The Floridat State Convention

Much, Tom, and it's indeed a a great privilege and a pleasure to be here in Florida and, to have, you as chairman of this meeting tonight. We seem to have traveled a long ways to find ourselves coming together again, and it's very very wonderful and I'm deeply grateful. I'm very happy to be here, I have to stop a little bit and just figure out where I am sometimes because I move around a fair amount, and, I kept reminding myself now get up and tell them that you're happy to be in Florida not in Texas or someplace like that. And, you know just to remember I because I get that all screwed up. Now, what I'd like you to do is just kind of sit back and relax, it's a strange thing what a clerical uniform will do to people, you know.

My god they sit up and take notice, it's wonderful. We may take up a collection before we're finished. Yeah. If that doesn't work, we'll play bingo first. I just want you to sit back and relax, I want to share with you for a little while and I'm deeply grateful to the committee for extending an invitation to me to to be here tonight.

I I was fortunate enough to find another Irish priest, that would take my place, they're about the only ones you can con into doing anything nowadays. And, he is filling in for me at Saint Teresa's parish in Kitchener, which I'm the pastor, and he's doing a good job this weekend, I trust he will be anyway, I'll find out when I get home. And, it's just wonderful to be in your very warm climate. When I left, on Friday, we had a little snow on the ground and it wasn't no great accumulation, but it was cold, and I flew to Houston, Texas and it wasn't very pleasant, I thought Houston be nicer than it was but, the weather was not all that great in Houston and, so, when I came over today and landed here in in Orlando, my god, I thought it died and gone to heaven right away, you know, just wonderful. Texas and it wasn't very pleasant.

I thought Houston be nicer than it was but, the weather was not at all that great in Houston and so, when I came over today and landed here in in Orlando, my god, I thought it died and gone to heaven right away, you know, just wonderful. I was over in the in the state convention in in Georgia a few weeks ago and, I I had a great time, I spoke, I was the last speaker and, it was a grand weekend and, the only reason I knew I was supposed to get up speak was the fellow moved away from the microphone. I still haven't figured out what those people are talking about over there. They they really talk very funny in Georgia. I want you to know.

They're still trying to figure out my tape over there too so I don't know. Now, when I I do a lot of speaking in Alcoholics Anonymous and perhaps, if you were to listen to some people maybe I do too much, but be that as it may, I sometimes wonder why I put myself through the kind of torture that I do when I do something like this. You know, I have a very very busy schedule. And on Monday last, I looked at my calendar and said, my god I'm in Orlando on Saturday night. Well it's Saturday, that's a long ways away.

And so along about Wednesday, I started to worry. And Thursday, I got, you know, a little bit more worried. Friday, I really got nervous, and this afternoon, I became a basket case entirely. I've been in the program a short time and I was invited to speak at one of our major penal institutions in Canada, namely the Kingston penitentiary. And I had never been in penitentiary, should have been, but I hadn't made it.

In any event, I I accepted the invitation and I went down to the penitentiary and the warden was kind enough to invite me to have lunch with him and he sat and I did. And God, I was nervous, oh my Lord, I was nervous. I hadn't been a place like that before. Now, after lunch, he announced it was time to go to the assembly hall, and we started this long trek to the assembly hall. And the first thing that I became aware of was they kept locking doors all the time.

They weren't too fussy about who came in, but my God. They were fussy about who's gonna go out of there. I tell you. Well, finally we arrived in the assembly hall. If I was nervous before now, I'm totally petrified because in front of me was a very large large number of prisoners in their gray uniforms and their numbers on at a very menacing looking sight indeed.

And unlike tonight, it was one of those occasions where my God, they had the lengthiest preamble to a meeting I've ever gone through in my life. They went out in the hall and got the janitor, he came in talk for 20 minutes, you know. And finally, they got around introducing me as a speaker and I stepped to the front of the platform and I had a dreadful terrible experience, one that a speaker hopes he would never have in a lifetime. My mind went blank. I couldn't think of a single thing to say, and after what seemed like an eternity in which I'm sure it was only a matter of a few seconds, I'm saying to myself inside, waters you've got to get this thing underway.

But I hope that I'll never ever forget that my opening remarks then was I was glad to see so many of them there, you see. I wandered around late this afternoon and came down a little early for the meeting. I wandered wandering around in the corner, and I saw all these beautiful people arriving. Husbands and wives come into the meeting and I thought how wonderful that is. And it reminded me of a story about, the couple who've been married for a long time and they just settled down in their bed at night and to go to sleep.

