Scott L. from Nashville, TN speaking in Daytona Beach, FL

On page 552 and what else I just described. Talk a little bit about this. A girl that comes to my home group that says life is tough is tough. First you get the test, then you get the lesson. Then if you don't get the lesson, you get the test again.

And I think that might be right. And so at least in part this 4 step is about laying that down. And I heard in a meeting in Atlanta when I was over about 5 years a guy defined freedom and I think he got it. He said, freedom is when I accept full responsibility for all of my own actions. Up until that point I may have been at large but I'm not free because freedom includes responsibility.

So steps 4 through 9 have to do with responsibility. They have to do with acting like an adult. A friend of mine says whenever she's confused and doesn't really know what her next move should be, she stops and asks herself this question. What would an adult do in a situation like this? And I find that helpful for for whatever it's worth.

My my experience with removing my own defects of characters, I have no power over them. I was at a trade show in Chicago sober a couple years and I was selling hardware and plumbing and electrical kinds of stuff. And I was at a big trade show in McCormick and I was removing my own defects of character. I don't know if anybody else is in here has had that experience but you can get a brain hernia doing that. And I was walking and I was working on what I think of as character defect number 1.

I call it CD 1. You know which one it is, right? Yeah. Lust yeah. That's it.

And, so I'm walking down the aisle and I'm not even gonna see these ladies. Right? Not even gonna see them. I'm removing this character defect. And I come by this particular space and these people make shower heads and they have invented this new shower head that does this pulsing thing.

And they have got a glass shower stall at about waist level. And there's a gorgeous young woman in there wearing about 6 or 8¢ worth of bathing suit. Couldn't have been more than that. Taking a shower demonstrating this thing. And I'm gonna walk by there not even notice it.

Right? I almost hurt myself trying trying to stop those thoughts. And I left there and I went to a meeting and I walked out of that meeting still crazy and I said to a woman standing on the street right after meeting, I said, where's the next meeting? She said, there's a men's meeting around the corner and you better go. So I guess it was visible.

So I walked in and I sat down in this men's meeting and this guy told my story. I was astounded where he had done that. And my sponsor tells me that I have no power over my defects of character. None. And that my defects of character are all self centered without exception.

Without exception, they're self centered. And self does not have the power to push self out of the center and if it did, it would leave a vacuum. And the answer to my defects of character is for me to try to become God centered. And on the days when I do that, my defects of character just recede. And and I don't I guess that the darkness can't exist in the light.

And the 4th step for me is the beginning of the shining of the light onto the truth. I said before that I don't have the power to forgive and I don't believe that I do. But I have the power to receive God's gift of forgiveness. See, when I got here I was like this. And as I have done this step work work and hung out with you people, I have begun to open to receive what's always been here for me as a free and clear gift.

And one of those gifts is forgiveness. I have used this program on all of my resentments. I have one and it's funny, I never think about it. Never crosses my mind if he walked into the room, I wouldn't think about it. I was in a business deal a number of years ago and I was I'm a commission salesman.

And the commission on my side was gonna be $50,000 a year. That's a lot of money to me. And, that's been 16 years ago. So I'm about 800,000 in the hole on this one right now. And you know, the only time nothing happens in here when I say that.

Nothing goes off inside. I don't have any feelings about that anymore. I hope that guy does great. I wish him the best. I think he's doing the best he can do and I'm doing the best I can do because I can't afford the price of hating one of the master's kids.

We pray in the prayer that they close most of the meetings with. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. I'm asking to be graded by my own standards. I have consequently relaxed my standards. It's pretty clear that I can't afford the price.

The price is just too high and these are the directions for me so that I can receive the forgiveness. And I have someone pray these prayers through their list one at a time and I don't care. The shortest list of resentments I ever saw that I thought was complete was about 40. The longest I ever saw was 450 and it was incomplete. I'm pretty sure of that and I don't care how long.

One at a time. Let's go back and pray for these people. To me, resentment is kinda like black ice around my heart. And as I hold in prayer that black heart up to the sunlight of the spirit, that sunlight melts that ice. And depending maybe on how long I've had the resentment and how much I've nourished it and how big it is or maybe how close I can hold it to the sunlight, eventually it will melt.

