Founders Day Florida Style in Tallahassee, FL

Thank you, Diaz. And and thank everybody for having me. It's, it's a blessing and a pleasure to be here today. My name's Don, and I'm an alcoholic. And, you know, speakers always say that we're grateful to be wherever we are, and we are.

But with me, and I expect most of us, it's not just a courtesy. I'm I'm grateful because I'm not apt to take a drink on a day when I've got an obligation to talk to a bunch of wonderful folks in alcoholics and all. And I've been blessed with with knowing no. I've been blessed better than that. I've been knowing with realizing.

In sobriety, words have have become very important to me because I I've noticed that things tend to become what I call them. And all my life, I had used to know and to realize interchangeably with one another with with one another. You know, if I knew something, I'd say I realize that. And it finally occurred to me several years ago that the word realize is a form of the word real. And when I realize something, it has become real inside me, and that's so different from just knowing it.

The things that I've known for 25 or 30 years that I had not realized. So what I'm getting at is that god has been kind enough to me to let me realize that I really am only sober a day at a time. By the grace of God, my sobriety date's April 9, 1981. And I can remember in early sobriety, I would sit around and listen to some old fool that'd been sober so long, been dry so long, he was a fire hazard, you know. And, and and I'd hear him say things like, I'm a drink away from a drunk, and I'm just you know, it's just one day at a time.

And I think, yeah. Sure. You know? Sure. You're still still in that spot.

And I went through several years since, Brandy, when, if you had asked me, Don, will you die drunk or sober? I would have given you the absolutely politically correct AA response, and I believe I would have passed the lie detector test. I would have told you why. Everybody's just sober a day at a time. None of us know.

But there was a part of me that had become unable to visualize me dying drunk. There was a part of me down in there somewhere that it wasn't real. I knew it, but I didn't realize it. And nothing happened, no event that I know of, nothing to tie it to. But I guess about 10, 12 years ago, god just gradually changed that for me, and I'm grateful for that because that makes every day of sobriety more precious because I do know that I'm sober today.

I'll tell you what else and all, and I'm I'm gonna be talking to you about 6 and 7, but I'm gonna mention a little something about 10, 11, and 12 before I start on that. You know, I read this big book, kind of selectively. And when I say kind of selectively, you know, it's hard to learn much when you already know what something says. You know, real hard. Kind of like it's hard, and then the instructions don't do you much good when you think you're smarter than the people that made the instructions.

And and I I've always had an awful lot of problem with things like that. And and I can read this big book, and I can know the words exactly. And then all of a sudden, somewhere down the line, I begin to realize, it becomes real to me that those words mean something entirely different than what I had thought they meant, than what I knew they meant. You know, I've stumbled through here for years believing that this book tells me that my daily reprieve is contingent on my spiritual condition. And I've got to tell you, that was scary.

That was scary because I still wake up some days and by my judgment, which ain't good on anything anyway, at least I do know that, but by my judgment, my spiritual condition is not very good. You know, I get scared. I get feeling like I'm walled off from you. I'm walled off from god. My brain gets to spinning.

Some mornings, it seems like I can't remember the last word. I just tried to pray, and I look at my And during the years when I thought that my daily reprieve was contingent on my spiritual condition, that scared me dead because I figured I fell out here walking around in the spiritual condition I thought I was in on days like that. I was just apt to get struck drunk. And I'm so grateful that I realize now that that book means what it said when it says that my daily reprieve is contingent on the maintenance of my spiritual condition. And let me tell you what that did for me instantly.

If I had driven down here instead of flying, I would have a car out there, and that car would have a condition. Okay? Now there's nothing I can do to change the condition of a car instantaneously. Whatever that condition is, it just is. On the other hand, there's a process of maintaining an automobile, and that is all action over which I can exercise 100% control.

So you see, I don't get my daily reprieve based on how I am. I get my daily reprieve based on what I do every day. I can wake up and not feel like getting on my knees, not have time to get on my knees, not want to get on my knees, but make myself get on those knees anyway. I can look at those meditation books when I'm so scattered I can't remember a single word. I can go in my office and be so self absorbed and so busy with important things that I clearly don't have time to talk to old Joe, who's calling for the 8th time in the last 3 days to talk about the girl.

You know? And but but when Joe calls and they tell me Joe's on the phone instead of saying, you tell Joe I'll have to call him back later. I can say, put him through. And I can pray to myself, that will be done. I'm no longer running the show.

