Big Book Workshop Weekend in Altamore Springs, FL

And, this is an important piece of information to me because I've seen it change lives. I was talking to a young woman who was maybe 17 years old, and he said to her, you need to stop being a young person in AA. Stop it, and just be a person in AA. Everybody in this room has a reason why they're different. Somebody's the tallest.

Somebody's the shortest. Somebody weighs the most. Somebody weighs the least. Somebody get the most education. Probably people here don't read too well.

Everybody's got a reason why they're different. And if we embrace our differences, they will kill us. I say to you young people, stop being a young person in AA. Stop it. Just be a person in AA.

It's really important. We got to leave the differences at the door. Hey, jd7. Last paragraph. As we go through the day, we pause when agitated.

Pause when agitated. The difference between a response and a reaction is a pause. And I've got a good friend. A matter of fact, a member of my home group said his, screensaver on his computer and I'm I'm 61 years old. I'm technologically challenged.

I can't do this. But, this guy can change his screensaver, And he's got the letters wow. He's got the letters PWA that bounce around on his screen for pause when agitated. And, some people in his office said, what is that? And he told said that paused and he said, said, wow.

What a great idea. So even the earthlings like that one. I wanted to talk a couple of minutes about sponsorship. We bounced off of it all weekend, but some specifics. I think for me, one of the things I do the poorest is the initial discussion with someone who's asked me to sponsor them, and it's a place I can really improve.

By sitting down and talking about let's talk very specifically about what I think sponsorship is and what you think it is, what whose responsibility is, what I expect, what you expect. Let's make some notes. Let's make some commitments so that we all know where we are. I think that's a good thing. I thought initially that my number one job as a sponsor was to coach a guy through the steps.

I don't believe that anymore. I think my first job is to love them. I'm told that God is love. And when I give love, I give God It's the highest gift. I am blessed today that I love all of the men that I sponsor.

It's an amazing thing. My second responsibility is to coach them through the 12 steps because I believe they'll have a spiritual awakening as the result because I've never seen it fail. I've seen people fail to do it, but I've never seen the process fail to work. I don't solve their problems. Step 1, section b says my life's unmanageable.

I can't manage mine. I sure as a world can't manage his. But what I can do when he brings me a problem or when he brings me a solution that he's about to try is to tell him if it looks to me like it violates spiritual principles. I think I'm a pretty good backstop for that. I think that's a good thing for me to do.

I think it's also a good thing for me just to is to help him explore other options when he brings me a a question. I told you before, I like to hear the word today in the question, and I wanna hear the word today in the answer. And then I said, let's explore. What what do you see as your options? So he can think of 2 or 3 options.

I can think of 4 or 5 more. One of the options is to get a 12 gauge shotgun, blow his head off. I think we should talk about that. I think if we talk about it, there's a pretty good chance it won't happen. I think that decreases the chances that are happening.

So let's talk about the options that we see because I may see some he doesn't see. A lot of times there's middle ground. My sponsor does this for me. It's astounding to me how many times that I see answer a and answer b, and he sees about 5 in between. And, usually, one of those in between one's a better one.

So I like to explore options, but I don't wanna make the choices for him. I don't want him to learn to be Scott dependent. I wanna learn to be God dependent. It's it's a healthier move. Once I've gotten him into step 9, that's when I get them to start sponsoring.

It's easy to find guys to sponsor. Just stand in the door and ask for them. They're not hard to find. There are treatment centers. You know, treatment centers holding them still for us or the jails.

It's not hard to find them. I don't wanna hear you can't find someone to sponsor. I'll find you someone today. That's not hard to do. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna ask them to get this new fellow they're sponsoring to get his permission to talk to me in detail about everything about this person.

Let's get permission to do that. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to coach him through coaching this new newcomer through the 12 steps. I'm not gonna let him risk somebody else's life. I'm gonna be available, and I'm gonna coach him through coaching this guy through the 12 steps. I've seen an awful lot of people get through the steps once, and they have these huge awakenings.

And then they come back to me about 6 months. I say, take me through the steps again. And I say, you know, I'll take you through them again, but you're it's not gonna happen again. You're not gonna get that again. The way you get that again is when you take someone else through, and they light up and you sit in that glow.

That that's where that comes from. But me going through I do believe in going through the steps again. I'm sober 20 years. I think I've done 16, 4 steps. I'm I'm.

I did my last one on an airplane in about 30 minutes. If you stay current, there isn't much there. Alright. Doesn't take long. Doesn't take long.

