is that I wasn't ready to stop drinking at the time, you know, and I'm in this treatment facility, and I don't know if it was the consequences hanging over my head, you know, some people call it the nudge from the judge, but for whatever reason, I listened in that meeting, took the cotton out of my ears and put it in my mouth, if you will, and what I heard in that AA meeting was a bunch of people like y'all telling my story, it's like y'all had read my mail, you were talking about how you had felt and thought and drank, and it was obvious by looking at you that you weren't doing that anymore, I mean, you can tell by looking at you, so I was intrigued by that, that y'all were telling my story, that it was clear you weren't suffering the way that I was suffering anymore, and so I continued to go to meetings, and fortunately for me, I believe I ended up in a series of meetings around town that from those emerged the common theme for me, and that was get a sponsor, work the steps, read that big book, pray, you know, those were, that was kind of the theme that emerged, and so I found a sponsor, the guy was a sculptor, he and I didn't have anything in common, but I watched him for several meetings, and I noticed that when he was in a meeting, he knew that big book, he knew our program, and I loved listening to what he had to share in the meeting, but the thing that made me ask him to be my sponsor was because I watched him before the meeting and after the meeting, and this guy wasn't just talking the talk, he was walking the talk before and after the meeting too, and that was attractive, and so I asked him to be my sponsor, and he took me to the steps, and my life took off like a rocket, it was amazing how quickly things improved just by committing to the process, it was amazing, and you know, I took the steps, my life's getting better, and I'm about 18 months in, and I go to court for these charges, and they end up getting all dismissed except for one, and I end up having to do 45 days in jail, I'm not a felon, and four months of house arrest, I lost my license for a couple years, but that was a heck of a lot better than five years in prison, so I go away and do my little stint, and while I'm there doing my little 45 days in the workhouse over here, they call my name 17 days in and say, hey Jimmy, you know, you're going to caduce.
Hey, Jimmy, you know, you're going to Cadis. Cadis is a local state-funded rehab here in
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Chattanooga treatment facility. And they called me up, and I've been to Cadis before. I've been there twice before, as a matter of fact. So I knew that place, and when they called my name, I thought, well, yes, please, because I knew that I could go to Cadis and smoke regular cigarettes or street clothes instead of keister tobacco and a jumpsuit in the jail. So I went to the treatment facility and went for 28, did my last 28 days as inpatient at the treatment facility. So here I am, a year and a half sober, and I'm walking up to the treatment center to be a patient, you know, for 28 days. And I walk up in there with my big book, like, I'm going to sponsor some boys up in here. Dr. Harry Thiebaud, in A-Tens of Age, he, in the back of it, he talks about the resurgence of the ego in the alcoholic. And I did not know it then, obviously, but I've come to learn later that that's exactly what was happening to me with me in that moment. That alcoholic ego was so strong, and I'd gotten complacent, you know, I got, and that's what, that's really what happened, because I'm still sober. But while I'm there, like, I think it's a good idea to tell the staff member, who's the counselor, who's holding the class for all of us, and she's trying to teach us about addiction and those kind of things. And she starts sharing some things that contradict what I know to be true in our big book. And so I felt compelled to let her know in front of the whole class that what she said was inconsistent with what my big book said. So anyway, I got to go make amends to that, to her, for me being a you-know-what in her class. But that was the kind of stuff that was starting to happen. You know, if I'd been on the beam spiritually, there were signs, right? There were several signs that things were, you know, not going the way they needed to go. And I didn't heed the warning, and I got out of my job, had held my job for me. And so I went back to work, and I was so important, and my company landed important contracts, and I was working 12-16 hours a day. And I'm coming home from work one day, and you know, I'm so busy and so important that, you know, I'm working so much. And I really don't have time to go to a meeting, you know, because I'm working so much. And I didn't really have time to call my sponsor either because I was working so much. And he was busy, too. And because I was working so much and just had so much on my plate, you know, I had to get up in the morning and get going. I didn't have time to pray, and I didn't have time to read my big book, and I didn't have time to call any of you to check on you from time to time, stay in touch. So y'all see where this is going, right? So in November of 2008, I was a groomsman in my boss's wedding, and they pour shots of liquor for all the groomsmen, and they poured ginger ale for me, and because they all knew that I didn't drink, and I reach out and pick up that shot of that liquor. And you couldn't have