And I can find myself praying for God to give me tolerance, pity and patience for this person and find that I have it. And then I can hope he has a great life and a spiritual experience and his kids go to school on scholarship and his wife gets promoted to work and you know that and I just wish him the very best. And that goes for the man I just described to you right now and I don't have the power to do that. I absolutely do not have that power but this program does. The forgiveness process is in the 4th step.

Cleverly hidden I might add, but it's right there. And that ends the 1st third of the inventory that generally shoots about 80% of the time necessary. I'm sorry. I'm I'm ahead of myself. There's one more.

It says referring to our list again, putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done. Now that's difficult to do if I'm still mad at him. I think that's why the prayer work and the observations are so important, so I gotta dig that poison out. And it doesn't say that I look for my part. If I'm looking for my part I still think they got a part.

So I need to get to the the forgiveness piece in place before I get to here. Says we resolutely look for our own mistakes. I have made mistakes. That's what we're gonna look for. Where had we been?

Alright. Here's your 4th column. Where had we been? Selfish, dishonest, self seeking, and frightened. I would note that those are all functions of self.

They are they are all parts of self. Though a situation not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely where were we to blame. The inventory was ours not the other man's. So I'm gonna do a 4th column and take a look at whether I had been selfish, dishonest, self seeking, or frightened. And then it calls for another list down here.

It says when we saw our faults we listed them. I think that's a separate list. Sit down and write down what were my faults. They're all self centered. We placed them before us in black and white, we covered that.

We admitted our wrongs honestly and we're willing to set these matters straight. Interesting how the 4th and 8 steps are so closely related. Much more closely than 45 because here I'm willing to sweep up my side of the street and that's what a the 8th step is gonna be about. And that's it on resentment. And now we go to the fear portion of the inventory.

It says notice that the word fear is bracketed alongside the difficulties with these folks. This short word somehow touches about every aspect of our lives and then here's an indictment. It was an evil and corroding thread, the fabric of our existence was shot through with it. It set in motion trains of circumstances which brought us misfortune we felt we didn't deserve. But now we ourselves set the ball rolling.

Sometimes we think fear ought to be class with stealing. It seems to cause more trouble. Apparently, that's gonna have to go too. And they're gonna tell us how to do that. Astonishingly enough, the directions are right here.

It says we reviewed our fears thoroughly. To me that's not a direction, that's a general description. They're gonna tell us very specifically how to do that. It says we put them on paper even though we had no resentment in connection with them. I suggest that if you've got the spiral notebook thing, turn 3 or 4 pages so you have room for some more resentments.

If you happen to think of some, dog ear 1 and start listing your fears. Start writing them down. And and it's everything. And it's fears of, fear of failure, Fear of success. You may not know you have that.

Take a hard look. I was afraid of success. I was afraid I was gonna succeed and I knew it was dumb luck and they were gonna expect me to do it again. I was scared to death for that. I did much better with failure.

Fear snakes? Afraid of death? Afraid of flying? Well, not flying. Afraid of crashing and burning in an airplane?

Take an inventory. Take a look. Talk to your sponsor about it. I recommend sponsorship a lot. I'm gonna talk about that here in a little while.

They said we put them on paper. It doesn't tell us specifically how and that's the only written instruction that I can find in the fear inventory. So I just say write one down and just just keep writing. Just start making a list of your fears. Shouldn't take long.

And it says, we put them on paper even though we had no resentment in connection with them. So some of my fears have resentments connected to them and some of them don't. So that's saying all fears, you got one, put it down. And then it says, we asked ourselves why we had them. I am so grateful that they answered that question in the next sentence because I had no idea.

I couldn't have answered the question. It said, wasn't it because self reliance fail us? So let's observe one at a time that I have these fears because I rely upon myself and it it it emphasizes that in these next few sentences all saying the same thing. Self reliance was good as far as it went but it didn't go far enough. Some of us once had great self confidence but it didn't fully solve the fear problem or any other.

When it made us cocky it was worse. Perhaps there is a better way, we think so. For we are now on the on a different basis. The basis of trusting and relying upon God. We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves.

Wanna read from page roman numeral 16 in the text. This is from the forward to the second edition. It's referring to Bill. Though he could not accept all attendance of the Oxford groups, he was convinced of the need for moral inventory, confession of personality defects, restitution to those harmed, helpfulness to others, and the belief and the necessity of belief in and dependence upon God. What I wanna point is that last last phrase, the necessity of belief in and dependence upon God.

