Jerry J. from Lake Withney, TX doing the steps at the Space Coast Roundup 2005 in Melbourne Beach, FL

Thank you. I'm a little lame on my left side. So if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna sit down while I do this. I haven't set up all day for a long time. Glad to be here.

My name is Jerry Jones, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Jerry. Sober by the grace of God and because these steps work, this program works, since January 1, 1973, for which I'm I'm very grateful. Any of you folks over here on the right that wanna move or your left won't can't see me or hear me or whatever, you're welcome to. I can see a couple of seats here.

You can even sit in the pink seats if you want to. Be alright with me. We got turned over a little more. Can you hear me? Okay.

Okay. We're gonna talk about the, the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. You just heard how it works red. And I don't think I can improve a heck of a lot on that, but, I can give you some of my experience with this. People are always asking, how does how does AA work?

And sometimes we have a difficult time answering that. Ray V, who's a Baptist minister and a speaker in AA, conferences like this, tells a couple of stories that I I stole from him. And he's commented on that from time to time. I understand. But this is a story about the minister who went to meet to miss to visit the elderly ladies, 2 elderly ladies.

And, they invited him into their home. They were glad very glad to see him, very hospitable. And, they said, would you like some cake? And he said, well, that'd be fine. That'd be fine.

So just have a seat here, and we'll go we'll go fix some tea and some cake. So they scurried off, and, and he sat there, and they noticed there was a bowl of peanuts beside him, and he just kind of reached over and began to eat the the peanuts. And by the time they came back with the cake and tea, he had eaten all the peanuts. And he was a little embarrassed by that, and he he apologized. He said, I'm really I'm really sorry.

I I saw those peanuts, and I I just I guess I'm a peanut freak. I just ate the whole damn thing. You know? And, and they said, don't worry. I said, since we've lost our teeth, all we can do is suck the chocolate off of them.

Now that's just kind of the warm up of the story I really wanna tell. While he sat there eating peanuts, he looked over and on the piano in the room was a condom in a glass of water. And he talked to the ladies for a while and but he couldn't get that out of his mind. And finally, he said, I just I just have to ask about that glass on the piano. And one of the ladies said, oh, I'm glad you did.

Said we were in the park last year, and we found that object right there. And it was in a little little wrapper, And it said, to prevent disease, place on Oregon. And we didn't have an organ, so we just took it out and put it on the piano. And do you know we haven't had a cold since we did that? Well, that's sort of like the mystery of Alcoholics Anonymous.

We always don't know exactly how it works, but we're blessed to be here and to know that it does work. Some of us are new here. Some of us are just getting started. And those of us that have been around for a while provide a little hope for those that that are coming along behind to a person who's suffering from any disease? To a person who's suffering from any disease than a person who's recovered standing in front of them, telling me exactly how they recovered.

And that's how our message is transmitted from one to the other and has been. If it hadn't worked that way, we'd all still be meeting the gatehouse in Akron, Ohio, I guess, if there's anybody there. I read another our line the other day that I think is particularly, apropos here. It was written by a minister, and he was talking about miracles. And he said a miracle, one kind of miracle anyway, is the replacement of an erroneous thought with the truth.

And that transforms your life and your perspective of life. And I think largely what the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous do is allow you and I to find the error in our thoughts and replace them with the truth. And we see life in a totally different way. I have a story about alcoholism that came out of my youth. I was raised out in West Texas.

I was born out in West Texas and was raised there until I was about 21 one up in the Panhandle of Texas. We have a panel to handle too. Y'all got one. We got one. Ours is a little bigger than yours, but that's alright.

We, I was raised on this farm up there, and I I had a dog, a bulldog, English bulldog, mostly English bulldog. I wouldn't vouch for his lineage exactly, but his name was Patches because he had little black spots on him, you know, and, he was white with black patches on him, and he was a, a remarkable dog. He was a hero in our community because he had engaged in a fight with a badger. Badgers are bad news for dogs, but this badger had run across the wrong dog. He weighed the badger weighed 1 pound more than Patches.

We know because it took about 2 hours of fighting him. He finally killed that badger, and we weighed them both. And, he outweighed patches by a pound. And everybody in the community knew about Thatcher's in his in his fight with the with the badger, and and he was a hero, hero in the community. And he had he had no problems.