choreographed it any better. They all looked at me, and they said, dude, what are you doing? You don't drink. And I said, guys, guys, it's okay. This is not for me. This is his big day. This is for him. And I took a shot of liquor. Two years dry, a year and a half of that might have been sober. I don't think I was really sober the last six months because that whole resurgence of the ego thing, and I was drifting away. So yeah, I took a shot of liquor, and man, that liquor went down my gullet and hit my belly, and that warm sensation went all the way down to the tips of my toenails and fingernails, and the hair on top of my head. And then I went and did my thing, and I went to the, it was at a beautiful, the Grandview Mansion at Rock City in Lookout Mountain. Y'all look it up, the Grandview Mansion in Rock City. It's absolutely gorgeous up there. You get on top of Lookout Mountain, and you can look out, and you can see seven states from up there. It's so beautiful. So I'm up there. We're at this mansion. We're overlooking the Tennessee Valley, and all that's happening. We go to the pavilion next door, and it's a full open bar and the reception, and it's an absolutely gorgeous ceremony. It's just so wonderful, and it was the most miserable wedding I've ever been to in my whole life, because the only thing that my sorry butt could think about was that one shot of liquor that I had taken in the groom's room before the wedding started, and the fact that I said that wasn't for me, that was for him, and I was the designated driver for the rest of the night, which meant that if that really wasn't for me, I wasn't gonna drink anymore that night, and I didn't. It
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was torture. So that should have been a big clue that I was not cured of alcoholism, because I don't think a normal person would have had a problem with taking that shot of liquor and going on and having a big old time at the rest of this wedding and reception, rather than obsessing over the fact that they had taken one shot of liquor. So that began 39 months of just mayhem and mess, but I didn't get any more legal trouble. What I did get was completely spiritually bankrupt. I was empty on the inside, and I think that's exactly what I needed. I ended up going to a treatment facility to detox, because I was having, I was at a point where when I would drink, I'd get really sharp pains in my liver, and then I did do a bunch of painkillers to make that go away, so that I could drink more to make the shakes go away. So I was in pretty bad shape at the end, and needed to be medically detoxed, and that happened, and then when I got back home, I spent 28 days in that facility, and when I got back home, I called the guy who had been my sponsor, and I told him that, I asked him if he would sponsor me again, and he said yes, and so I was sitting at his kitchen table the evening that I got out of treatment, and he looked at me across the table, and he said, Jimmy, your ego is going to kill you if you don't do something different. I think I got my first resentment at him right there, but he loved me enough to tell me what I needed to hear, and not to cosign my bull, and then he told me that if he was going to sponsor me, I was going to have to get a commitment. I was going to have to be a service, an alcoholic synonymous, and what that looked like, he told me was that I was going to do something that I didn't get anything out of, without thought or reward, and I couldn't tell anybody about it, you know, go around bragging about what I was doing, and so my first job was, I worked on our local host committee, we were doing a Founders Day picnic, organizing a Founders Day picnic here locally, and I got to help with carrying tables and chairs at that, and I think that was one of the things, one of the key things that was missing in my recovery initially, because I never, the first go-round, I never really committed myself to service in any real capacity, not in a meaningful way. I came to learn this time around that service for me, and it's in our literature, means sacrifice, you know, if it's not, you know, service is, it's inconvenient sometimes, you know, it can be inconvenient a lot of the times, but it's one of those things where, if I'm truly grateful for the beautiful life that AA has given me, then don't listen to what I say, watch what I do, and I think that how grateful I am is borne out in how I give back to Alcoholics Anonymous and the community around me, right? We didn't get sober to just hide out in Alcoholics Anonymous, we're supposed to take the wonderful lives that we've been given and use that to bless the world around us too, both in AA and out. I ended up getting to go back to school and get my engineering degree, which allowed me the opportunity to get the job that I have, actually working for the same company that I am now, but that gave me the opportunity to go back to Japan again a couple more times for work. I've gotten to go to Tokyo and Nanao Bay, which was really beautiful, and I've gotten to go to AA meetings in Japan, and I got the opportunity to travel to Munich, Germany twice, and my hosts there took me to Oktoberfest, so I've been to Oktoberfest, one of the largest beer drinking festivals in the world, twice, and sober both times, which is just a delight, it's such a delightful experience, and found AA there too, you know, when I was there. Slovenia, it's just been a beautiful, beautiful experience. I got to go