And, they just just got into bed and there was a thunderous explosion. The whole house blew up. And they were lifted right in their beds and they landed 4 blocks away lying in their bed. The old man looked around and the dust had suddenly realized they were safe. He looked down at his wife and she was crying.

It's for the name of God dear, don't be crying we're safe. What are you crying for? She said, I'm crying because we're so happy. She said, it's the first time we've been out together in 10 years. Now, the Franciscans have a very very enviable reputation for the great work that they've done among the poor and emulating the rule of Saint Francis.

But in recent years, some of the young whippersnappers in the order, have gotten a hold of the order, and they're kind of running it, and they had some different ideas, and they were having a get together, and they decided that perhaps the order needed a little updating, and so they, decided that they should have a conference on poverty. And in true Franciscan style, they held it at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. And in the planning, they said, you know, we should do something for old father Bill. It's been ordained for over 40 years. He's way down in the missions.

He probably still got the same robe and the same sandals he had when he was ordained. Well, let's bring him up and give him a little treat and let him enjoy the conference. Great idea. They brought old father Bill up from the missions. Put his consk him in the Waldorf, gave him access to all the amenities of hotel, and old Bill thought he died and gone to heaven, and he was wandering around, And after about 4 days, this reporter came up to him, and said, father, what do you think of the conference on poverty?

He said, son, if this is the conference on poverty, he said, I can hardly wait for the one on chastity. My father, God rest his soul, was a beautiful shiny Irishman who had no manners at all. There are 2 kinds of irises, the lace curtain and the shanty. My father's a shanty Irishman had no manners, and he loved Pat and Mike stories. And, he had a great repertoire of them.

And I heard one not long ago that I know my father would have enjoyed very much. Story about Pat. Pat was an illiterate soul. He couldn't read nor write. Had an awful time getting by.

He scraped up a little job here and there and just make a few dollars and get by. And lady luck shined on him. Didn't he get a fine job cleaning out the vats in the local brewery? Oh, my regular pay and everything. It's just everything's turning up roses And tragedy struck.

Pat fell in the bat and drowned, and they had the wake and his wife, Bridget, was receiving the guests. And one of the neighbors came by, missus O'Toole. She paid her respects and she called Bridget aside. She said, Bridget, I wanna speak to you. She called Bridget aside and she said, Bridget, I want to know.

Is it true? Is it true? She said, that the brewery paid you $500,000 for Pat's death. And Bridget said, it's true. They did missus O'Toole.

And missus O'Toole said, mother of God, that's an awful lot of money for a man who couldn't read and write. And Bridget said, and thank God he couldn't swim. Well, you you'll have gathered by now there's something wrong with me, so I'll get on to why I'm here. I just want to get a spot here in the big book. Here we are.

I'm a recovered alcoholic and my name is Peter Waters, and I'm a member of the Oakville group of alcoholics anonymous, and that's the order of importance as far as I'm concerned, Because for many years, it was very important who I was and not what I was. It is only by the grace of God and the example that I found in this fellowship that I've been able to find a way of life that enables me to live one day at a time without the use of alcohol as we fit the human being and as God intended that I should live. My story is an alcoholic is not greatly different than most stories will have heard. It has a certain amount of fear and remorse and degradation as we've all experienced it. It differs perhaps in a couple of respects.

One is that I was a religious alcoholic, the other is I was a political alcoholic, and I've always maintained when you put those 2 together you end up with a hell of an alcoholic. That's very true. I wanna preface any remarks I have to make this evening by referring you to a slogan that we're all very familiar within the fellowship and that is to keep an open mind. Now that's a very very important slogan, and it's going to be very important to you before I'm finished with you tonight too. As I'm gonna say some things tonight that are gonna be very, very disturbing.

I hope I hope that I get you so enraged at this meeting that you will charge out of this hall and you will go home and you'll find the big book wherever you put it. And you'll read again and again and again. Right? Because anything I'm gonna tell you tonight is gonna come directly out of the big book. So when I'm all through, don't argue with me, argue with the book.

It's very important that you keep an open mind. I've discovered over the years, there's a great deal of difference between an open mind and a vacant mind. So please keep an open mind. I was born 60 years ago into an Irish Catholic family. But one might say, well, what's that got to do with being an alcoholic?