He was well loved. He was petted. He was fed. He was admired. No prob had no competition whatsoever in the barnyard.

He was just, you know, king of the walk. And this particular morning, he was, in the yard minding his own business. And into our yard walked a big boar hog, neighbor's hog, ugly hog, Long yellow tusk ambled into your yard. And Patches had certain characteristics. When he made decisions, he married them very firmly, and he decided to get hold of the hog.

And he went sailing out there and got hold of the hog. And the hog began to squeal, and he was barking and growling. My dad came running out of the barn to see what was going on out there, and he began to go out and kick hogs and dogs and cuss. And I saw my dog was in a lot of trouble, and I went sailing into the middle of that frame. My mother saw her little kid getting in the middle of this this chaos that was going on in the barnyard, and she came running out to get into the deal.

Everybody in the barnyard had a problem. We all had a problem. There was a common solution. Patches turned loose of the hog. Let him go.

Well, Patches didn't choose to do that, and and the hog finally dragged him alongside the barn and he had to turn loose. And when he did, my dad caught him. He grabbed him up and he was snapping and snarling. He was angry and he was he was one of that hog. He was one of that hog.

And dad took him over to a water hydrant. The hog had slashed him on the side of his neck with one of one of his tusk, and he had sent me to the barn to get some pine tar to put on there to stop the bleeding, and we stopped the bleeding. We ran cold water on him, and we cooled him off, and there was peace peace in the barnyard. And we turned Patches loose, And Patches went right back and got hold of the hog again. And it was the same deal.

It was squealing and barking and kicking and cussing and mother wringing her hands and me trying to get my dog, and chaos reigned in the barnyard. And we dad caught him one more time, dragged him back there to him. This time, we chained him. We committed him. We chained him to the to the water hydrant.

Dad got in the pickup and removed all temptation by driving the hog away. I was given the job of being his counselor. I sat next to him and petted him and soothed him and asked him deep and penetrating questions like, Patches, did you ever have a good day getting a hold of hogs? Does your family object to you're getting ahold of hogs? Do they taste good?

Why would you wanna attack something so much bigger than you are? And, you know, in about 2 hours, I had cured him. He was laying on the ground. He wasn't tugging at the chain anymore. His tongue was hanging out, you know, and he had that little smile on his face like bulldogs get when they get their tongue out.

And he was looking around, and so I went to see my dad, and I said, dad, we can turn patches loose. He's cured. And dad said, well, I've had a little trouble with him this morning. I'm gonna check him out. So dad checked him out, and he said, yeah.

Yeah. I think he's okay. And so we we turned him loose. He had to go 2 miles to find the hog, but he got in one way. Now some of you can identify with one of the more of the players in that.

I guess I was the first hogging on in West Texas. And it wasn't hogs at all. It wasn't hogs at all, because he switched to cattle trucks just a little while later, and he just he just caught one of those. And we have a lot of people in this world who catch all the cattle trucks. A lot of them are catching hold of hogs, but they they move over to cattle trucks and they just don't get back.

And we don't have any solution whatsoever, none, to make it possible for us to catch hold of cattle trucks. We do not know how it's possible to allow us once we become alcoholics to drink again with any degree of safety whatsoever. We had a deal on my first AA group. And, our deal was if anybody went out and drank and found out how they could do it successfully, they had to come back and describe it, post it on the bulletin board so we could all do it if we wanted to. Nobody posted anything on the bulletin board.

Lots went out. Some came back, some never did. So we have a really difficult kind of condition that we deal with. It's complicated by the way we it's complicated by the way the the sufferer reacts to his own disease. Everybody knows he's got the problem except him.

And he's blind to his own problem. He defends his illogical and erroneous actions. He lies about him. I lied about them. I I was defiant.

My deal was, if you want to talk to me about the way I drank, you better be willing to discuss the worst thing I know about you because we're gonna get it all out on the table. And I'm not gonna change one damn bit. I'm gonna drink just exactly what I wanna drink when I wanted to drink it. Now there were people like my boss or bosses. When they talked to me about it, I was a little more subtle in the way I dealt with things.

I rationalized. Actually, if you had a wife like I had, you might take a drink too. Now that was when my wife was on me. I would say to her, actually, if you had a job like mine and all the pressures I have, you drink too. I rationalized.