Lord, please let me seek to love, comfort, and understand Joe, rather than to be loved, comforted, and understood. And I'd pick up that phone and say, good morning, Joe. How are you this morning, buddy? What can I do for you? And I can keep praying those 11 step prayers, which do the 11 step prayers do a lot of miracles for me.

And the one that I'm needing there is a big miracle they do do for me is they make me something that I am not by nature. By nature, I am not a listener. Without divine intervention, it's just automatic. I can't help it. My brain will be running on another track while you're talking and one of those tracks will be, what am I going to say next?

But if I'll truly pray those 11th step prayers before I talk to you, that will be done, I'm no longer running the show. And, Lord, please let me seek to love, comfort, and understand you rather than to be loved, comfort, and understood by you. It'll make a listener out of me. And when I do what Chuck c says, you know, Chuck Chamberlain said that, whatever I give my interest, attention, and love to becomes the most interesting thing in the world. And when I pray those prayers and I'll give my interest attention and love to what you or old Joe calling about the girl wants to talk to me about, that becomes for that time and place the most interesting thing in the world to me.

Now there's a noon meeting every weekday close to my office, and I have been there an awful lot in my life, and I know everybody that goes there. I've heard everything that they've got to say. Ad nauseam, I have heard everything they've got to say. I don't hear very well. Now the the acoustics are terrible in there, so I only hear about 20% of what he's saying.

So on that busy day when my spiritual condition is just feeling like crap, I can decide not to go there, but I also can decide to go. And I can make myself go on to that stupid old meeting of where I know there's no way in this world I'll get anything out of it. And I can go through the rest of the day like that, and I believe that I am absolutely guaranteed that I will not pick up drink that day. So you see, it went from my daily reprieve went from something being on a daily basis outside my control to something being within my control on a daily basis. I believe this book promises me that on the days that I do the work to maintain my spiritual condition, that I'm not gonna drink on that day.

There's a flip side of that coin. The flip side of that coin is I can wake up feeling like I am just absolutely so joined with God and so centered that we might just clasp hands and go out drifting through the universe and merge with the tower or something. You know, when I am so centered, it's just it's just, you know, and beatific. And and when it comes time to get out on my knees, I can decide why that would be redundant. My whole life is a prayer.

I can go on into that office when Joe calls. I can say, oh, I have the greatest and deepest love for Joe, but I'm currently contemplating this spiritual principle. That's just about to raise me to an even more exalted spiritual level, so we'll have to deal with Joel later. I can engage in deeper spiritual pursuits instead of going to that stupid meeting where I've heard what everybody's got to say, but I can't hear anyway and I don't wanna go. And on that day, I believe I'm subject to get just drunker and Cuda Brown.

That's the flip side of it. Whether I drink or not and based on how I feel today and what I think my spiritual condition is, it's what I do today. And I'm relating that back to my gratitude for being here because there may be a day when I take a drink. I know that. But I don't believe it's gonna be on a day when some sweet folks have asked me to do what you folks have asked me to do today.

So thank you for letting me be here. And now we'll, move a little bit into talking about what I'm supposed to be talking about, and that's step 6 and 7. And I'm not gonna not gonna give you much of my story at all. I'm I'm scheduled to tell that on Sunday morning, but I will tell you that I did not get here because alcohol gave me the hiccups. Alcohol was the center of my life, 25 years.

Alcohol took just about everything but my physical life from me. I know I was in an asylum one time. A friend of mine out of pure compassion came to see me. It was probably about my 12th asylum. And, I was talking to him about committing suicide and he said, Don, why?

He said, you've committed social suicide, you've committed professional suicide, you've committed economic suicide, you have committed domestic suicide, why bother? You know, you have already done that. So I I I did have a a rough go with it. I do wanna tell you that one of one of the reasons that I had the difficulty getting sober that I did was, a real problem that I had with the higher power concept. Anytime anybody mentioned God, it it made the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

It insulted my intellect, really, that you religious fanatics would talk about such clap trap, you know, in a frontal fellow like myself. And using higher power didn't fool me a bit. I knew just exactly what you were talking about and it would still make the hair stand up on my neck and run me away from you religious fanatics. And and I'm one of the ones who who has been so blessed because I was allowed to live long enough for alcohol to keep running me back here because I didn't have anywhere else to go. Until finally, the miracle happened and I was able to take that hand that you guys had been extending to me and let you lead me through these 12 steps that are our only program of recovery.