Those are 2 separate concepts. I can believe there's a God and not have a higher power. To believe in God and to depend on God are different concepts. I think that's pretty powerful. It was for me.

So it says here I'm back on page 68, for we are now on a different basis rather than relying upon myself. The basis of trusting and relying upon God. We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves. We are in the world to play the role he assigns. 2nd half of the first step, my life's unmanageable.

I don't get to pick the role, he does. But I'm given a gift and I believe this with all of my heart. I was afraid I was gonna have to be a missionary in Africa or something like that that I didn't wanna do. And somebody pointed to me pointed out to me one time that God has this particular animal that he gave a taste for the very tenderest leaves that grow on the top of a particular tree. And he also gave the giraffe the long neck so that he could get to them.

The idea is that God's will is a good deal. There's a there's a secret. God's will for me is a good deal. Hold that one for a while. But it's a package deals.

2 bowling balls. My will, God's will, pick 1. It's not 95 and 5. We're in the world to play the role he assigns. Just to the extent that we do as we think he would have us and humbly rely on him does he enable us to match calamity with serenity.

The permission to make a mistake is in that sentence. Did you hear it? It says just to the extent that we do as we think he would have us. I don't have to do what God would have me do. I don't always know what it is.

I have to take my best shot. And when I'm trying to do what I think the mass would have me do like I said before I'm still making mistakes but I'm making much finer quality mistakes. And I'm learning by living with the results of them because I insist on embracing my results now. That's permission to make a mistake. We never apologize to anyone for depending on our creator.

We can laugh at those who think spirituality the way weakness paradoxically this way of strength. The verdict of the ages is that faith means courage, all men of faith have courage, they trust their God. We never apologize for God, there's a rather direct piece of information. Instead, we let him demonstrate through us what he can do and here's a prayer. We ask him to remove our fear and direct our attention to what he would have us be.

I would like to note it does not say what he would have us do but what he would have us be. And once we commence to outgrow fear, there's a promise kind of interesting, we outgrow fear. Fear must be lack of growth if I cannot grow it. What kind of growth? Spiritual growth.

Growth toward God. Growth growth toward being the kind of guy he'd have me be. Growth toward dependence on God rather than the dependence upon me. Powerful stuff. That's it for the fear inventory.

There was a list, there were some observations, there was a prayer. Says now about sex. Many of us many of us needed an overhauling there. But above all we try to be sensible on this question, it's easy to get way off track. Here we find human opinions running to extremes, absurd extremes perhaps.

One set of voices cry that sex is the lust of our lower lower nature, a base necessity of procreation then we have the voices who cry for sex and more sex who'd be well the institution of marriage who think that most of the troubles of the race are traceable to sex causes. I think we don't have enough of it or isn't the right kind. I'm gonna skip down. We wanna stay out of this controversy. We do not wanna be the arbiter of anyone's sex conduct.

I don't either. If they didn't wanna be, I don't wanna be and the only time I feel good pointing at it with a man that I sponsor if is if I think he's betting his sobriety on it. I've had the occasion this year of doing that in extremely direct terms and I think he narrowly missed, a real bad one. Says we all have sex problems we'd hardly be human without if we didn't, what can we do about them? Here are the directions.

Says we reviewed our own conduct over the years past. That's interesting. Our own conduct. I'm not reviewing anybody else's. Where had we been?

Selfish, dishonest, or inconsiderate, whom had we hurt? What I like to do on that one and I and I do this, I hope with a great deal of humility is I like to take the second one first because this will lay out pretty easily in a column inventory if you'll start out with whom had we hurt as a column. And the second one being where had we been selfish, dishonest, or inconsiderate. The 3rd column being did we unjustifiably arouse jealousy, suspicion, or bitterness? And then the 4th column said where were we at fault?

What should we have done instead? My 4th column is very simple. Generally, it says, I shoulda left her alone, or it says, I shoulda told her the truth. It's short because when this is not a a course in self flagellation. We're not here to beat me up over the things that I've done wrong.

It tells me in the next paragraph well, let me go before that. It says we got this all down on paper and looked at it. So we're gonna put this all on paper so we can look at it and observe. We're making the list so we can make the observations. What are we trying to accomplish?