I justified. I hid my problem from myself as long as I could. And we see that happening all the time. Now we lived why did we drink? Why was alcohol good for us?

I don't know why you liked it, but to me, it kinda chemically altered reality. I could have a bad day and have a few drinks and, you know, it wasn't so bad. What the hell? Let's have another drink and and another drink and another drink. And after a while, it wasn't bad at all, and then it got bad again.

But by then, I was I was through with the first problem, but it was always back the next morning. But that's why I think I don't know why I like to drink as well as I did, but I could I just loved it. I like to be intoxicated. I liked being irresponsible. I was responsible a lot, But then I could take little vacations from responsibility and be irresponsible.

And I I really liked that very much. But I hid behind my disease, and I I can look back on my life today and cannot imagine why in the world I couldn't realize and see I had a problem. I I drank mostly at home, and I drank in pretty good quantities toward the end. I drank at least a quart of whiskey every day. And I could I could get a few drinks at lunch or something like that.

It kinda soothed me over. But I did most of my drinking at night, which meant that my one of the main responsibilities my wife had was getting me to bed. It was really important that I rest after I'd had a quart of whiskey, and and she it was her job it was her job to take me and put me to bed. I didn't always stay in bed. There were times when she put the there were actually times when she put me to bed without taking me to the bathroom.

And then I would get up and wander around the house and and look for the bathroom. It's not always easy to find the bathroom. Have you ever noticed how much closets look like bathrooms? You can make you can see how that easy to make a mistake there. And I smoked.

I was an automatic smoker. Smoker. I would, swing my feet over to the side of the bed. No matter whether I was drunk or sober, my cigarettes and my lighter were always right there. I could just reach out and and pick them up.

And when I was searching for the bathroom, that's the first thing I did was light up a cigarette. You can kind of see from the glow on your cigarette what was out there. You know? And it wasn't a pretty picture. I, come back to side of the bed, and sometimes I wasn't through smoking.

And then you would sit on the side of the bed and smoke the rest of your cigarette. Well, sometimes you were tired. Often, I was pretty tired. And drinking made me tired, I guess. And I would kinda lay back on the pillow and finish my bed.

And 1 night 1 night, I woke up, and there was a pretty good sized fire going on my side of the bed. And we, we got the fire put out. The bed was pretty well run by the time we got the fire put out. It's very difficult to explain that. The best explanation I've ever heard for that is just to tell them you think the same damn thing was on fire when you got in there.

I, I got up the next morning, and, I needed to go to work quickly. I needed to get the hell out of the house as quick as I could. I shaved, I showered, I got out of there. And as I went out the door, I told my wife, buy any kind of bed you want. Buy any kind of bed you want.

Don't worry about cost. Just buy any kind of bed you want. And I went to work, and I came back to have a few drinks and relax a little bit in the evening, and there was a letter from my wife to me. She was there, but she had written me a letter. Seemed very strange to me, but I read the damn letter.

And the letter said something like, Jerry, I have been talking to you about your smoking and drinking for a long time. Now, you've got to do something about your smoking and drinking. I can't go to bed at night without worrying about my life, the lives of our children, and even your life. You You gotta do something about this. And I did because I was responsible.

I told you that. I I quit smoking. I just quit smoking. Never crossed my mind to moderate or change the way I drink. I went to a few months before I quit drinking, I went to the doctor.

My firm required me to go to have all the employees to have a a physical every year. And the year before, the doctor had told me that my liver tests were not good, that, he said, do you drink? And I said, yes. And he said, how much? And I said, pretty good.

And, he said, well, you really need to moderate. Some people can drink, some people can't, and you've got a bad liver problem here. So I, I didn't do anything about that, of course. I just drank like I always drank. And I went to the doctor in, the next year, and he, he looked at me and he ran the test again and he called me and he said, see, I wanna show you this test, this graph.

He said, your test is off the chart. You're in serious trouble with your liver. Now you gotta do something about your liver. Now what I want you to do is not drink anything at all for 10 days, and return and we'll repeat the test. Well, I left this office and had absolutely no intention whatsoever of ever going back.

I wasn't gonna quit drinking. Why in the hell would if I quit drinking and went back and it was better, you know, he's not gonna let me drink anymore. If it was worse, you do you have your hair ever heard of a doctor who had a patient who had bad liver problems and drink a quart of whiskey a day? Hell, no. They're not gonna tell you that.