Well, perhaps it's not a qualification, but let me assure it's not an impediment either, you know. If you're very familiar with that kind of a heritage, you know you've got 2 strikes against you before you can get started. Mother of God, it's terrible. But I have no intentions of driving or taking you through a blow by bow blow or bottle by bottle description of my drinking tonight, because I don't think any great and useful purpose would be served. Because I learned a long time ago, it's not the quantity or the quality is what the stuff does do.

Now in this great city of Orlando tonight, there will be people who will get into their automobiles, and they will go out onto our highways and they'll run over people, perambulators brand as backyard and old ladies, and they'll end up in jail in the morning, and they never took a drink in their life. They're just crazy. So it is not the quantity or the quality, it's what the stuff does to you. And alcohol did certain things to me that I didn't want it to do. Namely, it made me hurt those I didn't want to hurt.

It took me to places I didn't want to be taken to, and it robbed me of things I didn't want to be robbed off. Allow me to amplify that by way of qualification. When I tell you that alcohol made me hurt those I didn't want to hurt, I was fortunate to have been born into a very very good family. A family that made many sacrifices to provide me with the advantages in life, and yet I look back over that period in my life and I identify strongly with the many alcoholics I meet in my profession today as a priest. I meet many alcoholics and there's one characteristic that we all share.

It seems to me, that we go out of our way to hurt those that we loved the most. Oh, how true that was for me. I can well remember, I was the hail fellow well met. The last of the big time spenders in the local hotel. In my case, the Hawk Hotel in Oakville.

I would hang right into the last dog was hung, then I would stagger home, slam the door, kick the dog, break the dishes, raise hell. Dinner wasn't ready, it raised hell. If it was ready, it would need it anyway, you know. And the person that had to take the brunt of this each and every time was the most gracious and beautiful lady that ever lived, God rest her soul, my mother. She did nothing.

Absolutely never did anything in her life to deserve that sort of treatment. I couldn't count the number of times I put her through that kind of a ringer. I have recalled on many occasions that Saturday night was the night you went out on the town. God, could you ever drink on a Saturday night? You could drink on into the night on a Saturday night.

Why? Because you didn't have to get up on a Sunday morning, unless you're a Catholic. But there was a lot of preparation that was necessary to get yourself all dolled up of a Saturday morning, so you could go up town to get sick, you know. I'd spend all of Saturday morning getting myself all dolled up. I had a different outfit than I have now, I want you to know.

And just before I leave my home to go uptown to get sick, I had a full length mirror inside the bedroom door. And I would take one last look at myself and I'd say to myself, Waters, you look like a Greek God. About 8 o'clock on a Sunday morning, I look like a goddamn Greek, I'll have you know. I would always end up in jail. Now, I'm not proud of the fact that I went to jail.

I went to jail many times. I'm not proud of that, but I learned something from going to jail. I made great discovery all the time, for all the times that I ever went to jail. You know what? I never once never once met a social drinker in jail.

Never once. No. But I was well known. Oh, yeah. The police knew me very well.

And they've come along and say, do you wanna make a phone call? Not going to you idiot. Of course, I wanna make a phone call. Wanna call my mother and have her come and bail me out of this joint. Now as gracious and as beautiful as my mother was, God rest her, there's something you should know about her and that was that she was Irish and of course, if you're familiar with the temperament of the Irish, you know it's a very very volatile temperament, you don't fool around with it.

And so the phone call would be very brief and one-sided, and it would go something like this. Mother, I'm in a little bit of trouble being caught tomorrow morning to court to 10, bring some money and hang up real fast, you know, don't let her get out. God, she'd tear you apart that woman, you know. Now my mother would arrive in the local court in a Monday morning at quarter to 10, and I discovered in a small community as Oakville was in those days, you don't buy the local paper to find out who's in trouble, you go to court to find out who's in trouble. They're all there.

Now I want to describe the court scene, the court scene would be about the section that says, size of the section of this hall over here, and and, the front row seats on this side were all was kept vacant. Now those seats were for the special guests. And they brought up, the special guests from downstairs at 5 to 10. And at 10 o'clock, the old man would come in, that's the judge. Now, if any of you have ever been in a court of law and I suspect some of you have.

