The How to recover from a spiritual malady weekend seminar in Fresno, CA

I'm Bob Darrell, an alcoholic. To join me in an opening prayer. Lord, help me to set aside everything I think I know about you. Everything I think I know about myself, everything I think I know about others, and everything I think I know about my own recovery. For a new experience in you, lord, a new experience in myself, a new experience in my fellows, and a much needed new experience in my own recovery.

Amen. Last, last night, we talked about the physical allergy. We talked about the the thing that drives us back to drinking, this this spiritual malady that I stopped drinking and I get restless, irritable, discontent. I stopped drinking and, my problems really begin. There's a description on page 52 of what happens to me when I enter into a state of abstinence, when I no longer have the juice that I had once found in taking a few drinks.

And it it's a pretty good description of me. In the middle of page 52, this third line down on the second paragraph, it says, we were having trouble with personal relationships. Well, that I don't know. That may not be big in Fresno, but that's a big problem in Las Vegas. If a guy calls me at 3 AM, it's not to talk about his neighbors.

I'm telling you. It's to talk about his girlfriend, or his wife. We couldn't control our emotional natures. Why do I such a alcoholics are often referred dry alcoholics are often referred to as moody. Father Martin had a great statement when he talked about he said, you can you can go into any business or social situation or family deal in the in in the world and pick the alcoholic out, not by his drinking.

He's easier to spot when he's not drinking because look for the person that everybody else walks on egg shells around. Right? The restless, irritable, discontent, having couldn't I'd sink into depression. I I have a lot of self pity. I I I may initially be, like, be full of a lot of bravado and self will trying to make my life over.

But no matter how hard I push, there always comes a time when the wind goes out of my sails and it's like I feel frustrated and depressed and full of self pity because it's not working out and nobody appreciates what I'm trying to do here. We couldn't make a living. I had a hard it was hard for me to see that because I could get good jobs. I just had a hard time keeping them, and it was never my fault. I there was a friend of mine, who died a few years ago with a lot of years of sobriety.

He he said he made a statement that I thought was hilarious, and it was so true for me. He said, I I look back over my life and I he says, I worked almost 50 places, and he said, I never worked anywhere where they really did it right. And he then he said, and you know something? I was always the guy that was leaving. And then he said, some of those places have been doing it wrong successfully for decades.

Right? There's something about me that I can get a great job, and it seems like the job of my lifetime. The people there are wonderful. Taking advantage of me, and they're using me. And I just get all that stuff going on inside me, which is all symptoms of a sick spirit that makes me judge and paranoid my head and all that other stuff.

We had a feeling of uselessness. I had that all my life that that that sense of like, what's it all about? What am I gonna be when I grow up? What's my purpose in life? I felt purposeless, like a loose cannon, like a there's a restlessness about me.

Useless. We are full of fear. I had a mind that just worried, woke up worrying, woke up convinced that things are out there to get me today. Full of fear. Just worried about stuff.

Anxiety. Just my head would spin and I'm the kind of guy that I can't I it's always busy in here. It's always I can't I'm the guy that if I somebody wants to talk to me before I ever talk to them, I've already talked to them a 100 times in my head. You know what I mean? I'm that guy that just that just spins like that about stuff.

Full of fear. Unhappy. Chronically unhappy. Chronically malcontent. I looked back over my whole life, tried to find one moment when it was ever just right.

Never could find 1. Had a lot where I a lot of moments where I thought it was about to be just right, like, when I was on the verge of getting late or a new job or buying a new car or so. But never ever where I said to myself inside where there was a sense of peace, a of completeness, where of happiness, where now I I had a lot of excitement in my life, like, when I just didn't get caught and I would mistake that for happy. You know, I'd be I but it's not really happiness. That's just elation and excitement.

And I always mistook excitement for happiness, but never really in my whole life a time when I thought this is this is really just right. Satisfied with everything. Content. Happy. Never was that way.

Couldn't seem to be of real help to other people. Well, they wouldn't listen. If I could get them to mind, they would have been different. But they wouldn't mind. People are they just it's like hurting mosquitoes.

It's I can't get them to do it right. Never been anywhere where I can get them to do it right. And, little did I know that I was the problem. I'm, I'm the I'm the fly in the ointment. I'm the guy.