That was a no win situation for me. Why would I wanna go back to that? Now that's just kind of the insanity that lived in my life. That's kind of the insanity that persisted in my life until I reached a place in my life where I couldn't go on. I reached a place that they talk about the dilemma of the alcoholic in the big book where I I had a choice.

I could either go on trying to blot out my life, which was unacceptable to me, or I could try to do something about it. And I decided to try to do something about it. I decided to try to quit drinking, something I'd promised I would never do in my life, but I decided I would try to quit. And I, I tried 2 days. 2 days I was without alcohol.

I don't know how you were when you quit drinking, but it surprised me. If you're doing something bad for yourself, you think you'd when you quit, you'd start getting better. It didn't happen for me. I I was unable to sleep. I don't know whether anybody else had that problem or not.

I was always in the wrong place. If I was outside, I ought to be inside. If I was inside, I ought to be sitting down. If I was sitting down, I ought to be laying down. If I'm laying down, I ought to be up walking around outside.

And I mean, I'm just moving and grooving quick. And it's driving me crazy. I can't think about one thing in the world, alcohol. My body, all my body was sending messages to my brain and says, we need a drink. You've forgotten something today.

Get it down here right now. We need it. And so I did something else I promised I'd never do. I called Alcoholics Anonymous. And I reached a very unsympathetic woman on the other end of the line.

I told her I was having a little problem quitting drinking, and she said, when do you drink? I said, well, mostly in the evening. And she said, well, you need to go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous every night. I saw I I couldn't possibly do that. I, I'm a busy big time lawyer, and I I just wouldn't have time for that.

And she said, didn't you say you'd been drinking every evening? I said, yes. And she said, well, we're gonna quit that, aren't we? So So you're gonna have some free time. So I said, what do you got?

What kind of so I, anyway, I got into alcoholics and arms. Didn't understand a thing in the world about what you were doing here. Saw your funky little signs on the wall. I didn't have a Sunday school problem. That's what y'all were talking about.

I had a serious problem. I wanted somebody to fix me, and the problem is to work the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, to recover from alcoholic the alcoholic condition, you have to be involved. There are no spectators who are alcoholics who ever recover. You're a player whether you like it or not. And I had to begin to play.

And it told me that alcohol send alcoholic my alcoholism centered in my mind. They told me that I had to learn to think and react to life in a new way. And they told me the way I would do that is to take the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And so very reluctantly, knowing they wouldn't work, But having no other options, I started doing what the people of Alcoholics Anonymous. The book says suggested.

They weren't suggesting these things to me. They were telling me what I needed to do. And so I began to go down this road because they were obviously alcoholics. They talked about it. I could understand it.

We I could identify with them, and they had changed their life. And they treated me differently than I had ever been treated in any group before. They never asked me what my job was. They didn't seem to give a damn that I was a big time lawyer. They didn't ask me whether I had a swimming pool in my backyard, what kind of car I drove, how much money I made.

None of the things that were important to me were discussed. They asked me what step I was on. They asked me if I had a sponsor. They asked me all these questions, and they did things, strange things. They stood up in meetings and did some of the strangest damn things I ever saw in my life.

They talked about the worst things in their life, the terrible things that they had done, things that had happened to them, and the audience would just laugh like hell every time they told one of them. The most inappropriate sense of humor that I have ever seen in my life. Well, I've done a couple things I thought were kind of cute, so I thought well hell I might tell them. And so I told them and they they embrace me. And they said, look here.

Jerry is beginning to be himself, And that's what it's all about, to be yourself. You don't have you can't start from anywhere except where you are right now. What time is it? Now. Where are you?

Here. You don't start from being vice president of a company or being married or what. You start with what you got today, and you begin to work through that. And that's where the program takes you. You start off it positions you exactly where you need to be with the first step.

Says we were powerless over alcohol. Our lives were unmanageable. Was I powerless over alcohol? My god. Yes.

Yes. I tried to drink 3 drinks a day for over a year and a half and never made it one day. I couldn't when I put something in, it kept going. And then they told me about the doctor's opinion, about how the doctor had written this opinion and said that it was an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind. Well, I didn't break out in hives, and I didn't have sneezing and that sort of thing when I drank.