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locally, we put together a young people's bid committee, by the way, January the 27th of 2012 is my sobriety date. I finally gave up and got sober then, and we started a bid committee and ended up getting awarded to host the Tennessee Conference of Young People and Alcoholics Anonymous in Chattanooga, and so we did that in 2014, and I was there, and I got to serve as the hotel chair on that committee, and we were there, and it's Friday night, and the place is just crazy. Anybody that's ever been to a YPAW, you know how, like, there's lots, there's a lot going on. It's a lot of fun, if you're struggling with wondering how to have fun in sobriety, just go to a YPAW, you'll see that's all they're doing is having fun sober, and maybe they're shotgun and Red Bull sometimes too, but we'll leave that, that's not for this discussion. When I got to do that, let me back up just a little bit. Prior to that, I'd been at a men's meeting, and the accident that I told you guys about from 1999, through the sharing that was going on, I don't even remember what the topic of the meeting was now, but through the sharing that was going on in there, all of that, that incident came rushing back, you know, and I got really emotional in the meeting, and I realized that I had never attempted to make formal amends to Miss Nancy for almost killing her 15 years earlier, and so I sat down with my sponsor, he was there, and we talked about it, and he encouraged me to write an honest letter, and so that's what I did. With his, under his guidance, I wrote an honest letter and mailed that off, and so I'm there at Tiki Paw, and the phone, my phone rings, it's a number I don't recognize, which is not unusual when you're on the host committee, and it's one of those things, and there's no telling what's happened now, I'm like, did they throw chairs in the pool, what's going on, and so I answer my phone, and it's Miss Nancy on the other end, and she had gotten my letter, and she said she would love to meet with me, and so I got to go that following Tuesday to Miss Nancy's church, and her fellowship hall, and I met with her, and I got to talk to the woman face-to-face that I had almost killed 15 years prior, and she brought a book with her that had pictures of the accident, it had photocopies, and had the originals of the cards and letters that we had exchanged following the incident, and we spent about two and a half hours talking, and when the time was appropriate, I asked Miss Nancy, I don't know how in the world I could ever make this, any of this right, she had, she had never, was never able to work again, had a lot of health problems after that that continued for the rest of her life, you know, her children and grandchildren, you know, her whole family was affected by that, and when I asked her what in the world could I ever do to make this right, she said you've been given a gift, God has rescued you from your alcoholism so that you can help his children, and that's what you can do for me, is you can continue to help those people who struggle the way you did, and so I have endeavored to do that to the best of my ability since that day, and it has looked messy y'all, I mean it's just been messy, the growing pains, I crack myself up almost on the daily at some of the just childish things that I still do at 49 years old, and I look back on it and doing a 10 step at the end of the day, and I'm like goodness gracious, you're a bonehead, why are you still messing up like that, you know, but how wonderful it is that we have this program, I get so frustrated, I get so frustrated sometimes with, for instance, in Alcoholics Anonymous, how we can sometimes spend
[00:45:00]
hours in a business meeting arguing over 50 cents for coffee cups, you know, when some sometimes these things can be so frustrating, but at the same time I can take a step back and look at the big picture and just be awestruck at how beautiful and amazing it is that this this thing we have here, this Design for Living, that's been rocking and rolling since 1935, it just somehow sticks together, you know, we've got these traditions that are this glue that just kind of holds all this mess together and we make it work and it's the most beautiful thing and I believe that what's convinced me now more than ever as a result of my experience in general service and service in Alcoholics Anonymous in general is that the most important work that any of us will ever do in the end is to greet the newcomer when they come through the door to be there, it's the one-on-one communication with another alcoholic that is the hands-down the most important work we'll ever do and everything else that we do should be supporting that mission, that's our only reason for existence and so I challenge both myself and anybody that's involved in service in any capacity in Alcoholics Anonymous to ask yourself when we're in those challenging moments, right, where we're trying to be of service and we're doing our thing that feels like we're spinning our wheels or we're having a hard time understanding how this makes any sense, stop and ask can I connect the dots from what we're talking about right now to helping a drunk not die of alcoholism and if I can then we can figure this out, if I can't we need to stop and start talking about something else because that's the most important thing that we can do.