This is what it says here. It It says in this way, we try to shape a same and sound ideal for our future sex life. So that's what we're trying to do with this. Not beat me up but figure out what I'm supposed to do from here. I like to ask the men that I sponsor to write a paragraph which is less than a third of a page on what they believe their sex ideal should be.

It's done prayerfully. It says down here we subjected each relation to this test was it selfish or not. It's back to self. The thread runs all through. Here's a prayer.

We ask God to mold our ideals and help us to live up with them, up to them. So I asked him to pray that prayer, sit down and write a paragraph as to what you believe your sex ideal is. What would god have you do in the sex arena? And I tell them that you don't have to chase the what ifs. Right?

If you are currently married, then write it down. You don't have to figure out what it would be if you still loved her but she was seeing somebody else and you were almost legally separated but not quite but the lawyers were talking. Right? We don't need to know that. We're back to a day at a time very simply.

What is it today? When your situation changes, we'll talk again. I invite them to share that with me if they want to. Some do, some don't. It's none of my business.

I'm willing to listen to it. I'm not even asking to. I'm just available as a sponsor to it. Says we remember always that our sex powers were God given and therefore good neither to be used lightly or selfishly nor to be despised or loathed. Whatever ideal turns out to be we must be willing to grow toward it.

We must be willing to make amends. Here we go again with the amends just like the 8 step. It ain't that hard. Trust me. It's not that hard.

Some of them don't even remember yet. They don't. Ain't that terrible? That's the worst part of it, I think. Make amends where we've done harm.

We treat sex as we would any other problem and here we go again into the prayerful things, this time it's meditation. In meditation, we ask God what we should do about each specific master. The right answer will come if we want it. So I sit quietly in the master's presence with a question and I listen for the answer and it comes. And I bounce it off my sponsor to make sure.

Suppose we fall short, does this mean we're gonna get drunk? Some people tell us so but it's only a half truth. It depends on us and our motives. If we are sorry for what we have done and have the honest desire to let God take us to better things we believe We will be forgiven and will have learned our lesson If we are not sorry and our conduct continues to harm others we are quite sure to drink. We are not theorizing, these are facts out of our experience.

I can sign that too. That's true. I've seen that. To sum up about sex, we earnestly pray, here we are praying again. My sponsor says, and what came as a big surprise to me, that god knows all about sex.

As a matter of fact, he thinks god may have invented it. It's a that's right. Says we earnestly pray for the right ideal, for guidance in each questionable situation. That's interesting. I only need the guidance in the questionable situations.

Generally, I know what to do. More specifically, I know what not to do. For sanity and for the strength to do the right thing. And I just love this. It says if sex is very troublesome, we throw ourselves the harder into helping others.

I watched this guy that I'm talking about almost and got him heavily active in helping others and I don't wanna be real specific about that. Got him doing a lot of 12 step work and the problem went away for him. The problem went away because it's just a selfishness. It is very simply a selfishness. It's all it is.

Says 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 heartbreak. I have seen that happen. Having trouble with this one?

3 nights a week take a meeting into a prison. See what happens to you. Get down to central office and start answering the phones. Get early to your home group, make the coffee, set up the chairs, stay late, wash the cups, put the ashtrays away, fold the chairs, get out there and get it on the road for the newcomer see what happens. It will go away.

I I have been astounded to watch what's happened on that. Absolutely astounded. And And now we have what what pilots call a checklist. It says, if we have been thorough about our personal inventory, well, there's an if, we have written down a lot. Well, if you follow these directions that we have just discovered in this book you will have written down a lot.

It says we have listed and analyzed our resentments. Okay. I remember where we did that. We covered those directions. It says, we have begun to comprehend their futility and their fatality.

We've talked about how futile they were, we've talked about dying from them. I bet there are other people in this room who've seen that. We have commenced to see their terrible destructiveness. Yeah. We looked at that.

Says we have begun to learn tolerance, patience, and goodwill toward all men even our enemies for we look on them as silk sick people. I remember that. We did some prayers and observations about that. We have listed the people we have hurt by our conduct. We did that in the sexual misconduct inventory, we did that in the resentment inventory, and are willing to straighten out the past if we can.