That wasn't my idea of allergy, but they said, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Your body reacts differently to alcohol than most people. You are mentally and bodily different from your fellows. Now I didn't particularly like to hear that, but it's the truth.

It's the truth. When I drink whiskey, I take a drink and it goes down and hits the bottom. Boom. Boom. It begins to kind of warm me up.

And then my body my my stomach sends a message and another one, and another one and another one until I've had too many. And then I sober up, and the obsession of the mind kicks in. Do you know what an obsession is? An obsession is a great big thought. It's so big when it gets in your head, it pushes all the other thoughts out.

And my obsession was a drink would improve this situation. It didn't matter who what situation was. A drink would improve this thing. And so I'd have the drink, and we go through the cycle again. And I could see that.

That was true in my life. That was reality. The steps are really a road to reality. We think chemically, we wanna change reality, but what we really want to do is learn to live with reality. We never could change the bulldog.

He had to get hold of something. But if we could have reached him, if we could have given him a different view of life where he could live comfortably without without drinking, he would have been okay. And That's what happens to us. We change the way we see and react to life. And the first step is very, very important that we recognize that we were powerless over the stuff.

We can't use it. The only thing the only choice we have at all is to leave it alone. And the other part is that our lives are unmanageable. We were trying to run things. We were trying to make the world work in our way, and that just doesn't work.

If you think you can manage life, make a list of what's gonna happen tomorrow. Ever done that? I have. I was a lawyer, and I had a list of things. But I got tomorrow, I'm going to do a, b, c, d, e, and f, and that's what I'm gonna do tomorrow.

Only I get one telephone call about a a a between a and b, and the rest of it just go off the wall. And I'm doing x, y, and z down here. You can't manage life. Life comes to you in all different directions and all different kinds. And we were people who we were people who insisted on it going a certain way and didn't even know we were doing that really.

But we were reacting as though we had to control it and it we couldn't control it and we were unhappy with it. And we couldn't accept the fact that it wasn't really beyond our can to to do that. So you get a real grounding in where you are and and and what you are when you take step 1. We devote a lot of our book to that very thing, to break through the rationalization, the justification, all the other things that we use to hide the the truth from ourselves. And and and we have to get through those things, and you have to get all your reservations.

I never sponsored anybody in my life that I didn't and I was sponsored this way. They told me to mark down anything in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, that I didn't believe. Anything in the book Alcoholics Anonymous that I didn't believe applied to me that I disagreed with because we're gonna have to talk about any reservations I had. Because if I had reservations, sooner or later, an event would come along and I would act out what I had the reservation against. So I had to break down my defense system so I could accept I am who I am.

And that's the greatest freedom on earth, to be who you are living inside your own values. Can't touch me with a 10 foot pole when I'm in that situation. Some other things. Now I had a real problem with step 2. Step 2 has some concepts in it that are difficult for me.

It said, I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. Came to believe. Believe. I've been to a lot of churches. I had been to a lot of churches.

I had talked to a lot of ministers. I had read books. I had been looking for God all my life. And the second day I was sober, I picked up a little 24 hour day book to see what those a a and a people were doing because I was very quick and having hell a lot of problems going on, and I I needed some help. And it said I was gonna give my drinking problem to God this year.

I can't tell you how disappointed I was in that statement. How are you gonna give something to somebody you can't find? And I asked ministers, bright men and women, how do you get this thing? And they said, you have faith. You have faith.

Did you ever try to have faith? I've sat in chairs and decided I'm gonna have faith. Nothing happened. Same is true of belief. I can't give you my beliefs.

I can tell you what my beliefs are. They may or may not resonate with your your own life, but you're gonna have to have your own beliefs. That's why we come to believe. I came to believe certain things in our call it's anonymous. I came to believe them because I had experience, not because I had faith.

Not because I came with faith. I some people may and it's wonderful if you can, but I didn't. Nearly agnostic as you can get. And I came to believe certain things because I observed things happening in Alcoholics Anonymous and things were happening to me, which made me believe. I believe that, you know, faith without proof is gullibility.

But I told them in the beginning, I don't believe all this stuff. And they said, we don't care. We don't care whether you believe it or not. We don't care whether you have faith or not. What we're gonna do for you is we're gonna tell you to take certain actions.

