Sky Camp Men's Spiritual Retreat in Eugene, OR

I really enjoyed being here with you this weekend. It's a beautiful place, and there's a great feeling here. And it was certainly part of the meeting that you had, last night here. That sense of camaraderie and the and the unity that is here. There really was, you know, I got I was thinking as I sat there with you, listening, that this sense of, the feeling amongst past passengers of an ocean going liner motion moments after rescue from shipwreck was in the room.

We are clearly all here by God's grace. A guy told me one time that, you have to qualify for God's grace, which was kind of startling to me when I first heard it. And then he said, in order to qualify for God's grace, you have to be a liar and a cheat and a thief. I thought, well, I qualify. Some maybe there's some people that don't need God's grace.

I need God's grace. I need it desperately. I have always known that you get back what you put out. That concept didn't startle me when I was told that, a long time ago. That what's coming in is going out, basically.

We, feel like we don't like what's happening to us. We can be sure that the law of exchange has meant we have put it out there. We put it out into the universe. And particularly, things like our withholds. We bitch and moan and carry on because the universe withholds from us.

I'm not getting the, respect I want. I'm not getting the income I want. I'm not getting the love that I want. I'm not getting the, freedom that I want. But it's always attached always attached to some withhold that I have going on in my life.

For so long, I, withheld love because I didn't. I'm gonna I'm gonna love you when I, get the love that I should have gotten as a kid. Until then, no. And I didn't really think that through, and I certainly never said it out loud. But that was basically my withhold.

I'd like to love you, but I didn't get the love I I needed as a kid. And, there's not enough, you know, I just don't have any. I don't have any to share. And when I began to see that, and was told, really, that, if I could take a huge chance and give give the love I never got, that things would shift for me. That the universe would reward me abundantly with that.

And when we're working and we all have we all have those those backgrounds, or we work with people that have those backgrounds, backgrounds where their early life was just in shambles. And it's, almost inevitable that they're gonna come to us with this feeling that I don't dare give away any love. I just don't. Because I didn't get my share when I was a kid. And what little sense of love I have, I cannot.

And, if we're really, living this life with the grace that we've been given so richly, the idea of being the the bottleneck for the love that's come into our lives is, really limiting to us. It's very limiting. It's the kind of thing that makes it impossible for me to be, the garden hose that I'm supposed to be. And that's really what it is. I mean, there's a lot of, flowers that need watering.

And my job is to be the garden hose. And they're beautiful flowers. They don't look like it. They're a little bit withered, you know, sometimes. But we can, make a difference.

We can make a difference. Not by anything that we do so much, but who we are. Who we are. And as we go back out of here today, I always like to remember in leaving one of these that this coming together that we have enjoyed so much, that has so enriched me, has so blessed Gary, who I love so much, has carries with it a responsibility of going back into our AA meetings, making sure that we simply carry this and not so much talk about it. It's it's, we've picked up some information.

We have gained some insight. We have been blessed by our togetherness. And, if I can take that back and be loving and kind and generous of heart to the people that I'm gonna see in my AA meetings, that's what I want to be. I want to be the garden host. Because I'll get all the water I need if it's coming through me.

If it's coming through me. I get all that and more and more. But if I go back there with an attitude that now I'm better. I'm a better AA. For some reason, I've got an edge.

I've got a little bit of a jump on you, nothing good comes of that. And I can't keep whatever I've gained here. If we go back into our homes and don't make sure our wives and children are glad that we were here this weekend, We're missing a bet. I can go back into that home and and how come these dishes aren't done is one way to open up the conversation. But that won't take me where I wanna go, boy.

I'll tell you that. That doesn't take me home. I can walk in the house and jump in and clean that kitchen up, you know. Why not? What's the difference?

Make her glad I'm back with a loving point of view. Not say a word about it, just grab it and do it. Take care of whatever is to be handled there. And let her know I gained another level of appreciation for her. This lady I'm with is quite a remarkable lady.

A couple of months ago, we had one of those rare Saturdays where there was an open day. And we woke up and we were chatting, and she said, what do you wanna do today? And I hadn't even thought about it. I said, gee, I don't know. What do you think we ought to do?

She said, let's give up an old idea. I went, what? What? She said, yeah, let's give up an old idea. I said, because I'm a good AA.

I said, okay. And she said, good, you go first. And I this sort of the gauntlet had been thrown down and I had been thinking about something very interesting. I had been thinking, you know, in this book there's phrases that I've come to take literally and kind of push the envelope to see if there's any substance to them. And one of them is God will constantly disclose more to you than to us.