And those 12 steps led me to, to a loving god that I didn't even know was there for me. And that's the reason I'm alive today. I will tell you before we start in on 6 and 7 specifically that I believe what I just said with all my heart, that there's no other program of recovery other than the 12 steps. In fact, I was taught and I believe that there's no other program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, I can be a member of the fellowship on any day I've got a desire to stop drinking.

I don't even have to go to meetings. You know, it's the only day I've got a desire to stop drinking. I wanna call myself a member of the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. I can do that. And thank goodness the requirements are no higher than that.

That led me hang around until the miracles really began to happen. But there's a whole lot of difference in being in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and being in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, the part that we read, from chapter 5 and that we call how it works at meetings, says, here are the steps we took that are suggested as a program of recovery. And I was told in very early sobriety to look through that first 160 4 pages and find something else that was referred to as a program or a program of recovery. And I'll save you the trouble.

I did. It's not in there. So the only thing that's called the program in that big book are steps 1 through 12. And I believe a lot of things about them. I believe they are the prescription for alcoholism.

No other prescription has ever worked for me. I think it's contrary to the entire entire principle of this big book claim that Alcoholics Anonymous is the only way for somebody to get sober. That would be controversial. That would be arrogant. And I think it's just absolutely, against the principles of the book to claim that.

But I will tell you that absolutely nothing else has worked for me. And I know 100, probably even 1,000 of other folks for whom absolutely nothing else has worked except the 12 steps. When I say they're the prescription for sobriety, I mean this. It's if I've got an infection that's gonna kill me, but that infection will respond to penicillin, I don't need to understand all the ins and outs of this infection, how those little bacteria can can make such terrible things wrong with magnificent meat. I don't need to understand one single thing about how penicillin works in the human body.

I don't even need to believe that that little bottle of pills can take care of everything that's wrong with me. And here's the kicker, I don't even need to want to take the pills. If I've got the infection and I take the pills as directed, and when they explain that to me, they kinda verbally underscored as directed, I'll get just fine. Thank you. And I believe these steps work on alcoholism precisely the same way.

I was told some things about the steps, such as if you weren't supposed to do them in order, they wouldn't have been numbered. It was explained to me that they were called the steps rather than the 12 principles, the 12 propositions, the 12 tenants, you know, you could call them any any number of things, that they weren't called the steps by accident because in a conventional staircase, the second step in that staircase actually must have the first step in that staircase to serve as its base. It rests on it and sewn up the staircase. So I believe that with all my heart. I also believe that when we're going through the first nine steps, we need to stay where we are.

Can't tell you how many times I've had sponsors say, oh, Don, I'm trying to work on this 4 step. Man, I can't do this. I don't know how I'll ever make amends to those people. I think you son, you may get drunk or get run over by a truck. You're 5 steps ahead of yourself.

You know, stay where you are because you see, a little story that I love, it it's a lot like me and I I think maybe it's a lot like a lot of, us alcoholics. About an alcoholic that had a flat tire out on an old, dark, deserted road and didn't have a spare. Well, the alcoholic looks everywhere and first doesn't see anything, then he or she sees a little pinpoint of light way down the road. So the alcoholic starts walking toward the light in the committee, and the alcoholic's head goes to work. And he says, what if that's not even my house?

You know, walk all the way and it's not a house. And he gets away and see his house. Well, what if it's a house and there's nobody at home? Well, what if there's somebody home, but they won't answer the door this time of night? What if they're home and they answer the door and they don't have a jack?

What if they're home, they answer the door, and they got a jack, and they won't let me borrow it? Well, at the home, they got a jack and they let me borrow it, and I walk all the way back to this car and it won't fit. And about this time, the alcoholic's knocking on door. Old farmer comes to the door and after a minute says, can I help you? Alcoholic says, I didn't wanna borrow your damn jack anyway.

So that's probably a a good reason to stay where we are when we're going through the first nine steps, which I was taught are the entire program for recovery. I was taught that when we have done the first 9 steps, if we've done them the way the book says, we should be in a state of recovery. We should at that point be a recovered alcoholic. When I got sober, it doesn't seem to be such a big deal now, but when I got sober, man, you had to say you were a recovering alcoholic. It just seemed like it sounded terribly arrogant and so on if you called yourself a recovered alcoholic.