Yep. I remember where we saw that. So it seems to me that if we've done those things then we've been complete. I've got some other notes that I wanna read for my own experience and I'm gonna go back to fear for just a second. There was a fellow named Johnny used to come to my home group.

And he had a tire iron under his under his front seat and he had a knife in his pocket and he had a pistol in his in his boot and he had some shotguns at the house. And he says, I ain't afraid of nothing. And we've been sober about 6 months. He said, you know what? I'm afraid of everything.

That's why I gotta have all that. It's funny how little I know about myself until I begin to take these inventories. A lot of what I believed about me turned out to be untrue. If you had asked me the day before I got sober if caffeine affected me, I would have said absolutely not and it didn't. And and, if you drink as much Scotch as I was, it probably wouldn't affect you either.

And it took me a year to figure out that I can't do caffeine. I can have a cup in the morning, I can have an iced tea at lunch, I have to stop there because if I have a cup of coffee even decaf with you good people at an 8 o'clock meeting, I'm not sleeping that night. How many other things are there about me that I didn't know when I got here? It was important to me because this magnet through the junkyard of life metaphor that we talked about before, as these things drop away, we're gonna discover who I really am and I didn't have a clue. I didn't have the faintest notion who I was because I've been an act all of my life.

I had pretended to be who I thought you wanted me to be all my life and I didn't know who I was. I did not know. I have a friend, a woman who was held in at gunpoint in a bank robbery. She's in recovery. And when she came out of that situation, she analyzed it and she said, you know, my fear was all in the future.

Granted, I'm standing there in the bank and this guy's got a stocking over his head and a pistol in my ear holding me like this But she said, you know, it was really okay. I wasn't doing what I wanted to do and I wasn't physically very comfortable but my fear was in the future. Fear is in the future. There's a fellow named Doug d out of Dallas who who does a wonderful discussion about self and I've changed it slightly. But it's that, resentment and depression are when I wasn't getting my will in the past.

Anger is when I'm not getting my will right now. And fear is the concern that I will not get my will in the future. What is the problem? Can continues to come back to my will. Isn't it astounding?

Isn't it just astonishing? I'll tell you back on the fear thing just a little bit too. I had a guy after I did one of these sessions one time say well, he said the reason I look both ways before I step off a curb is because I'm afraid I'll get run over by a bus. To me that's not a fear. That sounds to me like intuitively no.

That it's in my own best interest to look both ways before I step off of a curb. When we talk about fear, I'm talking about that gut wrenching petrified thing and I've I've had the experience of needing to get rid of some fears, on a couple of couple of occasions, I had some things that, turned brown and began to stink rather badly in my business a while back and I found myself in fear again. And what fear is is a reassertion of my will. It's the reemergence of ego every time. And what I had to do was a prayer that I discovered was a way to I've heard people since I got sober, they say turn it over to God, nobody can tell me how.

I found out how. What I do is I take a situation and I discover by inventorying what do I think is the very worst possible thing that can happen here. Now, it's a judgment on my part, part. I'll give you that. But what do I think is the worst case?

In this particular situation, the worst case was I lose the business, I go bankrupt, I lose the house, I lose one of the cars and I have to get a real job working for somebody else. Alright. Because I'm a self employed. That was that's the worst thing I could imagine that could possibly happen. And so I took that as a package to God.

And I said, if this is your will, send it. And I didn't mean it. See, that was the problem. That was the problem right there. It's because I wanted it my way.

Because I figured if I could turn over the what I thought was the worst case, I'd turn over everything else. And I prayed that prayer every time I thought about it. See, my my spirituality been gone for a couple of weeks and it took me that long to realize it was gone. My spiritual contact was gone. And I prayed that morning and night, added to my morning evening prayers it and I didn't mean it and I didn't mean it and I kept praying it.

And all of a sudden all of a sudden one day, I met it. And what happened is I'd step back into the sunlight of the spirit. See the first requirement for me to have anything if I'm gonna walk this walk is I don't have to have it. If I've got to have it, I've put it before God and I stand in its shadow. The first requirement is I must be able to hold it in an open hand.

I must be. And I held at that time, finally, I got my job, my economic situation held in an open hand again. And, I'm not saying this is cause and effect, but 3 days later it turned around and took off like a rocket. I don't know. But the important piece is that I was at peace.