And I'm thinking, I don't get a sense of constant disclosure. I don't get that. If he's constantly disclosing more to me, I don't feel it. I don't see it. I don't get it.

I wonder what that's all about. And as I thought about it, I realized that I have some rules set up about the disclosure. And who can make the disclosure. The disclosures almost always come through human beings. And, I've got a lot of rules around that.

The guys I sponsor, they don't get disclosed to me. My wife? No. No. No.

The secretaries in the no. My partner, John. Yeah. Maybe. My sponsor, Yeah.

For between 3 and 4 PM on alternate Tuesdays. If he catches me just right, I'll I'll open up my head. But the disclosures are coming in constantly. And so we were laughing about that because I've got all these rules that block the disclosures coming in. I don't want the disclosure does not come from the elevator operator.

It does not come from the guy in the next lane. Uh-uh. No. The idea that I somebody would disclose to me that I'm acting impatiently or rude or driving inappropriately. Uh-uh.

And yet, it's an old idea. It's the notion that I get to pick and choose, that I can somehow control the manner in which the information comes in, the disclosures come in. And when I, looked at that, I realized that's such an interesting old idea. But it really limits it really limits the disclosures. And I, decided to drop the idea that I can set the rules about the disclosures.

And, it has been very abundant since then. I've got a lot of disclosures. Some of them I didn't want at all, of course. But you kinda you kinda get a little neutral about it. You kinda go, Wow, that's interesting.

Look at that disclosure. Look at that. That person didn't even know they were making a disclosure to me and, they did. It's all, I think, part of, step 10, which is, it talks about effective living. It's we need to grow in understanding and effectiveness.

I mean, if I'm going to set my purpose in the morning, basically, when I say direct my thinking, at step 11, I have said, I want to line up my will with God's will. I just want to get it lined up before I start the day. I want it supposed to be online. And so I submit to whatever God's will is. I just make that call in the morning.

Thy will be done. Direct my thinking. Get me lined up. It's like, sailing. I saw some boats out here on the lake yesterday afternoon.

That's always a business that's so interesting because you have an aiming point and you're heading out there. And you got a rudder and you have a mainsail and maybe a jib, and you are cooking along there. And the current and the wind, and the imperfection in the little boat will take you off, take you off your point. And you adjust the sail or you adjust the rudder And you come back over in an over correction. And I think we spend about 95% of our time off where we want to be.

It's like a heat seeking missile in a sense. There's God's will and I'm going after it. And that will will make a move and I'll be off over here someplace without and I there's a, a constant adjustment. It's akin to this on, page 19. It says, a sentence that I really was annoyed about as I was so many of them.

Most of us sense that real tolerance of other people's shortcomings and viewpoints and respect for their opinions our attitudes which make us more useful to others. And there's that word useful again. And then he says, our very lives depend upon our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs. And if you just read that literally, you're gonna say, well, I don't have a constant thought of others, and my life seems to be going along pretty good. So what's the truth in that statement?

But when he uses the word lives, he's probably talking about our lives. He's fond of saying we've been rocketed into the 4th dimension. The 4th dimension, as you know, is the spiritual dimension. The first dimension is our physical ex experience and our physical existence, and then the second one would be our intellectual existence, and our third would be emotional, emotional existence, and the fourth one would be our spiritual existence. And so my life in all four of those quadrants, in all four of those dimensions, is affected.

And it depends upon my constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs. Well, I knew I didn't have a constant thought of others. I knew that. That's not a big thing to figure out. And I asked about that.

I said, you know, this just seems like a, kind of almost a silly statement to me. And, they said, Do you have, pretty much a constant sense of gravity? And I said, Yeah, I guess I do. I mean, you can't throw your leg out without you're off balance at that point. And you throw your leg out and you catch yourself and then you throw the next leg out.

And any living thing is in motion and off balance. A statue is in perfect balance, but that's not where we play this game. Whereas we move around, we're always off balance. We're always off the point. And we want to stay close to that, and we want to stay close to balance.

And we always must take into account the law of gravity. I can't sit down in this chair without flexing and relaxing a series of muscles in rapid, rapid order just to make sure that I sit. I like that. Incidentally, that you know those buttons you push to keep the shower going? Well, I'm, the gal that's supposed to do that for you didn't show up this morning.