Page 55, very important. Two paragraphs. Page 55 is a to me, is a vision. It's a vision of what's of when, where, and how I will find God. It's a vision of what will happen as a result of these steps.

It's a vision of what's gonna happen to me if I continue with the process. It's gonna be a that we're gonna start getting into shortly. Middle of the page. Actually, we were fooling ourselves for deep down in every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God. Deep down in every one of us.

Calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other, it is there. For faith in a power greater than ourselves and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives are facts as old as man himself. We finally saw that faith in some kind of god was a part of our makeup, just as much as the feeling we have for a friend. Sometimes, we had to search fearlessly, fearless in searching, but he, capital h, he was there. He, capital h, was as much a fact as we were.

We found the great reality, capital letters, the great reality in the last place I would ever imagine, deep down within us. And when would I find it there? In the last analysis. In the last analysis, it is only there that he may be found. It was so with us.

After I've looked everywhere else for power, after I've looked in alcohol and it left me powerless, after I looked in drugs, after I looked in relationships, under the illusion if I had the right type of person to write me to love me the right way and would never lead me, that I would have found the power to shore up my life and give me a sense of validation and wholeness. If I had the right job and was properly financed, I would have then have the power to get along in life and wouldn't be as threatened. And looked everywhere and failed and looked everywhere for not only this power, but looked everywhere for sobriety. I went to, treatment center after treatment center after treatment center. Psychiatrist after psychiatrist.

Went to churches, went to self help groups, tried macrobiotics, tried TM, tried I mean, I was everything from Ram Dass to rum dum by the time I got to Alcoholics Anonymous. I looked everywhere, and what I don't get, and I don't connect the dots, is that through all this frantic searching, I keep ending up over and over again with you. I keep ending up in AA meetings with people that are trying to introduce me to a process that will introduce me to a God within me. And it's like, no. It's over here.

No. No. It's over here, and I don't get it. I'm looking everywhere else, and when I've absolutely failed, there's nowhere else to look, and I came to you. Came to you.

There's a story that I I read 20 some years ago that blew my mind, and it's a true story. And it it it's it told me exactly what had happened to me. And the story's about this this farmer who lived in South Africa back in the 1800. And he had had inherited a ranch in South Africa, and it was a nice ranch. I mean, it was not a a mega rich ranch, but a the kind of ranch where he could have lived there and his kids could have had it.

And for generations, the family could have made a nice living and been prosperous and done well. But he inherited this ranch at a time when the diamond boom was starting in South Africa. And all of a sudden, he saw other people and he'd read about all these people in South Africa that were going from guys like him, middle, upper middle class to, like, these Bill Gates kinda guys. Right? Mega rich people.

And with their yachts and their all that stuff, you know, their private train cars and all, you know, they became mega rich, big estates. And he became very envious, and the more he focused on what they had, the more disgruntled he became with what he had. Until finally, one day, he sold his ranch obsessed with finding diamonds and took the money from the sale of the ranch and went out into the bush to discover diamonds, to strike it rich. And he spent his whole life out there, and he never did strike it rich. He never did find diamonds, and he died alone and disgruntled and resentful and bitter.

And it came to pass that the ranch he sold, he sold it to these brothers, these Johnson brothers, and they were they were developers, and they were gonna develop this part of this, ranch that they'd bought from him. And they had some they were moving these rocks around one day and they find this unusual stone that's about this big and they didn't know what it was and it was weird looking and they cleaned it up and it ended up being the Hope Diamond. And they discovered that the ranch that this poor SOB had sold to them was the largest diamond field ever recorded on the face of the earth. It was the largest and they didn't they all of a sudden, they got they're like the richest people in the world. And they thought, well, we gotta we're gonna have to have a marketing company to market all these diamonds.

This is gonna be a huge deal. We don't we what do we call it? And the one brother said, why don't we name it after that poor son of a bitch that died out in the bush looking for diamonds that never did strike it rich that we bought this ranch from? The other brother said, that's a good idea. And his name was De Beers, the poor son of a bitch that died in the bush, and they cut they named their company the De Beers company, which to this day is the largest marketer marketer of diamonds in the world.

And the deal I'm like De Beers. I'm out here looking and it was right there all along. Right? I was God was bringing it to me and I'm going, ah, it's over here. He's bringing it to me.