My God, are you ever polite when the judge comes in? Holy God, you get polite in a hurry. You stand up, you sit down, you cross yourself, it's worse than the Catholic church, I want you to know. Now, the court is in session and the first thing you begin to pray for is that the clerk will make a mistake with your name, so people won't know who you are. But there's no such luck.

He says, a waters. You can hear for 4 blocks along the main street. Everybody in town know I was in court. Then he reads the charge, and it's the first time you've heard it too, you know. It's very damaging.

Very damaging. Now, I know perfectly well that some of you've been in court. The reason I know that is I've been with you. And I I don't know what the procedure is here in Florida, but in our country, the the the center aisle, you sit they they put a chair right in the center aisle, you sit in that chair, and the old man's up here, the judge kind of looking over his glasses like this at you. And when he says to you, stand up, it occurs to you that you might be going to the farm for a while, you know.

You may be there for the planting and you may be there for the harvest, who knows. It also occurred to me that perhaps I could impress the judge. I don't know that you ever tried to impress the judge or not, but you have you should try it sometime. Yeah. I'm just about ready to impress the judge when I suddenly realized that I'm standing there and I have a tie on and no shirt.

And he looks at me and says, I've seen you before. He'd seen me so often, he thought we're going steady there for a while, And my mother is in the courtroom. My God, how we hurt people. Then alcohol took me to places I didn't want to be taken to. I can't ever reach a call standing on the city hall hall steps in downtown Oakland at the age of 16 and declaring to the world that I'd be on skid row by the time I was 30, but that's exactly where I ended up.

Not difficult to get on to skid row, there are people here tonight who know that. You can walk on, fall on, roll on, tumble on anything you like on. But mother of God, is it ever hard to get off of that place? But if I had to go to Skid Row, I'm deeply grateful I went to the one that I did and not the one I've seen on many occasions. When I've gone out to make a 12 step call on some bird who's created his own skid row behind the beautiful drawn drape of the bottom floors of the Lakeshore Boulevard.

And you walk in and he's making love to the toilet bowl. And the first thing he's going to tell you, oh, I can't be an alcoholic. I've got too much money. I said, keep drinking, you won't have it very long. And then alcohol robbed me of things I didn't want to be robbed of.

I would have to tell you my friends, this is the most expensive organization I ever joined in my life. In the days of my public life and business life, I belong to many many organizations indeed I did, and there isn't a single one of them that ever cost me as much money to get into as it as it cost me to get into our comics anonymous. It cost me $40,000 to get into this outfit, And I'm gonna stay around till I get my money back. I want you to know. And at the rate has come in and be held a long time slow.

I had to lose the respect of my family. I had to lose the respect of my fellow citizens who had placed their confidence in me at the ballot box to allow me to sit as the head of the city council on many occasions. But you see, we deal with alcoholism and it's a very patient disease. God, it's a patient disease. It'll wait for you and when it catches up with you, it will rob you of the greatest gift that God gives to humankind.

It will rob you of your self respect. This is when you become something less than a human being. You develop the morals of an alley cat. You don't give a damn who your heart, where you're seen, or what you do. And it was in this condition that I was privileged, privileged to be brought through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous to stay on January 31, 1961.

And I have not taken a drink of alcohol in any form since that time. I'm not saying that tonight to impress anyone here because we have many people in this hall, I'm sure with long term sobriety, and they indeed would be the first people to stand up here and tell you that we all stay sober on the same basis, one day at a time. There isn't anybody in this room who got a 2 days today. We got one day and we stay sober one day at a time. And whether the fact that I have nearly 28 years of sobriety, whether that impresses you or not, I really don't care.

Because you see every time I mentioned it, it impresses the hell out of me. I want you to know. Because I couldn't stay sober for 20 8 minutes never mind 28 years and I come to Alcoholics anonymous and I discovered that not only can I get sober and stay sober, I can do something else? And you're probably saying, well, this bird has a reputation for being long winded. We now know he's loud, and now he's gonna lie.

He's gonna tell us there's more to alcohol anonymous and getting sober and staying sober. My friend, if there wasn't more to alcoholics anonymous and getting sober and staying sober, I wouldn't have stayed. I'm irrevocably convinced there are 2 dimensions to alcoholics anonymous. There's the fellowship of alcoholics anonymous, which I love with a passion. I've served it long and I trust that I've served it well, but I'm here tonight to tell you that the fellowship of alcoholics anonymous will not get you sober or keep you sober.