No extra charge for that. I'm just telling you. Imagine on the tape, they're going to go, What? I was in a meeting one time and the tape broke. So I stopped talking and the guy got the tape going again.

And as soon as he did, I said, and that's how I earned a $1,000,000 my 1st week of sobriety. He said, Far be safe. I don't know why they don't like me. Do you? If I'm driving, you and I are in the car and we're talking, we've got a pretty interesting conversation going.

Nonetheless, I have a more or less constant sense of a lot of things other than the conversation. I have a sense of the dashboard lights. I have a sense of my speed. I have a sense of, other traffic. I have a sense of the sound of the engine.

I have a sense of the sound of the wind. So I need, you know, pick up we're constantly aware of all of that stuff at a different level. And they told me that the, that was it. Just a constant low grade sense of other people and how I may help meet their needs. It makes me more useful.

My sponsor has been a remarkable example to me over the years about that. I remember years ago, and I haven't told this story in a long time, years ago when he first went to the midnight mission to run it, I guess he'd been my sponsor for 3 or 4 or 5 years, maybe. And he was down there for a little bit. And he said to a couple of us, me and Byron and Jim Shaw and a couple of guys that were on the scene in those days, He said, next Sunday night, if you get a chance and wanna come by the mission, come on down there because there's one of the Los Angeles Rams was arrested in the airport recently for pot, and he went through the and for another problem that he had, he went through the court system, and they assigned him to do community service. And as it turns out, he's gonna come down and do community service by putting on an NFL film here at the mission next Sunday night and then answer a receiver for the Los Angeles Rams.

And, interesting, chance to see him up close and stuff. We all showed up there. And he came in and he, had his equipment and all of that stuff. And he's under this court order to do it. And we're sitting back in Clancy's office.

He came in, he got there a little bit late, but he came in. And he went out, and he put on, the NFL film, and we all sat and watched that. And then he, answered questions of these guys. And they were all sober, these guys, and they, asked bright, interesting, intelligent questions. And, he wasn't real good with the questions.

But, that period passed and now we're all back in the office, and he's wrapping up this equipment. And he came back and had Clancy sign off his chip. And Clancy, did that. And then he said, Lance said, I'll see you next month. Clancy said, don't come back here.

Don't come back here. And we're kind of going, wow. He said, what do you mean I'm ordered to come back here? He said, I don't have to have you back here. You go make another deal with the judge.

He said, why? This is a big guy. He said, because you're so disrespectful of these men here that I'm not going for it. He said, what do you mean? He said, well, first of all, you showed up late.

They were sitting out there. And by the time you got this thing, Wanda, it was 20 minutes past the hour when you were supposed to start. That's disrespectful. They were waiting for you. And you show up late.

How busy are you? And then after the film was on, and after it was off, and you were asked those questions, you were so dismissive of these men. These are bright men. They're sober men. And they were respectful of you, and they'd ask you a question, and you would dismiss the question with some curt response.

He said, don't ever come back here again. And we went, oh, and he said, I gotta come back. I don't want to go back to that judge and tell him I can't do this. It'll take him another 6 months to find me something to do, or else I'll go sit in jail for a little bit. And they talked and we're just kind of like pigeons on a fence watching all of this.

Clancy finally said, I'll give you one more shot at it. But he said, I just want you to remember, these men may have given away their dignity at some time along the way. We don't ever take their dignity. Ever. Well, we were all down there the next month.

I can tell you that. We wanted to see volume 2. Man, he was he was early. And when it came time to answer questions, you should have you would have thought he was talking to the board of directors of the Rams organization. It was stunning to watch that.

And it was stunning only because the men weren't, you know, most of the guys were replaced by other guys. They didn't know this volume 2 of a drama. But the guy that got it, I got it. But the other guy that got it was Lance. He got it.

Big time. I would doubt that he's forgotten it by now. I would think it comes into his mind from time to time. And, Clancy wasn't coming off of it a millimeter, not one millimeter. And I really got that.

Constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs. Now, he wasn't talking about solving problems. This doesn't say how we may solve their problems. This is about how we may help meet their needs. And we gotta look and have a low grade appreciation for people around us, where they are and what their needs might be.

And take a look. And intuitive thought will give us, what's the need? What's the need here? It's not our business to solve problems. Sometimes we do that.

Sometimes we loan money or provide a place for somebody to stay. But what's the real need? The need may very well be, get your own place pulled together. Get a job. Get a day job.