So So what it says in here in the last analysis, if we live long enough, we eventually get here and we eventually meet the our maker in the last place I'd ever look. Deep within me. Deep within me. And I I remember hearing people talk about that. I remember listening to guys like Chuck Chamberlain and, some of the guys that I listened to when I was brand new.

And I it made no sense to me that God was within me because when I went went within myself, I didn't find God. I ran into a pack of crazy people, you know, just chattering and just going on and on. They were I couldn't run into God in me. But the book explains it. It says that it's because that this power deep down within me is obscured.

It's blocked off by 3 things, by calamity, by pomp, and worship of other things, which oddly enough in the 4th step inventory in steps 4 through 9, that's what I'm gonna address. I'm gonna clear away the channel between myself and this power source inside of me. I'm gonna unobscure the channel, unblock it. And it the things that unblocking me calamity. If you don't know what calamity is, imagine that a surgeon could surgically implant a microphone into your brain and hooked it up to speakers, and for a day, we got to hear everything you thought.

We would hear calamity. I mean, it's you know, on a bad day, when I'm really afraid or resentful, I mean, my head is like it's whacked. I mean, I'm crazy. Now I have learned over the years not to look like I think. Right?

But it's like that. I mean, God if God is in me when I'm sick, he could be in there with a megaphone, and I'm not gonna hear him over the chatter in my head. All the fear generated conversations as a re some of them as a result of the things I'm trying to control or protect, and some of them are generated as the things I have to defend from the things positions I've taken. But it's all chatter. It's all self created, self centered fear based crap.

Calamity. Calamity. Pomp. We're obscured by pomp. I didn't know what pomp was.

Pomp's, for me, is another word for ego. That I could actually be so full of myself that there's no room for anything else, like a glass of water full to the top. I believe that I can be so full of myself that there's no room for God's grace. And God's a gentleman. If I wanna be wrapped up in me to the exclusive extent that I there's no room for him in my life, he just goes, okay.

Sorry. I'm here if you ever want me. He never intrudes until I get enough of me beaten out of me to open that door a little bit. A little bit. Then he can come in.

By worship of other things, I this was the hard one for me to get. I if you would have put me on a lie detector in early sobriety and asked me if I worshiped anything, I'd have said no, and the lie detector would have said I was telling the truth. I may have been able to admit that when I was drinking, I probably acted like I worshiped alcohol, but I in sobriety, I thought I don't worship anything. That's crazy. I don't worship nothing.

And I worshiped a lot. I didn't even know it, and didn't know what it meant until I was about a year and a half sober, and I was ending my first sober relationship. There's not a human being on the face of the earth more self involved than an alcoholic ending a relationship. I mean, you can come up to a person like that and say, I just came from the doctor. I have terminal cancer and 3 weeks to live.

And he'll say, you know what else she said, man? You know, I mean, it's right? And I'm at this late night meeting one time, and I'm ending this relationship. And I'm in the meeting and I don't hear nothing in the meeting. Because I for a couple reasons.

One is I got a the I got a spring now implanted in my neck because she's not in the meeting, that every time the door opens, my head goes like this. You know? And I sit in the meeting, and I'm I'm I'm not listening. I'm having conversations with a person that's not in the meeting. Right?

I'm having the things I should say to her to make her realize how wrong she is, you know. I'm going all that stuff. Right? I'm going this is crazy. I'm whacked.

So the meeting's over. I don't hear nothing in the meeting. I am God could be trying to talk to me through the people in the meeting and I don't get it. Alright. There's a a guy there from from Glendale who's 28 years sober as a visitor, and him and I ended up going out to a coffee shop after the meeting.

And this guy after everybody left him and I sat there and for 20 minutes at least, maybe 30, he sat and listened to me go on about this relationship. I mean, I went on with about this relationship until his eyes had glazed over. I mean, you know, right? He said, he He said he said, if kitty said, have you ever thought about the first commandment? And when he said that, I I was, you know, I'm kind of new.

I'm a year and a half sober. I still was not real open minded yet. I said, I'm not really into that. I'm just in AA. And he says, yeah.

I know. I know. He said, you and I are a lot alike. He says, guys like us, we never get past we can't get past the thou shalt not to hear the rest of it. And he said, I think in my experience, over the years that that the 10 commandments were originally written as statements of spiritual cause and effect.