It is not intended to do that. The fellowship would do that I join the rotary club. But I wanna be very quick to add that the 2nd dimension of Alcoholics Anonymous is the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the program of Alcoholics Anonymous will not only get you sober and keep you sober, it will change your life. If you're if you're an alcoholic and you are here tonight and you are not interested in changing your life, then I say to you my friend, please don't come back. Oh, that sounds terribly harsh, but I say it out of interest for you.

Because if you're an alcoholic and you're here tonight and you have no intentions of changing your life, then the only thing that Alcoholics Anonymous will do for you is, screw up your drinking. But if you're an alcoholic and you're here tonight and you want to change your life, then you are in the right place. You are in the right place. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I get around a a fair amount and I always like to get to meetings a little early, kind of size up things, especially if I'm speaking, and, I I did that tonight again, you know, sort of thing. You kind of, you know, I'm a preacher, that's my vocation, and I like to think that one of the one of the talents or gifts that I should keep sharp and is being a good communicator, and when I come to a gathering such as this, I like to kind of look over and get a sense of the audience.

And I do it for another reason, Because in my opening remarks tonight, I began by saying that I was recovered alcoholic. Some people get right up tight about that, you know. And they say, Waters, you just say that to be controversial. My friends, I want you to know that I don't have to say anything in Alcoholics anonymous to be controversial. Just show up.

Or sometimes and not show up. And they'll talk about it for bloody weeks. Wilson told me one time, he said, Waters, you shouldn't worry so much about what other people thought about you, you knew how seldom they did. And it's very true. I take as my authority for the statement that I made that I'm a recovered alcoholic, a quotation from the big book of alcoholics anonymous.

Now, this is a very large hall and we have a large audience, and so I want everyone to know this is the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, my friend. I have discovered over the years that if you wanna hide something from somebody in AA, you put it in the big book. They'll never find it. They think it's a table decoration goes with the decor of the hall. And one day they're walking by, my God, there's print in that book.

How did that get in there? I want a quote to you from the forward that was written by Wilson in 1939, and I quote, we of Alcoholics Anonymous are more than 100 men and women who have recovered. That's what it says right there. From a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body to show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book and the quote. Now when you use language as direct and as positive as those statements are, my friends, it doesn't leave, too much room for freaking around.

And that's what I'm gonna talk about. Oh, not frigging around. No. No. No.

I'll come back another night and do that. See, I haven't always been a priest. I have a distinct advantage over everyone here tonight. I have been on both sides of the confessional, And I haven't heard anything I haven't done either. I want you to know.

I want to talk about the program, the alcohol zones. Now, I want to preface it by saying that it was my good fortune, my one of the greatest privileges of my life was to know Bill Wilson, and to spend considerable time with him, and, to sit at his knee as it were to learn from the master, and thank God. I'm deeply grateful for that. And in knowing Bill Wilson, you know, people have often asked me what kind of a person was he? And I would tell you my friends, he was a very ordinary person.

Just like anyone in this room here tonight, with one exception, He had been touched by the hand of God. In the old Irish tradition, we would say that the man had an aura about him. An aura. And Bill had an aura, there's no question. And in his search, in his long journey, he made some great discoveries about himself rather late in life.

And one of the discoveries he made was his ability to be able to write. And none of us would surely argue with the great treasury of writing that he has left us, that this was so. But he not only had the ability to write well, but he had the ability, the uncanny ability to be able to put into his writings. What I refer to as implications. Reading between the line, if you will.

If you read an article written by a good journalist, he doesn't have to give you every bitty gritty little piece of things. He puts the rights in such a manner that you understand the story, and Bill have that ability, and and he had it well. And so tonight, I'm gonna ask you to share with me for a brief while in a journey through the steps. Now the reason I would ask you to counter in your mind the idea of a journey is because any journey, no matter what its duration or its destination may be, of necessity begins with the first step. And that's exactly where we'll begin our journey tonight.

We have indeed some very profound people that you have met and so by, who would tell you that the first step is the most important step of the program. I have no worth the idea whether that's true or not, and I'm not going to argue about it. But there's one thing that I am absolutely certain of about the first step. I couldn't be more sure about about the first step. It's in the right place.

It's amazing how many people miss that point. They're in the program for 45 minutes, they want to take the 4th and 5th step. And you suggest to them rather gently, that perhaps they should look at the first. And they get very enraged and tell you, why I did the first step of this program before I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. My friends, I've only one thing to say about people like that.