And work out these details yourself, and I'll see you at the meeting. And it may sound harsh, but maybe that's meeting his need in the sweetest way we possibly can. Another way that it comes up in my home is that Linda will come, we'll be having dinner or something, and she'll be upset because she and the tailor had a little go around that day, or somebody at the grocery store, or whatever. And she's mad about the way their exchange went. And she'll tell me this story.

And then they said this, and I said that, and that and I got charged double. And I'll get upset. I'll say, well, did you tell him this? Did you tell him that? Well, you should have mentioned this.

You know, when you get into that kind of a jam in the future, you really ought to and pretty soon it's like, what? See, because I'm trying to solve her problem. Because I think it's my job. I'll sue that son. Did you tell him I'm a lawyer?

You can do this because it's not on there. My higher power just spoke to me. What is her need at that moment? And how can I meet it? It's pretty easy.

All I have to do is let go of any problem I think I see and say, I can see why you are so annoyed at that guy. Aren't some of them just weird? That's what her need is, to have me say, I understand that. I understand how annoyed you are. And give her a hug and move on to the next event.

It's sort of like, don't fix it, donkey. Just get it. That's all. That's all. And that's an important part of living effectively.

The subtleties of life are what life is all about. It's the subtleties that we want to wake up to. That we've always, kind of, not noticed. And it's the subtleties of life that make us or break us. It's just like when somebody says to me, how are you?

Really, they're asking, how are the sum total of your relationships in your life? That's the question. And I say, fine. Fine. But it's just an automatic response unless I think about it a minute.

How am I? How is my life? How are my relationships with the people around me? The people I should be respecting and loving and caring for. How are those?

How are the subtleties of each of those? You know, you can do a lot damage and a lot of comforting with a tone. With a tone. And we all know the tones. Because we've all heard.

You know how we know which tones hurt? Because they hurt us when we were kids and we heard them. And we just somehow don't forget that. We get, we fall in love with a woman. We try to find everything about her.

And find out and along the way, we find out what annoys her, and we carefully keep that in the back here someplace. So we can bring out the stiletto on occasion. Defend ourselves. Poke that ice pick in there. Effective living is about and I'm saying this because in step 10 it says, our purpose is to grow in understanding and effectiveness and effectiveness.

And we've done a lot of work if we come to step 10. We have, an amazing amount of work done. We've looked at ourselves and and solved problems with, other people, and made amends, and done a lot of stuff. And of course, the amends process is usually not over by the time we take a look and start living by step 10. One of the most remarkable examples of effective living, of staying on track, of getting off, and then coming on.

I watched a few years ago, and I know you'll know what I mean when I tell you this, the, there was a major league basketball player, one of the Lakers. And he, one day took a huge hit. He got a little note back from the insurance company that he was HIV positive. Now that hugely impacted his game, his relationship with his players, with the Lakers, with his, can you imagine what a sponsor on a big ad would do with that? With his family, he had a relatively fresh marriage, and a little boy.

Every area of his life is hit in a major, major way with a little note from the insurance company. I would guess that almost 90% of the athletes, and I know that most of us, would have tried to hide that as long as we could. Just as an economic matter. I think I can keep this secret for 6 months, and I'll grab every nickel from every endorsement I can. In the meantime, I'll start demanding upfront money.

I'll do this. I'll do that. I'll play as well as I can until I And I'm sure those thoughts must have gone through Magic's mind. I won't even tell my wife. I'm not going to talk about this.

But what did he do within about 24 hours? He called a press conference. He said, Well, I'm HIV positive. What can I do for you? Now, that's effective living.

Because we're all going to take the hits. Some of them very painful. Some of them devastating. And how far off the aiming point am I going to go before I come back? He went off a day and he's back.

He plays ball. He played ball like he lives a spiritual life to me. I mean, that's just it was his energy. I see him over there in the morning where I work out. And, he's quite a guy.

I see that he's involved in an awful lot of projects for people in the black community. I see that he's, and making money too, incidentally. He doesn't think it's cool to not make money on those things. And it's not cool. It's not cool.

But it's just an example. And we've all seen examples of that of people in AA that became very ill. And really took seriously the idea that, when we're served up with some calamity, if we return to this spiritual life that we have been given so generously, we really can meet that calamity with a sense of serenity. Just to the extent that we're doing what we believe that God would have us do. Yeah.