And if you take them with honesty, open mindedness, and willingness, you will have your own personal experience, and you will believe. We don't know exactly what it'll look like. We don't know exactly what it'll be, but it'll be better than anything you've ever had in your life. So that started me on belief. I saw people in alcoholics anonymous get well that should not have been able to get well.

I, they'd come in, you know, with 4 day growth of beard on their face, dirty clothes, rusty zipper. You know why they got the rusty zipper? And they, somebody here knows. I And you know this this guy is not gonna make it. He's just not gonna make it.

He hadn't got enough left. Left. He can't make a complete sentence. He starts telling you about one thing and it drifts off and it's something else before he gets through with it. He's not gonna make it.

And he hangs around the Alcoholics Anonymous for a while, take gets a shave, a new pair of pants, some clean clothes, takes a bath, and emerges from that horrible state that he came in in as a as a decent, God fearing human being. How'd that happen? How did that happen? Something here is working. I sat in rooms like this and got caught up in what was going on, And I felt something.

There was a power working in rooms of alcoholics anonymous, and I had to had to do something with this God as I understand him. Him. I I had always defined god as or thought of god as a big man somewhere sitting on a cloud, wearing a long robe, had lightning bolts on one side, you know, and a scorecard right up here. And he kept score for me and pulled out a lightning bolt every once in a while and knocked me on my can because I wasn't doing the right thing. And I tried to avoid that.

I didn't believe that. I did not believe that. I've driven a tractor a lot of days out there as a kid in West Texas and looked up the clouds and never saw him sitting on the cloud one day. Just couldn't. And I went to the preachers, told them, okay.

How do you know, what god stand on when he made the earth? They haven't got any questions. They haven't got any answers or questions like that. You know? And they had told me to have faith.

And I had the trouble getting my head around God. Now I have no problem whatsoever in understanding that there's something a lot bigger in this world than we are. I read a couple of articles one time, a long time ago. It says talking about space. Sun's 90 3,000,000 miles from earth.

If this distance was the thickness of that paper, the stack of paper would be 71 feet high to the nearest star, and our galaxy would be 3,000,000. Our stack of paper, 3,000,000 feet high. That's big. That's big there. The scientists talk about the big bang theory.

I got a question for the scientist. Who made the bang? Who made the material that sailed out and created the universe? Where'd it come from? There's something bigger than we are, a whole lot bigger than we are.

But what I had real trouble with was that that could have anything to do with me. I was so small, so insignificant, and lived such a short period of time on my life. You know, time, another factor about God in this universe and things is is time. We manufacture time, but Michener in his book, the Centennial book, talks about the old Rockies. There were some ancient Rocky Mountains near the same place where the where the, new ones are.

And, they were 10,000 feet high according to the scientist, and, they just wore away. And he says, how's that happen? And he said, each 1000000 years, they lost 250 feet, which meant that each 1000 years, they lost 3 inches, which meant each year you couldn't even measure the wear and tear on those mountains. So yeah. Yeah.

There's something bigger than I am. Yeah. There's a power greater than myself, but could it have anything to do with me? But in Alcoholics Anonymous, I saw it having to do with people. I saw people getting well, and so I defined God is whatever works in alcoholics anonymous.

What what kind of power there is in Alcoholics Anonymous. And, you know, I, still still think that. That's the most direct experience I've had with the power. I, I don't I don't at all want to make light of anybody else's experience. I had no conversion experience in the sense that I went up to the front of the church.

And they asked me after I'd gone to the front of the church because I thought that was where it was gonna happen. They asked me, Jerry, don't you feel different? And I said, yes. I did. I was more disappointed than ever ever because nothing had happened to me.

That happens to some people. It happens to some people who really believe that. Just didn't happen to me because I was demanding. I had set up standards that God had to meet. It just doesn't work that way.

It works only when we meet the standards the universe has set for us to meet, and that's where I missed the boat for so long. It wasn't in sprinkling and dunking and things that they did. I've done all all those things have been done to me more than once. Nothing ever happened until I got in a chair in the middle of a bunch of drunks, and I saw some power working in their lives and felt it beginning to work in my own. And then I came to believe.

And when you when you come to believe, then you look back what all these other folks have been talking about all these years, and you can say, yeah, that's right. They're right. Bill says in the book, you know, how many people in this world are are helped by their religions. They go back to their religions. They're involved in their religions, and they're happy in their religions.