They should not be treated for alcoholism. They should be treated for lunacy. They're crazy. It is impossible. Absolutely impossible and insult to my intelligence to tell me that you can take the first step of this program without being in the program.

You can't do it. It's not possible and don't buy into that nonsense if anybody is trying to give you that stuff. Now let me see if I can just share with you not only what Bill meant by some of these steps, but also what I found in my search to be the implications. The first step says, we admit that we were powerless over alcohol and our lives have become unmanageable. In my search for a deeper meaning of that step in my life, I can remember very very beautiful people like Don Carlton, Pat Bog, Don McArthur, Red Brown, these are all the old timers that that that Tom knew so well and that white oak screw, who would really give it to you, told me how to find many of those insights.

They said, Waters, take the big book, put it in front of you at the table and beside it put a dictionary and when you are not sure, look up the word. Look it up. Now, you'll do some amazing things by doing that. You'll increase your vocabulary. You'll find that you have had the wrong interpretation of many things for a long time and you'll become a heck of a lot smarter than what you are right now.

If you'll do that, that's what dictionaries are for, and they're very inexpensive. And you buy one and you set it beside the big book, so that you might know. And I'm going to do this exercise with you in some detail tonight. Because the first step says, we admitted we were powerless over alcohol and our lives have become unmanageable. In my search for the word powerless, I thought I knew what the word powerless meant.

I went to the dictionary and I discovered it wasn't what I thought it was at all. Powerless, the definition in the dictionary was very clear for me and I was I was in thrilled to find the definition, because it said, powerless meant, the inability to be able to change. I could not change. I didn't want to smash up the car. I didn't wanna lose my business.

I didn't wanna go to jail. I didn't wanna hurt my family, but I could not not do those things. I was cut off from any source of power. Please remember that. I had become an island.

I had cut myself off from any source of power that would allow me to change and therefore, I could not change. The inability to be able to change, fitted me perfectly. And what is the implication in the first step? Loud and clear, it says, and our lives have become unmanageable. I submit to you my friends, that if you're serious about this program of Alcoholics Anonymous and you intend to go on now and there with the remaining steps, wouldn't it make an awful lot of sense to you that you should get the manageability of your own life back into your own hands as quickly as the good Lord will allow you to get it?

Because if you don't, and you continue to try to work this program and without that manageability, you will end up with a mess. If you had a little business over there and you had a manager running it and he was robbing you blind and running the business into the ground, you wouldn't keep them for sentimental reasons. You'd fire them, And we're not dealing with businesses, we're dealing with our lives here. I am irrevocably convinced that if I should die this night and I pray to God I don't, but if I should, that the Lord the God of my understanding is only gonna ask me one question. He's not gonna ask me how fast I drove on the expressway.

He's not gonna ask me who I slept with. He's not going to ask me whether I had bad thoughts, whether I swore, whether I cheated in my expense account. No. He's gonna ask me one question and one question only and I dare say, he's gonna ask you the same question. And that question is, did you become the best you you could be?

And I can only be the best me I can be if I'm free to be it and I'm a good manager doing it. Otherwise, I'm gonna be in a mess. And then we go to the 2nd step and it says, we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Not God. Not God.

They'll deliberately left God out of the second step for many good reasons, because there's strong implications there, which we'll deal within a minute. But if powerless means the inability to be able to change, then power must mean the ability to be able to change. The power comes from God, but you better be careful what you do with it. Oh my, I can't tell you I can't exhort you strongly enough to tell you to be very very careful what you do with that power. That you get and that you ask for and that he gives you.

Please, my friends, I beg of you. It is frightening. It is terrifying to see how it is misused. Now you would just say, well, what's this word talking about? Well, let me give you an example.

Only a few short years ago, an ordained administer by the name of Jimmy Jones. Got a whole bunch of that power and took a 1,000 people to Guyana, had a Kool Aid party and killed them all. Same power. Same power came from the same God. Misused by God.

Be careful what you do with that power. That power is so potent and it's so strong and can be so destructive on one hand and so productive on the other. Came to believe that a power great in ourselves could restore us to sanity. Could restore us to sanity. What is the implication?

The implication in step 2 is loud and clear and very very important. The implication is, you have to do it. God ain't gonna do it for you. Let me tell you something that may sound strange coming from a clergyman. God does not give you anything.