That somehow, as they came out of the Hebrew into the Arabic and eventually into the Greek before they got into the Latin and the English, that somewhere in the I suspect it was the Greeks who'd put a spin on them and made them as that that authoritarian kind of deal. He said, I don't think they originally intended to be like that. He said, the first commandment is, I am the Lord thy God, thou shall not have false gods before me. You and I never hear anything past that thou shalt not. He said, I think it's a statement of spiritual cause and effect.

I think you can do absolutely anything you want to do and it's perfectly alright with God. To do and it's perfectly alright with God. I think you can put anything you want between you and God. The problem is, you've just put something between you and God. You've just obscured and blocked the light.

And he said, if when you worship something else, and he said he said to me, he said, worship just means to obsessively turn your consciousness towards. When you worship something, you put it in the place that blocks you from God. He said, and if you want to know what you worship, he said, at the end of the day make a pie graph of everything you've been thinking about. And the thing with the obsessive large piece of the pie is what you obsessively turn your consciousness towards. And when he said that, I had this picture in my mind of this pie with a little sliver for AA and a little sliver for work, and the rest of that pie was her.

Was her. And I realized that, I was the guy, no wonder I felt so desolate, No wonder I felt so alone. It wasn't because she was gone, it was because the source was gone. No wonder I felt so awful inside. No wonder it felt like my spirit was withering and dying because I blocked the light.

I blocked the light. And I wish I could tell you from that moment on, I never did that again, but I'll tell you there been a lot of times in sobriety where maybe a resentment, maybe being right about something took up the pie where I was just constantly defending it in my head. Maybe money, work, children. I've had a lot of things that push me out of the place and break me away from the decision that it talks about on page 53. On our page 53, there's in the middle paragraph, it it it says it really describes the reality of my life between the struggle between self will and God's will.

It says, when we became alcoholics. Do you ever notice how you always feel when your life's crap, you feel more like an alcoholic than when it's going good? I have a guy that I sponsor who's funny. He he talks about he he talks about coming, about coming into the detox, and he said, man, I was a 100% alcoholic. Then I got out of the I got into the halfway house and I was about 90% alcoholic.

Then I got a good job, and then he said, I was only about 60% alcoholic with that good job. Then when I got my 1st paycheck and I had a cup $300 extra in my pocket, I was about 40% alcoholic. Then I got in that relationship, and I was about 20% alcoholic. And when I bought that house, you know, it's hard to find any alcoholism left in me at that point. I just right.

So when we became alcoholics crushed by a self self imposed may not look like it, but I'll tell you, every crisis I've ever had in my life has been self imposed. Crushed by a self imposed crisis, I could not postpone or evade or sweep under the rug or make go away. We had to fearlessly face the proposition that God is either everything or else he is nothing. God either is or he isn't, and this is the big choice that we guys like us live with for the rest of our lives. What was our choice to be?

And on a day that the job or money or my stuff has the biggest piece of the pie is the day that I've made that choice, that I have put something between me and God and I've chosen something else to be my source. I have bought into the illusion of power somewhere else. And if I had that, that that would complete me. When the reality of my life is I've had a lot of that's, and I can't tell you one that ever completed me ever once, and that's the illusion. And every day is the day I gotta make the choice.

Today, am I gonna try to show up and act like somebody who God is everything, or am I gonna really put him block him off in my life and put something else in that place and act almost act like he's nothing. One of the definitions that I got from my friend Charlie, I started doing these, recently these big book studies with these with these 2 guys, Joe and Charlie, and we do them kind of 3 of us together. And what Charlie gave me something I really liked years ago, and he said he said one definition of an agnostic most people think an agnostic is a person who's not sure if there's a God or not. He said, I think an ag for most of us in AA, what it is to be an agnostic is to believe completely that God's running the universe and then go about your life acting like you are. Right?

See that, I get that. I get that why. See, that explains to me. Why I can have a head full of God in a shallow spiritual experience, because it's in my actions, because I'm a hypocrite. I'm saying one thing.

I I sponsor a guy that's that's a really fanatical religious guy, and he reads the bible every day. And I can't I'm trying to get him to see that he plays God more than people who don't do that, Where he sits back in judgment of everybody and their sins, and he's he's up on that throne of judgment, you know, looking down on he's play he plays God. And because he's plays God and he tries to take God's place, his spiritual life is very shallow and desolate and full of a lot of self righteousness, and condemnation, and judgment. And he hides behind it, But it's very shallow, and it's very desolate, very desolate. What is our choice to be?