It was okay. Because as long as I had this program, this contact with God, as long as I can stay sober and be one of you people, I was gonna be okay. My will, God's will. 2 bowling balls, pick one. It's not 95 and 5.

I'll handle money and sex and he can handle arrest. It's not not the deal. It's not the package. Not what the 3rd step prayer said. It's not what it said.

It worked for me. What I discovered was that I'm trapped. When I got sober, I discovered see this right here? See it right there? You probably think of that as skin.

That's a prison. I'm stuck in here. You know what I mean? I used to get out all the time. You know, I'd go be somebody else.

I I I did a lot of things I used to be able to. I'm stuck now. And the first thing I had to do if I was gonna live in here 24, 365 was clean it up so I could stand it. And the 4th step is the beginning of the housecleaning. I heard a girl in a meeting at the mustard seed in Chicago.

If you ever get a chance to get up there, it's great clubhouse. She said my priority is not what I say it is, my priority is what I do. Priorities is what I do. If I wanna know what my priorities are, I don't listen to my words about the future. I take the evening half of the 11th step and look into my past and see what got done.

And what got done was a priority and what did you know not get done was not a priority and anything that I am saying to the contrary is a lie that I'm telling me and I did not like that the first time I heard it. And it's the truth. And I think that's why it's so important for me. So what's my priority? My priority is what gets done.

It's what is accomplished. Important piece. There's something else to me that's very important. We talk in the 3rd step about God's will. And that was a frightening concept.

So many of us as children were told when aunt Sarah died, it was God's will. I mean, God's will got a bad name. And I had to take my own concept what I believe that phrase God's will meant. Break it into 2 pieces and one of them is things like, what am I gonna be when I grow up? Where am I gonna live?

Who am I gonna live with? How much money am I gonna make? What's gonna happen to my children? Did the communist eventually take over the world? Every bit of that violates one day at a time.

And not being in management according to the first step, I don't need to know. Leaves me with my own concept of God's will and that is very simply what would the master have me do today. And I know what God's will is for me. Just act like one of his kids. I'm a citizen.

I vote. I drive a car. Put your blinker on around me in traffic. I'll let you in. I say please and thank you.

Yeah. That's big news in Nashville. Some days. I I try to, I'm trying to be a good dad to my kids. I'm I'm trying to be a good husband to the to this fabulous wife that I have.

And I act like I'm married all the time. All the time. I'm an alcoholic. I've got a sponsor. I sponsor some guys.

I go to a lot of meetings. I read the text. I read 2 pages a day in the big book, just 2. It's a discipline. I read the big book 4 times a year.

2 pages a day. That's all. The word discipline and the word punishment meant the same thing in the home I grew up in. The word discipline comes from the same root word as the word disciple, means follower. So, when I discipline myself, I don't punish me.

What I do is I choose to follow. So, I know what God's will is for me. Stacked like one of his kids. I I I'm a child of God. I pray.

I meditate and I try to treat you guys like brothers and sisters, loved brothers and sisters. I know what God's will is. There's an important piece for me in the 3rd step, really important. A lady I know in Nashville says that prayer is not a chance to change God's mind. It's not a sales opportunity, it's an opportunity for God to change my mind which is the one that needs to be changed.

I wanna talk just a little bit about sponsorship. My, my 5th sponsor died in May 4 years ago and, Don was a beautiful guy and he had, I could talk about him for the next hour. I'm gonna stifle myself and just say that I needed to be sponsored. So for 11 years and I needed to be sponsored and there was no question about it. And if you're new and you're looking for a sponsor, I wanna tell you what I looked for because I had had the 5 best sponsors any man ever had and I asked myself what were their common characteristics so that I could look around and find 1 and this is what they were.

They'd all been men. I don't sponsor women and I'm not sponsored by women. They had to be men who had done the 12 steps because the 12 steps are the programs. I need someone that's in the program who could help me stay in the program. Well, if they haven't at my home group they say if you can't anymore give away something you ain't got, then you can come back from somewhere you ain't been.

And so it had to be somebody that had been there. It had to be someone who had a sponsor himself and there are a couple of good reasons for that. One is that it means he surrendered to somebody. The second one, more important to me, is that the first time I come to him with a question he can't answer, we got a plan. We know where we're going.

We're going to his sponsor. I tell you how good our plan is. I happen to know for a fact that his sponsors got a sponsor. We got a great plan. It was important for me to have a sponsor who would tell me the truth.