Now, in case you think I made a mistake, I'm gonna repeat that. God does not give you anything. God gave you something and you are obliged to take it, you will no longer have a free will. Right? So what does God do?

He provides. He provided what we needed, we kept close to him and and performed his work well. He provided. You see, you you should be very very careful what you pray for. Oh, God it doesn't give us what we want.

Thank God. I had a fellow report to me 2 weeks ago, that he had prayed for his wife and his girlfriend, they both come back at the same time. He said. So what does God do? He provides.

Now, there's a grocery store over there somewhere and they provide groceries, but you better not take them for nothing. You get in trouble doing that. There are conditions under which you can take them out of the store. There are conditions under which God provides. On page 63, the big book, Bill answers it.

He says, when we sincerely took such a position all sorts of remarkable things followed. We had a new employer being all powerful, he provided what we needed. God does not give us what we want. Thank God. Right?

He provided what we needed. I have people who come to me and say, father, how does this thing work? I said, well it says here on page 63, they provided what we needed, we kept close to him and performed his work well. Yeah, but father you've been around for a while, you could tell me. I said, well, now that's pretty clear.

Let me just repeat that for you. He provided what we needed, we kept close to him and performed his work well. Yeah, but father you've known me for a long time you could tell me. I said, god damn it. It's right there.

You see. There's an awful lot of difference between being stubborn and stupid, you know. That's the best deal you're ever gonna get. There are no shades of gray. You either believe it or you don't.

Now if you choose to believe it, I wouldn't be bold enough to tell you what'll happen to you. But if you choose not to believe it, the best I can do for you is a free funeral at Saint Teresa's any day you want. And then we go to step 3 and it says, we made a decision to turn our will in our lives over to the care of God as we understood him, not the control of God. The weeping and wailing is done on step 3 my friends is unreal. It's incredible.

I get people saying to me, look at what you've done, you brought me to this wonderful outfit and now you want me to do the impossible. You want me to make a decision. Did you ever meet an alcoholic who was foreign to make a decision? I made so many decisions. I put myself out of business 3 times before I got here.

I'm sure you would identify with those world shattering decisions you had to make on a very cold Monday morning in the middle of February. Whether you're gonna be at the liquor store 5 to 10 or 5 after, you know. Would you go buy 1 bottle or 2, you know. They come here so they can't make any decision. And said, we made decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, not the control of God.

God does not want to control your life. My Lord. We can often often get that across to people. God does not want to control your life. If he did, you'd be a robot.

He gave you a free will. That's what it's all about. A free will to say yes or to say no to the God of your understanding. And so he gives us, you know, he says, turn your will and your life over to the care of God. Now this is the most remarkable step.

It's was the one of the most wonderful steps in the whole program, of course. Because every time I look at this step, I am reminded of an invitation. Now, if you were to receive a very exalted invitation, seas. Well, I was the recipient of such an invitation 3 years ago. I came into my office one day and there on my desk, sat a very impressive looking envelope with the stamp of the Secretariat of the Vaticano on the corner.

That's from head office. With trembling hands, I open this envelope and to my great joy, my great joy. I discovered that I was one of the priests that was going to be presented to the holy father, when he came to our country. Oh, my Lord. My heart was beating.

I was so excited. I immediately called my sisters, who have shared a great deal in my journey, to share that news with them. And not being satisfied at just sharing with them, I called my brother priests to tell them of the good news. And still not being satisfied and not being able to contain myself, I was so excited. I began to call my fellow members of alcoholics and on.

And I said to them, guess what? Guess what? I'm going to meet the Pope. And they said, what the hell are you talking about? We thought you were the Pope you see.

If you were to receive if you were to receive a very exalted invitation, I'm sure you'd be very excited and tell all your friends about it. Every day of our lives, every single day of our lives, we receive an invitation to be a co creator and we receive that invitation from no less than the creator of the universe. My God. I get goosebumps when I think about it, that he would look down on the the least worthy of his servants and say, come, I want you. I want you to help finish my creation.

My God. But I say to him, God, surely you've forgotten. I'm an alcoholic and I've done all those terrible things. And he says, waters, have you not read your program? Doesn't it say, let go and let God.

Doesn't it say, some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was new until we let go absolutely. He said, I want you to know, I have not only forgiven you, I have taken it away. Wow. Wow. Try that on for size.