Before we go into step 3, I wanna touch on 1 paragraph on page 46. I think the middle of the page really is the essence of step of step 2. There's a line in our book that says, God does not make hard terms with those who seek him. This is an easy deal. I don't have to measure up.

I don't have to get good first. If I can do the 2 things that it talks about on the middle of page 46, that's all I have to do, and it's an easy reach, really. It doesn't even require that I believe anything, really. It requires that I do 2 things. It says, yes, we have agnostic temperament have had these thoughts and experiences.

Let us make case to reassure you, we found that as soon as we were able to 1, lay aside prejudice. What's that mean? Prejudice comes from a Latin word meaning, prejudgments, preconceived notions, opinions. If I can lay aside all my prejudices about God see, the thing that's hard for me is that I only want to lay aside the bad ones. It doesn't say that.

It says lay aside. And I that's why I think these over the years, the 4 ministry the people, clergy members that I've tried to sponsor, the hardest thing they're they're worse to sponsor than alcoholism counselors because they become they're they're the I know guys. You know, they're spiritually I know, but they don't know. They don't get it. This is all up here.

It's all up here. I know. I know. I know. No.

You don't know. You're dying. The one this one guy had drank himself to death, and one time he's in detox, and I'm trying to talk to him and he's telling you're in detox. You don't know shit. You're in the but I know.

I know. God loves you. You're in detox. You don't get it. Right?

He couldn't lay aside his prey his preconceived notions of God because he thinks they're the right kind. And some of them may be the right kind. They might be right, but they're not experiential. They're intellectual judgments. And if I am going to develop a relationship and open a channel between me and a power greater than myself, it must have substance, it must be real for me, and it's gotta be in here.

It can't be up here. If I base a relationship with God based on prejudices and judgments and opinions and intellectual crap, when my ass is up against the wall and I'm dying and my very life is on the line and I need a power greater than myself, it better not be theoretical. It better be real. And for me to try to to to build a relationship with God based on a bunch of stuff I've read or been taught intellectually would be like trying to to form a friendship with one of you guys based on information I've gotten from one of your exes. Right?

And it might be it might be that she might have been kind or he might have been kind in giving me the information. But the minute you do something, you'll do something one day and I'll go. That's what she meant. I can see it now very clearly. Right?

And it puts me up here in that judgment mode and it's all and what happens is it blocks my ability to have an honest open relationship with you. It prejudices my position towards you. It's baggage. It may be kind baggage. It may be spiritually enriching baggage.

It may be fill it may be baggage that sounds like a Hallmark card from a recovery bookstore baggage, but it's baggage all the same. And I my experience is is I'm gonna form a power, a relationship with this power greater than myself. I must come to the table from a place of surrender. I must come to it the table as a child who knows nothing. Hard thing to do.

To be I can be childish, but childlike. I know a lot about childish, but how do I be childlike? The Buddhist I I love the Buddhist tradition. It's, there's some incredible wisdom in in Buddhism. And and I'm not I'm not a Buddhist anymore than I'm anything really except the guy who seeks God's will in my life.

The Buddhists have a story that's 1000 of years old and it's about the the wisdom that the ultimate wisdom. And the ultimate wisdom according to the Buddhist is to know that you don't know. And the story is about this little Chinese farmer who who lives on this little piece of land and he farms the land for this lord. He doesn't even own it, and he has to tie crops to this Lord in order to live there. And he lives there with his only son, and they own nothing except one thing, they own a horse.

It's their only their whole estate is this horse. And this little wise farmer one day gets up and he realizes his horse has gotten out and has run off, And he virtually lost everything he owned. And his friends and his neighbors and his family come over to console him to tell him how tragic this is, how awful it is, And he shrugs his shoulders and he says, I don't know if it's awful. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.

And they look at him like, what do you mean? You're just you've you have nothing now. He just kept saying, I don't know if it's awful. Couple days later, the horse returns and it's leading a whole herd of wild horses right into his corral. And his friends and his family come over to congratulate I don't know if it's wonderful.