I called myself a recovering alcoholic in front of my old sponsor one time, and he said, Don, that's fine. Said, just be aware that the book refers to recovered alcoholics. And by that time, I've been sober, you know, probably 5 or 6 weeks and I had become quite a big book scholar. So so his name was Cherry, Cherry Carpenter. So I said, well, Cherry, where did they have that in the big book?

And he said, well, the first place they hit it, Don, was in the subtitle of the book. I didn't know book had a subtitle. Of course, the subtitle is how many thousands of men and women have recovered from alcoholism. And then he said, then they hit it twice more in the first paragraph to the foreword to the first edition when they said that more we have more than a 100 men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of man and body and that the purpose of this book is to show others precisely how we have recovered. He also stopped at that point, pointed out that it did not say that the purpose of this book is to share with others the philosophical truths that somehow transported us to a sublime state of sobriety, but rather to show others the specific actions that we took, which enabled us to reach a state of recovery.

Cherry also told me that, you only do the first 9 steps one time. Now that sounds a little shocking when you first hear it. But then when you realize that 10, 11, and 12 contain absolutely everything that's in 1 through 9. For instance, part of my morning meditation is that I read the 3rd step prayer. I read the, 7th step prayer, and I read a lot that the book has to say about the 11th step.

But when I read that 3rd step prayer in my mind, because the way I'm sponsored, I'm not redoing my 3rd step. I'm doing 11th step work. That's part of my part of my process of seeking to improve my conscious contact. Same with the 7th step. I'm doing 11th step.

In Master Bradley, I've done all 8 or 10 inventories that look just exactly like a 4th step and follow the big book pages 64 through 70 exactly. But in my mind, they have not been 4 steps. They have been 10th step of continuing to take personal inventory. Took me about 5 years sober to figure out why Cherry made those distinctions, and and he didn't get on soap boxes. That wasn't something he beat me over the head with.

He just wanted me to know that. When I was about 5 years sober, I realized why he was doing that. He knew who he was dealing with. He knew that if he let me be a poor, little, crippled alcoholic that wasn't like those earth people out there and had to be babied all the time, you know, that 15 years sober, I'd be sitting around the clubhouse playing Euchre all day whining about earth people and how I had to take care of myself. He wanted me to understand that if I'm an alcoholic and that's what's wrong with me and that's all that's wrong with me, and I've done those first 9 steps the way the book says and then I'm living on 10, 11, and 12 every day, I ought to be as well equipped emotionally, spiritually, mentally to deal with this world on this world's terms as a person who never had alcoholism.

So then and also if he didn't want me thinking of myself as forever recovering, forever mired down in a process with no end, You know, he wanted me to see that I could get to the point where I was okay as long as I continued to do 10, 11, and 12 and the other things that I needed to do to stay okay. Okay. I got sober in Nashville, Tennessee. I had lived on the street for about a year and a half before I got sober. I had lost my law license.

I had lost everything in my life. I had lost some bodily functions. Thought I was gonna die of alcoholism, drug addiction. Everybody I've ever talked to who knew me or knew knew of me during that period thought I was going to too. When I was 18 years sober, I found out that 15 years before then when I was 3 years sober, remember, I didn't find it out until 15 years after it was said that that same sponsor that was talking about, Cherry, had told this to a fellow, a fellow that he and I both knew just absolutely could not stay sober.

And it come into him and said, well, I've been on another drunk. And I know I'm hopeless. I know I'm way too egotistical. I know I'm incapable of being rigorously honest with myself, and I know I've got great emotional mental disorders other than the alcoholism. But if you'll try to sponsor me, I'll try one more time to get sober.

And Cherry looked at him, put a little chew at the back in his mouth, said, Jim, let me tell you something. Said if Don Major can get sober, anybody in the world can get sober. And I've never known whether Jerry was Jerry was complimenting me or insulting me, but, at any rate, that's what he said. So I was in bad shape. The miracle happened.

I got sober, April 9, 1981 or stopped drinking. My last drink was April 8th and, threw myself into fellowship and miracles that I'll talk about Sunday morning happened. And, celebrated a year or so over living in an attic in Nashville with no phone, no car, teeth finishing rotting and out of my head. Was never able to get employed, happier than I'd ever been in my life. At about a year and a half sober, my law license got put back in order as a pure pure side effect of doing steps 89.