Another thing that's been a cool experience to learn is that when I can set aside my own ambitions and really honestly work for the greater good, I think about what Bill said in his essay on leadership and he talks about us as people where we have different skills and abilities and proficiencies and all those things and that's part of what makes us so strong and makes this so beautiful is because of how diverse our fellowship is and our talents and everything and so it's been a real gift to, you know, to take the time to get to know people, to get to know what they enjoy and what they're good at and use that to inform how we might nudge and encourage somebody when it comes to getting involved in service and Alcoholics Anonymous.
We need leaders everywhere, you know, everybody in this room is a leader. Bill closed this concept in an essay saying that every sponsor is necessarily a leader and often it can mean the difference between life and death. I mean, that's leadership if there ever was, right? When we're talking to, when you're doing a 12-step call and you're talking to somebody, I mean, I'm sure there are people in this room who've experienced the same thing I have where you've had a sponsor pass away or you've known a wet drunk who darkened the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous only to turn up dead a short time later. I mean, those are realities that happen every single day around Alcoholics Anonymous and so when it comes to that whole idea of leadership and Alcoholics Anonymous, at the end of the day, it's really about me getting out of the way and figuring out how can we collectively do the best job we can with making sure that our message is available and accessible to anybody that needs it. And that's a tall order and I've failed to make good on it a whole bunch but I got a great sponsorship and a great group of folks around me and with me on this journey that helped serve as examples to be my lighthouses on the sea that my ego tends to toss me to and fro upon. But you guys help me keep it together and I think what I've found in all of this is summed up really well in forward to the 12 and 12 where it says of A's 12 steps
[00:50:05]
that they're a group of principles spiritual in nature which is practiced as a way of life can expel the obsession to drink and able to suffer to live happily and usefully whole and that's the key for me. All I ever wanted my whole life was to be happily and usefully whole and I didn't know I needed it and didn't know I could find it until I got here and y'all gave it to me. So that's all I got. Thank you very much for having me.
Thank you, Jim. That was great. Thank you so much for joining us tonight when you never know what you're going to get. You just have to keep coming back. We surely hope to see you here next Thursday when our special guest is Jeff B and his name is long name from Fargo, North Carolina and anybody from Fargo has got to be something, you know. If you like this meeting, please pass do as Bill Wilson always says, said, pass it on. You never know. You can help others right from your phone or computer and tell them about this special meeting. Everyone is welcome to hang out on the back porch after the meeting and we are going to have a good time and Jimmy, do you have any closing comments and will you please take us out with the prayer of your choice? Well, yes.
Just thank you. Thank you for my life. Far beyond my wildest dreams. I've sold myself short. I've been overpaid and if I live to be a million years old and try to pay it back every day, I'll never be able to pay it all back. I'm okay with that. If y'all would help me, let's close with the Wii version of the serenity prayer. God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen. Amen. Okay, y'all, y'all can go.
Thank you so much, Jimmy. Thank you, Jimmy. Thanks, Jimmy. Appreciate it.