The first one day is pretty good while, but it doesn't take too long after that. I think it's important for me to pray on every contact with the men that I sponsor. If I were to get to the point where I think I am sufficient to sponsor them, I think I'm in real trouble. So I need to be checking in with god each time. Talking on the phone, I don't have to pray out loud.

When I sit with someone I sponsor, we always take a few moments and sit and invite god to sit with us. We always do that. My, my 5th sponsor died when I was sober 11 years, and clearly 11 years and long and sober long enough to not be sponsored. And, I mean, he was on his deathbed, and we knew it. Now I don't know why I wasn't looking.

It's because I'm brain damaged. And when Don died, I was about 2 weeks without a sponsor, and I was crazy. And I didn't know what I was looking for was my problem. And I sat and analyzed the 5 men who had sponsored me to that point, and I have had the 5 finest sponsors any man's ever had. And they were very different individuals, but they had common characteristics.

So I asked myself, what were their common characteristics? And I share that with you. You knew you don't have a sponsor. You're about to change whatever. Maybe this would be useful to you.

They certainly were for me. So here were the characteristics of my sponsor. They were all sober men. Now I I have seen men sponsor women and women sponsor men successfully. I can't be involved in that personally because I haven't seen an unattractive woman since the summer I turned 12 years old.

And this is life or death, and I can't afford to get confused. So that's that's for me. It was it was sober man who had a sponsor himself. Hopefully, that means that he surrendered. Definitely, it means the day I bring him a problem that he can't solve, we have a we have a plan.

It's gotta be someone who's already done the steps. If page 96 is correct and his primary job is to either take me through the steps or make sure that my step work stays solid Well, at my home group, they say you can't anymore give away something you ain't got, and you can come back from somewhere you ain't been. So I gotta make sure he's got it. It's a fair question. It's gotta be somebody who's active in service.

I heard I hear this attitude of gratitude. My sponsor told me the only two things, attitude and gratitude. Attitude and gratitude have one thing in common, and that's that they rhyme. Gratitude is action. Thankful is when I'm really glad this happened to me.

Gratitude is when I'm so glad it happened to me that I gotta stand in the door and try to capture the newcomers. I gotta take meetings into jails. I got to do the things. Look around. The winners are all doing something to give it back.

They serve the group as the treasurer, the GSR. They're doing something. There's gotta be somebody who's active in service. It's gotta be someone who would tell me the truth when I do not want to hear it. It's gotta be someone who does not care what I think about him.

A friend of mine said his sponsor told him he said, I would rather have you hate me for the rest of a long and productive life than be your best friend for your last 30 days. So it's gotta be someone to tell me the truth I don't wanna hear. I had a fellow that I used to drink with call me about 5 years ago now, 6 years. And, he said, I'm in treatment, and they said I gotta get a sponsor. Did you sponsor me?

I said, sure. I will. And we're not friends starting right now because I'm gonna make suggestions, and you're gonna take them as orders, so this isn't gonna work. And when you have a brand new shiny 5 year chip in your pocket, we'll renegotiate if you want to. He's carrying a 6 now.

We haven't renegotiated. Yeah. Because that that's working. And I think also one of the most important characteristics is I gotta have a sponsor that laughs a lot. It just astounds me when I see someone get a sponsor that's a sourpuss.

I can't figure that out. I asked I asked Jerry Crow to sponsor me because I wanted to feel like he looked because he looked like he was having a pretty good time. Is that why you drank? Wouldn't have a good time? Yeah.

Still wanna have a good time? Yeah. Crap. Get a sponsor that's having 1. You won't have to figure it all out.

You just do what he's doing. Doing. Simple enough. For those of you who've been wondering how your sponsor always knows when you're full of it, I'm gonna let the secret out right now. Okay?

It's when when the sponsor hears the magic words, everything after that's BS, and the magic words are, yes, but. Everything after that's BS. Right? Very good. So they teach that at the sponsor school.

Page 100. Top of the page. Both you and the new man must walk day by day in the path of spiritual progress. Both of us. Path of spiritual progress.

Right? The journey, not the destination. If you persist, remarkable things will happen. When we look back, we realize that the things that came to us when we put ourselves in God's hands were better than anything we could have planned. I'd like to observe.

It doesn't say when we look forward. It says when we look back, we see not that the things that we were able to extract from life through massive effort, but the things that simply came to us when we put ourselves in God's hands. I heard Chuck Chamberlain say on tape one time that it's my business to take care of God's business, and it's God's business to take care of my business. And when I hold up my end, he holds up his. Yeah.

Follow the dictates of a higher power, and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world no matter what your present circumstances. Wow. Powerful, powerful stuff. I've I've stood before you in stocking feet this weekend. In the first session, we invited God here.