I'm absolutely convinced that if it had been my objective to get my law license back, I not only would never have gotten them back out of the diet of alcoholism, but when I really and truly was able to act like a person would act who was concerned only with doing what the book says with 89 rather than trying to fix me, then the miracle began to happen. See, I can't get sanely enough to feel like that, but I found out that doesn't count. Doesn't make a bit of difference. As long as I will do the right action in the right way, my feelings and my intentions will all straighten out later. But if I fall back into that pit that's nearly killed me so many times, it's nearly killed me so far.

Falling back in that pit of we gotta do something to make me feel like doing right so I can do right. I'm back in the pit. I won't tell you sober. See, that's so ingrained in me that if I wake up in the morning and don't feel like doing what I need to do, let's say going to work, don't feel like doing the right thing, every fiber of my being wants to do something like call 1 of y'all up and aggravate you. I don't feel like going to work.

What can we do to make me feel like going to work so I can go to work? What difference do you make? I gotta go to work. What difference do you make whether I feel like going to work? See, my mind doesn't work that way.

And and over the years, I have worried sponsors to distraction. I have dominated discussion meetings. I have prayed until I was blue in the face. I've even spent probably a few $1,000 on outside counseling trying to make me feel like doing right so I do right. See, I've got this insane thing.

My my base trouble, you know, the book says that that that selfishness self centeredness is the root of our troubles. What my sponsor says, that means first thing wrong with me is I've got an ego disorder and everything else flows from that. And on kind of that ego disorder of man, there's something down in the middle of that thing that is absolutely convinced that what I think, feel, and believe is the center of the universe. My lord, we can't have a little down in doing something he doesn't feel like doing. Among other things, it'd make him a hypocrite.

And, you know, we, alcoholics, are peculiar about being a hypocrite. Now if we've been sober, well, and done our steps, we do it tastefully and subtly and in a spiritual manner, but but we can get a little, little chuckle or or smile out of past larceny and adultery and things like that. And if a homicide is far enough away and enough removed, we can get a real taste for a little lifting of the corner of the mouth there out of that. But my God, we don't wanna be hypocrites. It'd just be awful.

At any rate, my bottom line is all that praying, all that outside counseling, worrying people in the program to death, I've never had anything do any good toward making me feel like doing right except doing right when I don't feel like it, and I just hate that. I mean, I wish I didn't have to give you that news. But the only thing that ever makes me feel like doing right when I don't feel like doing right is go ahead and do it right. And if I keep waiting to change it, it won't work. But at any rate, I worked on through my, through through my first 9 steps in Nashville, and law license got put back in order.

And I went back to Louisville when I was 21 months sober and, moved back up there with everything I owned in the front seat of a 10 year old barred car. I hadn't seen my only child, seen or talked to my only child in over 3 years. The my former law partners, out of just pure compassion, they didn't want me anywhere around them, but they paid 30 days rent on an office, a safe 2 blocks from them on a little office for me to be there and 30 days rent on a furnished room. I went back and miracles just started happening everywhere. 2nd month I was there by God incidents.

I talked at the Kentucky State Convention in front of 2,000 people and I thought that was bad, but I said earlier that my judgment of events in my life is just almost always wrong. You know, if I think it has no redeeming characteristic whatsoever, if I'll not drink and keep on stumbling in the right direction, it will wind up the foundation of some of the most beautiful things in my life. On the other hand, if when I first see it coming, I think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread is probably getting ready to try to kill me. You know, I I I need to not put a whole lot of story in my judgment on events in my life, but but that wound up being a real positive event talking at that conference. People started asking me to sponsor them.

They started saying, Don, you say good things. People started asking me to speak all different places. And I started out very early in sobriety talking, you know, a good bit around the country. My law practice started doing fairly well to start with. And first thing you know, I was driving a decent car and I had decent clothes.

My daughter, the same month that I talked at that conference, I saw her for the first time 2 months. Later, she moved in with me and lived with me all through high school. And, and and we have dear friends today. She, gave me my first blood grand channel back in April, and they were down last weekend. And she's been in al 9 20 years, and and we just and we also get on one another's nerves to the point we break the other one out in halves.

You know, I don't wanna paint this idealistic, unrealistic picture, but we sure do love one another, and it sure is a whole lot better than what I had. And all those things are rolling along. They're rolling along till I was about 9 years sober. And by that time, and I'm not saying this, but please don't misunderstand. I'm just giving you a picture of where I was.

I was sponsoring between 40 50 guys, and I was I was regularly talking all over the country. You know, probably at that time, I was traveling 12, 15 weekends a year, And I was dying. I was absolutely dying inside. And the main reason was that financial chaos and relationships with the opposite sex were absolutely killing me. And, Lord, I was trying so hard.