I've never fit in a religion very well because I'm kind of a mongrel. I just don't quite find the spot for me. Alcoholics Anonymous has been my spot, But it's not the only thing I've studied or read or done since I've been in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. I've I've gone back over those same books and those same to the same ministers. And I've talked to them.

I've talked to ministers who said, you know, I've been to some of those Alcoholic Anonymous meetings. My gosh. If we can get that going on in our church, it would be something great. We could reach a lot of people. People really transform their lives in this.

And the book talks about how we're reborn. I don't know how that word ever got left in the book with a bunch of agnostics and atheists like we have, but somebody let it slip through. The preachers talk about reborn being reborn all the time. But we are. We're changed at a depth foundations of our mind.

If we really involve ourselves, if we do the things, you know, we back on step 1 there, back on how it works. Do you ever go through that? We read that thing so many times. Y'all don't you you read an abbreviated version. But we read it so often in my part of the country that we kinda get immune to hearing it.

We don't really think about what it's saying. Think about what what they're asking us to do in there. It requires thoroughness. It requires honesty. It requires willingness to go to any length to get sober.

It requires fearlessness. You know, you gotta take a chance. What a chance were you taking? Not much of one. Because you can have your misery back any day you wanted.

But you've got to be willing to risk a new idea. There's no easier, softer way. We give up our old ideas. That's what a lot of our program is about, is to finding out what first of all, you don't even know what they are. And then when you find them out, you hang on to them because they you think they've worked, but they haven't.

So you have to get a new frame of reference for this. It says half measures available snuffing. Now that's a kicker right there. If you do half of this thing, you ought to get 50%. Right?

Not a deal. 0. Half measures get you 0. So it requires a real deep dedication to find your bottom, to find where you are, who you are, and to take a good look at your spiritual life. And that's another thing.

We talk about this being a spiritual program. What is spiritual? What is spiritual? Spiritual is never anything that you can see. Never anything you can see.

It's love. It's kindness. It's goodness. And it can be always discovered because the more you try the more you give away of it, the more you have of it. If as opposed to material, I chased material things a long time.

I was big on material stuff, but it has no lasting benefit to you. You just get it and it's gone away. I remember when I first started practicing law, I had to ride the bus to work. I did not like to ride the bus to work. And I knew just as soon as I could afford 2 cars, everything was gonna be alright.

And I ultimately got enough money together to buy another car. And so I would take my car to work. You know, I hadn't had that second car a week until I came up on a great truth. Wrong kind of car. I needed a bigger car, a better car, a different kind of car.

And then I got a bigger, better, different kind of car, and that one lasted about 2 weeks. And I saw another one that I really thought maybe I should have got. And so you chase more, better, and different, till you can't chase them anymore, and you never get any fulfillment out of them. But you get fulfillment out of spiritual life. You feel good about yourself.

You feel good about your fellow man. You feel good about life. You can always find something good going on. And that's what the spiritual life is all about for us. We need to we need to engage in that spiritual conduct.

We're headed we're headed toward a spiritual awakening. And these are just the first few steps that we take along the way. Well, we're gonna stop here now and switch over to take a few minutes, break, and we're gonna switch over and do 3, 4, and 5. So I'll see you back here in about 20 minutes. Okay.

Well, as we finish the 12th step, the app finish how it works, the part we usually read, it says we we're convinced a, that we're alcoholics, and b, that, no human power can help us, and that God could and would if he were sought. And step 3 says, we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over the care of God as we understood it. This, carries forward some of my reservations about, God, as you can imagine. This sounded an awful lot like the altar call that I heard in a lot of churches. And it is, the altar call that you hear often in churches, I believe.

The churches didn't go much as far as teachings, didn't go a lot beyond that. They left you to the bible and your Sunday school classes and that sort of thing. And we're a little maybe a little more organized, as to how as to how you proceed, how you turn your will and your life over to the care of God, then then perhaps they are. At least it worked that way for me. Remarkable things happened at step step 3.

I, there's a story about a little boy, who had a tricycle. He'd ride his tricycle up and down the front of the house. He lived next door to the preacher. I haven't got anything against preachers, by the way. Just they just they just happened to be handy for me to tell my story.