And, I think I could be standing on holy ground. And so I've tried to carry that in my heart and hope I have. I I try to do little things like that to remind me. I I invite god to ride with me when I'm in the car. Ride with me.

I invite him to go in with me. I I sit in the car and send love into places I'm going into sometimes. It's a good idea. Miss Linda says we are all members of one family, and our last name is god. Yeah.

The Buddhist have a saying. They say the only way to get into heaven is to bring someone with you. I think that's in part what sponsorship's about. I really think it is. I wanna thank that god publicly.

I asked for an open heart Friday when we started up here. Boy, have I gotten it. That has been a beautiful thing for me. There's some great stuff up here, but the really good stuff's in here. And we've been I've been able to touch the heart a lot of times this this weekend.

And I thank you for that. It's not always that way. And I think it it's it's up to you. I think you're sending it, and I think we're getting it. I think that's what's happened.

If you borrowed my gut, which I invited you to do, and it worked for you, borrow them again. Try it again. I went to one of my men one of our mentors, as a matter of fact, is in pretty bad shape physically. And I was very upset. And and I what I see is that he's not gonna be with us a whole lot longer, and I'm concerned about that.

And, I I expressed it, I think, fairly well. I'm not doing it real well now. That, you know, what what are guys like me gonna do when guys like him are gone was the question. And I think it's the answer to we've thrown an awful lot at you this weekend. And if we've thrown anything at you more important than here are the steps we took which are suggested as a program of recovery, I don't know what it is.

I don't know what it is. I think it's the most important thing we said. What he said to me and my concern at his loss and what am I gonna do, he said, I've been bringing you hands full of of water. Go to the river. Go to the river.

Wanna close? I wish we had more time. Working with others, is really a sponsorship manual. It is so specific blow by blow of of every conceivable situation that you ever encounter when sponsoring someone or working with a newcomer. It tells you in a sense what to share in meetings.

It tells you in a sense how to relate to new people, the perspective to have. It cautions us not to do for them what God could do for them. And every newcomer, myself included, when I got sober, I had overwhelming problems. And I wanted the people in a to fix the problems. And instead, you want me to go to meetings and write an inventory and pray and yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But look.

I'm gonna go to prison here, and I have no place to live. And and you kept going back to teaching me this program in spite of my demands for attention on all these other areas until you just exasperated me. And I just said, okay. I'll do it your way. And there's an old adage that if you, give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day and still be hungry.

But if you teach him to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime. And most new people come to AA looking for fish and they get fishing lessons. Right? And that's what we do. We get fishing lessons here.

Vision for you says that god will will show you how to create the fellowship you crave. I've always craved unity. I drank for unity. I drank to be a part of. I drank because I didn't fit.

And the way that we get this is we watch a fellowship build up around us as a result of what we do here. And if you go into the hospitals, institutions, and you stick your hands out to the newcomer, and you go in the 12 step calls, you will find a you will find a community about you, a community in action, helping other alcoholics with a purpose, a purposeful community. That's what my home group is. It's a purposeful community. It's a community in action.

I was up in Northern California 15 years ago, and, I was at, an AA event up there. And the guy that was my host, we were sightseeing a little bit. He took me to this place that blew my mind. They had these trees that were 300 feet high, and some of these trees were 30 feet in diameter. You've probably seen there's pictures of this one tree.

They have a road through the tree. It's so big. These trees are incredible. You I would stand in that forest, and I felt small and insignificant as if I was in some primordial Jurassic Park kind of place. It was amazing.

It was very humbling feeling of being small and the magnificence of these trees. And we got this guy's truck, and we're driving across to look at more trees like that. Another part where there's more trees, and we're going by these meadows. And the guy says to me, he says, you notice you won't see a 300 foot tree in one of those meadows by itself. And I said, yeah.

I said, how come? He said, well, he said it is their nature to aspire to grow to such magnificent heights that what happens is they literally outgrow their roots capacity to hold them up, and they will literally topple over on their own aspirations and magnificence. And he said, what they do is they grow up in groves together, and they intertwine their roots under the soil into a net at the floor of the forest, and they literally feed each other and hold each other up. And I when he said that to me, I thought, my god. That's all my life.

I've aspired to take bigger bites out of life. I've been a guy who's never been never been satisfied. I've had the thing that Ed Dowling talked to Bill Wilson about that has driven me all my life, the divine dissatisfaction. God's greatest blessing. I've always wanted more and left alone to myself.

It all but killed me. And in your hands and in the hands of the disciplines of Alcoholics Anonymous and a fellowship in action, as I intertwine my life and my roots with you in a purpose. I am able to grow into my destiny, which has always been to aspire to magnificent heights. I cannot aspire to anything more. Everything less than my nature is doing time for a guy like me.