I really was. I was trying to use rigorous honesty, prayer, sponsors, meetings. You know, I was trying to use all the best tools in the world to try to get things straightened out and and I couldn't. And I didn't know what was wrong. Now it may shock you, but I actually have the capacity to get a little Ted grandiose from time to time.

And I can remember thinking that I was kinda like Moses in the promised land. That that what god had really done, he had let me have all these wonderful things that had happened to me in sobriety, but he brought me where I could see a world where people had sanity and peace in their economic and relationship lives and let me look down into that valley. And then said, Don, you didn't really think I was gonna let you get away with everything, did you? Said, you can't ever have any of that. That's your burden.

That's your crotch for what you've done. And that actually went through my mind because I didn't know what to do. Something happened in May of night. Well, and and I'll tell you a little bit about the the chaos. The chaos was just awful.

I I got sober owing a whole bunch of money. And, of course, when my daughter moved in with me, there were expenses there. And and I was surviving. As I say, I was living in a decent place, driving a decent car, wearing nice clothes and doing what I had to do, but the old debt just rolled and rolled. My finances when I got sober were such that when I was 3 and a half years sober, my sponsor and my lawyer and I got together and decided that my finances had improved to the point where I could file a chapter 11 bankruptcy without getting indicted.

And as it took me 3 and a half years sober to work up filing a bankruptcy with a plan to pay back every penny, and it was such a mess that there were 5 years of litigation after I filed it before a plan got approved for me to start paying. So things were financially a mess. I couldn't have bought when I was when I was 9 years sober, that I had a credit card because by that time, my daughter had started college and they gave her an American Express credit card and I had a family member, American Express credit card for my daughter. On my own, I couldn't I couldn't have bought a a a loaf of bread. The relationship thing lowered.

They say you stop maturing emotionally when you start drinking alcoholically. If that's true, I started drinking alcoholically when I was 12 or 13. And and, as I began to get sober, some some lady who didn't have 2 heads, you know, looked alright, would pay a little attention to me. And and I wanna tell you, when I swore undying love to her, I couldn't have been more sincere, couldn't have meant it more. You know, 2 or 3 weeks later, oh, my God, if I don't get away from this woman, I'm going to die, you know.

And that went on and I wound up with with 2, bad marriages in. It wasn't not bad necessarily. The the first marriage, I wanted so hard to do the right thing that I got to think about maybe what I'd been doing wrong was having sex with these women before I married them. And maybe it was defiling the marital relationship. I did that and I got me a list.

I think I had 42 things on it of what I needed. Couldn't be a vegetarian, didn't want anybody that was that militant about their food. You know, I had a lot of things like that. Just just things that I wanted, and a woman had my checklist with 42 things on. This poor child wanders by who seemed to fit them all.

So I married her. And, and and we stayed married for a little over a year, and I had to say, you know, I have made a terrible mistake. And, and then the last then the other marriage before that 9 years was a lady I met at Car Wash. I had a new expensive car with, with with temporary tag on it. She was quite a bit younger than I am.

And, we started talking, had lunch, and somewhere along the line, she followed me home, didn't leave. And and and that one resulted in a 5 month marriage and a 22 month divorce and also my son who is 15 years old now. And, and that's all worked out fine. My son and I are really great friends, and, and I am able to deal with her as I need to. So it worked out.

But but you see what a mess things were. Well, May of 1990, I wound up going to, Cleveland because Cherry, my sponsor in Nashville, had died. And I'd asked Tom Bee from up there and Avon Lake right outside of Cleveland to be a sponsor. And, I flew up on a weekend. It was a funny thing.

I had asked Tom to do that and then it came couple of weeks later, I saw Biggie in the paper. Continental Airline had, like, $52 round trip from Louisville to Cleveland. Flew up there, and there was an AA golf tournament up there. It was an Akron, Cleveland, AA golf tournament. I don't play golf, but Tom does.

And, got up there, and I won't tell you there were some there were some people up there with a lot of sobriety. At the time, Tom had 29 years, and they treated him like a newcomer. There was one old boy there that weekend who had drank with doctor Bob. Well, these guys didn't get me out of it. And Tom had told him, said, you know, this is really gonna be a hoot.