Maybe I don't know if it's wonderful. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. And they're looking at him like this guy's a nutcase. A couple days later his son is trying to break one of the wild horses and he's thrown, and he's crippled, and he can't walk, and he can't work, and his friends, and his family, and his neighbors come over to console him and tell him how awful this is.

This is awful. This is terrible. And he shrugs his shoulders and says, I don't know if it's terrible. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. And they think, how cold?

Your only son has been crippled and you you don't even think it's awful. And a few days later, the Chinese army comes through the valley to force all the young men to go and fight in a battle where none of them would survive, and they couldn't take the sun because of the leg. And the little old man knew the most important thing he'd ever know, that he don't know. He don't know. And if if if my very experience means nothing else, it means that I what everything I thought was so was probably wrong.

One of the worst things I ever thought that could happen to me would be that I'd end up an alcoholic. It turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. One of the worst things I thought could ever happen to me is that I have to come to AA and become one of them, turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. One of the worst things I ever thought could happen to me is I'd I'd become one of those God guys. Oh my God.

Not a God guy. Oh, God. Not one of them. It's one of the best things that ever happened to me. See, I don't know.

I really don't know. And if I can stay I think I think the thing that they talk about in my experience in Alcoholics Anonymous when you when they say you must surrender, it's surrender what? It's surrender my judgment. When I turn my will over to God, I'm turning my judgment. When you make your last will and testament, it's your last your will is your judgment.

It's your last chance from the grave to let certain people know you liked them and others know that you think thought they were crap heads. Right? I'm gonna give them this. I'm gonna give them this. I'm gonna purposely they get nothing.

They're gonna see what I thought of them. Right? You get it's your last judgment. Your will is your lens judgment. And isn't that really the the thing that that stands in my way?

This prejudice thing, this judgment thing, I think is the core of the I think the the road to hell is paved with judgment. In, in Genesis, in the bible, the story of creation, Adam and Eve, after god created the heavens and the earth, Adam Adam and Eve were created and they were placed in in paradise, virtual paradise, place called Eden, the Garden of Eden. Perfect. Absolute paradise. Had everything they needed, they were taken care of.

It was it was wonderful. Heaven on earth. God made a suggestion. He said, you know, this is yours. Do anything you want.

Enjoy yourself. Have a good time. The party's on. But I'd suggest that you don't eat any of this particular fruit. This one fruit here, it's the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Better not eat that, which I think Adam was I think Eve was an alcoholic. I don't think she wanted to eat it till till he said, you know, you maybe shouldn't. And it kinda got right. Oh, yeah? But that's some good shit, you know.

Knowledge that after eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they got the knowledge of good and evil. And all of a sudden, what was paradise, Adam's going, there's there's crabgrass. God, what the hell were you thinking? Eve, I thought you just the other day, I thought you were perfect. You you get a little cellulite.

I mean, God, what the hell is going on? This is this is crap. And what had been heaven all of a sudden became hell and what had changed? Nothing. Except they got they took the position of judgment.

And I have had the exact same thing happen in my life in sobriety, where I've worked at a job that one day I'm so grateful to have, and then another day and a day where I don't even know I've started running the show and playing God, it's crap to me again. And what's changed? It's my position towards my life that changes. I get my will back and I get the judgment and I sit on the throne and I put I I judge and label and everything and it becomes crap. It becomes crap.

So the first thing I have to do is lay aside prejudice, and then the second thing is express even a willingness to believe in a power greater than ourselves. It doesn't even say I have to believe, it just says if I can express even a willingness. And now I look back over my early sobriety and I understand the wisdom of the actions that were suggested to me when I was new. When they said when this guy said to me, he said, Bob, we know you don't really believe in God. And I I wanted I wanted to defend myself and tell him how spiritual I was, and he cut me right to the quick.

He said, look, What experience really do you have with God? And I really didn't have any really. I was willing to believe there might be something, and I was willing to get his approval for acting like someone who maybe believed. But believe really? Why would I?

I had no experience with God really. Not not not really. And he said to me, he said, even though you don't really believe in God as of yet, I want you to do one thing. I want you to physically get down on your knees every single morning and ask whatever is running the universe for the help you need that day to stay sober. And then at the end of the day, physically get down on your knees and thank whatever that was and know that you didn't do that, that you'd asked something and it gave it to you.