And we all know what it feels like to be depressed and, like, we're doing time. And you've allowed me to grow into my nature. I've always resented people who read poems at at AA meetings. I still do. And I'm gonna risk being one of those guys I don't like because there's a this gentleman right here, Samuel Shoemaker, Schumacher.

Shoemaker was, he wrote this, and he's mentioned a lot in a literature. And he he was Bill Wilson's spiritual adviser in New York in the very early days of Alcoholics Anonymous. And, you know, not everybody in the Oxford group liked us. I mean, really. I mean, we were the drunk squad.

We were you know, they they used to say things to each other like, well, we shouldn't have been praying for tolerance because look who showed up. You know? Right? I mean because we were we were those people. We've always been those people, really.

And we were those people in the Oxford group. And, but Sam loved us. Sam used to watch Bill down at the Calvary Mission and watch Bill's dedication to helping the people on Skid Row. And and he it was his life. And I don't know.

I I there's no way for me to know. I've tried to find out, and there's nowhere it's written why Sam wrote this poem, but I've always suspected he wrote it watching us. Because we did more of what he talks about in the poem than the group ever did. You gotta remember that Frank Buckman's vision of spiritual of the spiritual fellowship of the Oxford group really was catering to the rich and the wealthy and the captains of industry. One of his big fallings out with Bill Wilson is he wanted Bill Wilson to stop these dealing with these skid row guys.

He wants you to go down to Wall Street and look up some of your old connections. We want you to talk to these captains of industry down there because I because they'll swell our coffers, with their but these skid row guys, they're not gonna do much for us. They have no influence and no power, but Bill's heart was with the alcoholic. Bill loved the people who suffered like he suffered. And I think Sam wrote this poem from watching us, and it's called I stand by the door.

I stand by the door. I neither go too far in nor stay too far out. The door is the most important door in the world. It is the door through which men walk when they find God. There's no way my going way inside and staying there when so many are still outside, and they, as much as I, crave to know where the door is.

And all that so many ever find is only the wall where a door ought to be. They creep along the wall like blind men with outstretched groping hands, feeling for a door, knowing there must be a door, so I stand by the door. The most tremendous thing in the world is for men to find that door, that door to god. The most important thing any man can do is to take hold of one of those blind groping hands and put it on the latch, the latch that clicks and opens only to that man's touch. Men die outside the door as starving beggars die on cruel nights in the dead of winter.

Die for what is within their grasp. They live on the outside of it. They live there because they cannot find it. Nothing else matters compared to helping them find it and open it and walk in and find him. So I stand by the door.

Go in, great saints. Go all the way in. Go way down to the cavernous cellars and way up into the spacious attics. It is a vast roomy house, this house where God is. Go into the deepest of hidden casements of withdrawal of silence of sainthood.

Some must inhabit these inner rooms and know the depths and heights of God and call outside to the rest of us. How wonderful it is. Sometimes I take a deeper look in. Sometimes I venture in a little further, but my place seems closer to the opening, so I stand by the door. There's another reason I stand there.

Some people get partway in and become afraid, lest God and the zeal of his house devour them. For God is so very great and asks all of us. These people feel a cosmic claustrophobia, and they want to get out. Let me out, they cry, and the people weigh inside only terrify them more. Somebody must be by the door to tell them that they are spoiled for the old life.

You see, they have seen too much. For once you taste God, then nothing but God will do anymore. Somebody must be watching for the frightened who seek to sneak out just when they came in, to tell them how much better it is inside. The people too far in do not see how near these are to leaving, preoccupied with the wonder of it all. Somebody must watch for those who have entered the door but would like to run away.

So for them too, I stand by the door. I admire the people who go way in. I wish they would not forget though that how it was before they got in. Then they would be able to help the people who have not yet even found the door or the people who want to run away again from God. You can go in too deeply and stay too long and forget the people outside the door.

As for me, I shall take my old accustomed place, near enough to God to hear him and know that he is there, but not so far for men as to hear them and remember that they are there too. Where? Outside the door. 1000 of them, millions of them. But more important for me, 1 of them, 2 of them, perhaps 10 of them, whose hands I'm intended to put on the latch.

So I shall stand by the door and wait for those who seek it. I had rather be a doorkeeper, so I stand by the door. And I give my undying gratitude to the members of Alcoholics Anonymous, who stood in the hospitals and the institutions and the missions when guys like me were dying of alcoholism, and you repeatedly showed up, and you gave of yourself, and you looked for guys like me when I didn't wanna be found. Thank you for my life.