It means it has to be somebody who doesn't need me for a best friend. I need someone who will tell me what I do not wanna hear. That's important to me. It has to be someone for me who's active in service work because I think all the winners are. They're taking meetings into prisons and and jails and treatment centers and they're showing up at the detoxes and their secretary of the group and they're setting up and they're tearing down or answering the phone.

You know what the service work is. I gotta have somebody who's doing that because I need a winner. That's what I need. And and I think maybe the last and probably the most important characteristic is I need a sponsor that laughs a lot. I would not have a sponsor when having a great time.

Because my experience has been that the people who do this step work, who get to the 12 step, who have the spiritual awakening and try to practice these principles in all their affairs are having a ball. Now there are moments when that isn't true but overall they're having a fantastic time. If you ever get to Nashville, look up Ice Cream Steve. He's my sponsor and he is a nutcase of the first order and I know he's gonna hear this tape and he will not be upset when he hears that. He'll think that was funny.

You gotta see this guy walk into a prison. I walk into a cell with with 78, convicts and get in their face. He is not afraid and he's having a ball. He's nuts. And I wanna feel like he looks.

I wouldn't have a sponsor that wasn't having a great time. Page 132 in the text, we absolutely insist on enjoying life. My sponsors need to do that. And so I looked around when Don Roy died and there stood ice cream Steve. And here we are 4 years later and he and I are still sober and just having a fabulous time.

If you're new here, do somebody a favor and let them sponsor you. Do somebody a favor and let them sponsor you. I need the men that I sponsor. And the men that they sponsor, they need them. It's a wonderful thing to have the opportunity to see the light come on in somebody's eyes as they do this work.

And I thought that that I was when I asked the 1st guy to sponsor me, I thought I was saying I'm a dead weight. Would you drag me? No, it wasn't it. What I was saying was I think you're on the path. May I walk beside you?

We will help each other. And that's been my experience in sponsorship. I believe the easiest men in this fellowship to sponsor are the men who are sponsoring newcomers themselves. Their stuff see, I'll sit here nodding. Does their their issues vanish.

They absolutely vanish. All of a sudden, a guy who was nuts and it wasn't going well at work and it wasn't going well at home. He had all these problems. He picks up a newcomer and I only get 2 phone calls from him the next week. One of them is to ask me a question about sponsorship.

And the other one is to tell me something absolutely hilarious that rookie is either said or done. Right? That pattern holds from then on. And all of a sudden, his issues have vanished. Do somebody a favor.

Let them sponsor you. I think it's really important. I'd like to say again that I do not consider myself to be an expert on this thing, but I am willing to try to field questions about the, 4 step or anything else if anybody wants to try it. And, otherwise, we're gonna call this a ball game. We got a microphone.

If you would get on the microphone, are we still taping, Mark? Yeah. We're taping. Yeah. If you'd tip.

I'm going to ask a question. Oh, okay. And I will get to the barbecue on time. I promise it. Go ahead.

I got a question. You said you'll write the name down and then you write 19 words after that. How many times can you write that name same name down? Okay. 1st place is that's not what I said.

I said you write the name, you skip one line. You write the name, you skip one line. You're already going across the page. Alright? Make sure you get your full list of names first.

Uh-huh. Write them once. 19 words. That's it. Because, see, 1st place, if you work across the page, all it does is feed the resentment.

You get those feelings inside like you got right now because you're thinking about whatever this is. And the second thing is if you continue to write about it, it just feeds that. And we're not trying to feed it. We're trying to get it on paper so we can make the observations, do the prayers, and Abused me as a child. Nineteen words.

That's my suggestion. Whatever your sponsor says, by the way, I agree with. Each has their own experience. Please go ahead. Hi.

My name is Jeff. I'm from Tampa, Florida, the Safe Haven Group. This is the first time I've ever sponsored anybody, and it happened last week. And I've got 3 of them right now. And I left, like, one open ended question to these 3 people, and they jumped all over.

I said, hey. If you wanna run through the big book, if you just wanna go over a few things, just let me know. And 2 of them let me know on one day, and one let me know on the other day. And, I'm having a a situation where I'm trying to manage all 3. This is the first time I've ever sponsored anybody, and the only thing I prayed for was 1.