And I started doing that and I didn't understand that the what I was doing and I was living in this halfway house and I I'm not doing it well. I mean, I I go in the bathroom and I lock the door in the halfway house and I take the car the rug and I shove it up to the crack under the door. I guess I'm afraid somebody's gonna peek under the door and see me pray or something. I don't know. And I'm embarrassed, and I feel like a hypocrite.

I get down on my knees and I say, you know, whatever's there, please help me to stay sober today. And I get up off my knees and I go about my day. And I started doing that every day and some funny stuff started happening to me. It was like all of a sudden I started having good luck. And all of a sudden I started attracting things to me that I needed.

And a lot of those things that were I was attracting to me that I needed, I didn't even know I needed until I got it. There'd be times when I would just be absolutely insane. You you know that kind of insanity of early sobriety where you go in these mood swings and getting depressions and my head spinning and I get this knot in my gut, and I don't even understand why. I don't have enough presence of mind and familiarity with myself sober to even identify what's going on. But I know I'm I'm in pain, and I feel awful when I ask something I don't even believe in for help.

I go to some meeting and there's a stranger in the room talking about what's going on with me, and I get it. I can hear him talk about it and it's like, oh, that's it. Oh, and then he talks about what he did and oh, I gotta go talk to my boss, and I gotta clean that up. Oh, okay. And I started getting that stuff happening to me over and over and over and over again until even the skeptic that I am started to realize, man, there's something here.

There's something going on here. I've never had this kind of good fortune and this good luck. I I'm getting everything I needed, and I started to get a sense of being taken care of by something in the universe that was on my side. And I started to come to believe as a result of being willing to try to eventually, and this is the the letting go of my prejudice took a long time. You know, one of the things I do with the guys I sponsored in the last few years, it seemed very effective.

When they get to step 2, we in the beginning when we're on step 2, I asked them to make a list of their prejudices because I didn't know what my prejudices were even though I was full with them full of them. And some of them I didn't even recognize, and we talk about it. You know, that that that sense that I I didn't even know I could admit to myself that I even if there is a God that I really don't measure up yet to his help. That idea that God's too busy to be concerned with someone as like me. That I would have to have a stellar good life first to get his attention.

All the little secret judgments and preconceived notions I had about God, and then I asked them to start taking the actions. And the old timers, when they had me hit my knees, that was an an excellent example of an expression of a willingness. Now here's a guy, I'm newly sober, I don't believe in God, but I'll tell you getting down on my knees and saying those words, I can't think of a better expression of willingness because I'm doing something I don't even believe in. Is it an expression of faith? No, it's not.

But it is an expression of willingness. And I started to come to believe as a result of what happened in my life, as a result of expressing the willingness and trying to be open minded and open to the experience of what was gonna come into my life. With gas lamps, and there was a guy, years ago before they had the electric starters on the street lights, who his job was to go around the streets of London with a long pole with a flame on the end and light the gas lamps. They called him a lamplighter. And at at dusk, every day, you could climb up to the top of the tower of London and look out over the city, and no matter how hard you looked you could not see where the lamplighter was, but you could see where he'd been by the lights.

And I could sit in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous at 2 or 3 years sober and I really, at that moment could not see where God was, but I could see where he'd been in my life. And I think even even more dramatically, I could see where he'd been in the lives of the guys that came in after me. I mean, I got to I had a ringside seat for the head to watch the hand of God. I watched these guys 6 months, a year behind me. I I watched him as I went to the meetings at the detox.

I saw their eyes. I saw the deadness. I saw the hopelessness. I heard the stories of the damage they'd done that was irreparable. And then a year, year and a half later, I'm I'm here looking at him in a meeting and hearing him laugh and hearing him talk about they got to spend the weekend with their kids, something they never thought they'd ever see again.

And about how they got a job and they got their first raise, and and later saw some of them get married and have kids and buy their first home and marry off their daughters and, you know. I mean it don't it don't take a rocket scientist to notice the hand of God in these hopeless beyond human aid guys. You can't some of the things that the transitions and changes that happen in Alcoholics Anonymous are absolutely impossible. Years of therapy and self help could not produce the revolutionary changes in our lives that we see on a regular basis here. A regular basis.

I mean, you could take most of our lives, and if the media ever found out, any one of us could be a miniseries. I mean, you know what I mean? It's just what it how it happens to us in sobriety. I mean, really? We could be a miniseries.