I've got this clown that's a hotshot circuit speaker and all this, and the little idiot's dying inside. So, you know, he's coming up here with his butt on fire, except for sure Tom didn't say it like that. He's too kind and too spiritual, but that would have been the gist of it. I didn't get out of the airport before one of those old guys said, oh, sober about 9 or 10 years. That's about the time that most folks begin to look at steps 6 and 7.

And I can remember thinking, well, you don't know who you're talking about or, you know, who you're talking to. You know, by that time I had listened to probably close to a 100 and 5th steps. So and so on. And and let me say this, sometimes I say that and forget to qualify it. What that guy was saying was not that we can't comprehend 6 and 7 and that we can't do them right until we've been sober 9 or 10 years.

What he was saying was that when most of us blow past it and don't realize what it really means, that it takes about 9 or 10 years for us to run into the brick wall. So, you know, don't get the impression that we can't approach it right earlier in sobriety. We certainly can. That's just when the brick wall seems to jump up out of the ground if you haven't approached it. Right.

And let me say something else about this weekend, that weekend, May of 1990. That weekend is truly a burning bush in my life. Okay? And I wanna talk just a minute about burning bushes because I believe that I believe that God has let me realize something really important about burning bushes. I have never seen a clearly flaming bush already bursting into total flames.

And I don't have any matches to light a burning bush. But what I have got is a set of bellows where I can fan the fire when I see a spark on that bush, what I'm getting down to is that my real awakenings, my burning bushes, my epiphanies from a religious standpoint are pretty well the ones that I have decided were that. And let me tell you how that came to me. We all know the story about Bill Wilson when he was shaking out the last drunk in the hospital room, and he saw something. He saw something.

And it's clear when you read that that Bill didn't have a clue what he'd seen, didn't have a clue. Doctor came in the next morning, told the doctor about it, and the way it sounds, it may have been kind of a passing conversation. And the doctor said, I don't know either, Bill, but if I were you, I would hold on to it. And Bill did. And that's the reason we're sitting here today, guys.

That's the reason there is an alcoholic anonymous. Because Bill Wilson, instead of deciding, well, that was just part of withdrawal, some synopsis in the brain, you know, some circuit short circuit, and Bill said, yes, I'm going to hold on to that. I'm going to let that be a turning point in my life. And Bill got out those bellows and started fanning the flames of that burning bush, and that's why we're here today. So, and the reason I'm saying that's particularly about this, I've often wondered that if when I was flying back from Cleveland that weekend, if somebody on the air airplane had said, Don, what has happened to you significant this weekend?

I don't know whether I would have said, oh, I've got a new view of step 6 and 7 or not. I really don't. But I do know that events that happened and what I was able by God's grace to hold on to and live, that 6 and 7 are are what happened that weekend. They are what happened that weekend. It changed my life.

What had happened, I had done my 4th and 5th step in Nashville, and I had formed a picture of what a spiritual dawn all looked like. I think we all do there if we do our 4th and 5th steps. And, I did what the book says. You know, we don't have I don't find anything else in the book where we are so specifically advised precisely what to do as we are advised on pages 75 and 76 about what we do when our when we finish our 5th step and go home and do the 6th and 7th step. You know, it tells us we go home, tells us where to go, says we take 1 hour, tells us how long to take, tells us we get the big book down from the shelf and we review those first five proposals, the first five steps, make sure we haven't skimped on anything.

And then we move on to the top page 76 where we find every word that the big book has got to say about 6 and 7. It's a little bit less than a half a page, 2 paragraphs on top of page 76. Well, I did that. And by that time, when I did that, it was real clear to me what 6 and 7 were. 6 and 7 were where with God's help I had gotten that far.

I went to work on me to make me and what I had decided a spiritual don ought to look like. Now, let me assure you that the spiritual don I had in my head didn't have any of the character defects left that were making myself centered but uncomfortable and embarrassing me. So I spent the next roughly 8 years after I did that, it was somewhere around a year or so that I was doing that. I spent roughly the next 8 years praying for God to get rid of those character defects that were making me uncomfortable, were embarrassing me, that I thought were impeding my spiritual growth, that I thought were inconsistent with who I ought to be. And I prayed on that, I'm sure, every day of my life for those 8 years.

And I know now that I might as well have been praying for a bright red Ferrari. Because you see, when I'm praying for a character defect to be gone because I want it gone, because it's inconsistent with who I think I ought to be, and particularly if it's making me uncomfortable. I'm praying for my own selfish ends. And the book tells me that it won't work. You can easily see why.