Get back to that, aiming point. And so step 10, is a remarkable way of having the kind of situation with us that, can make a huge, huge difference. We are gonna, there's a couple of other things that I wanted to discuss with you on step 10. The, the idea is to keep it cleaned up. Keep it cleaned up.

To keep on that aiming point. Continue to set right any new mistakes as we go along. Vigorously. Vigorously. The words are wonderful because it means energetically commence this way of living as we cleaned up the past.

We've entered the world of the spirit. Our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness. This continues for our lifetime. We continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear. What we have done now, we've, the word promptly is used in the book for the first time.

Promptly. And the power that we've tapped into gives new meaning to the need for promptly. Promptly. Because we're moving with power now, we're moving rapidly, and we're moving more effectively than we've ever moved in our lives. And we will bump into people.

We will cause hurt feelings. We will cheat. And go, Kat, what hap how did And clean that up. Those little embarrassing things we hoped, we hoped, we hoped we would never see again have just come back. And they teach us, that we'll always be human.

Love and tolerance of others is our code. This is the place where he says, every day is a day when we must carry the visions of God's will into all of our activities. And we talked yesterday at step 2 about forming a vision of God's will. Forming a vision of what he would have for us. And they used the springboard of the bedevilments on page 52.

I was having trouble with personal relationships and so on. And what would that look like? And that's not a bad vision to carry into the day. I have on my desk a copy of what I wrote down that time, and I'll go down that. Am I carrying this into the day?

Is this something I want to carry into the day? We become we come to to develop what he calls a vital 6th sense. This business is called intuitive thought or 6th sense. And we really, tend to dismiss this. And it's a very important thing to have going on.

Very important. The thing that has to be kind of out of the way is my ego. My ego is coming in here trying to keep under control all the things that are are gonna take me into unfamiliar territory, anything out beyond my belief system. My ego just says, stay away from that. Be careful.

Don't go there. Don't do this. You know you gotta fight. You gotta be right. You gotta do this.

You gotta do that. And on this side is intuitive thought coming in. And it comes in light, low volume, steady, incredibly sweet, very fresh. And my ego overrides it. And it will not compete with my ego.

It doesn't it doesn't compete anymore with my ego than the moon does with the dogs that bark at it. I mean, what would the moon do with the dogs that bark at it? No. It just keeps on being the moon. The dogs are of little consequence to the moon.

And the intuitive thought is like that. A few years ago, I had a remarkable experience. I'm in court. And you know, in court, you can't do that. You gotta get in there and fight and win.

And I get so prepared and so amped up. And I go in there, and I'm just into my trial book and into my head. And sometimes, I'm so busy with what the next question is gonna be. I don't hear the answer to the one I just asked. I don't I lose the impact of the jury, and I lose the energy of the judge, and I don't know what's going on.

And I'm all up here in my head. And I've learned that, that my my best best posture in a courtroom is to be in the room, To be in the room a 100%. And I'm in that room, in that courtroom one day, representing one of the cities in Southern California. There were 2 other parties. 1 was a police officer, a motor officer, that had been hit by a guy driving a Mercedes.

And the 3rd party was the guy driving the Mercedes. And the guy driving the Mercedes, was a arrogant guy. He's never done anything wrong in his life, ever. Not ever. So he was fun to be around.

I enjoyed him a lot. And his attorney was kind of in the same category. And, so I was there with the city that had hired the guy that paid out a lot of money to get this motor officer back in uniform again. And the, judge, was determined that he was gonna keep us there all day if it would settle the case. He didn't want to go through the 3 week trial that was going to have to follow.

And I'm sitting there and I'm looking at this motorcycle officer, who I liked. His leg had been shattered. He was never going to drive a motorcycle in uniform again. And he loved that duty. And his attorney, the cop's attorney, was there.

And the Mercedes driver and his attorney. And the insurance guy with the money. And the case was worth a lot of money in the city. My client had spent a lot of money to put this guy back together again, and they wanted their money back. And I thought, you know, I'm just going to love these people.

I'm going to love every one of them here. And I looked at that cop, and I loved him. I was loving him. I was just thinking, man, that must be shattering. You young guy, 35, something like that.

Been on the force a while, had a few years to go. Loved driving motorcycles. And he wasn't going to do that anymore. He's on a desk now. And I began to get some compassion for him.

And I looked at his attorney who was kinda greedy. He wanted a fee out of the deal. He was more interested than that in that. I looked at the, guy driving the Mercedes and his stony face. I loved him.

I loved his attorney. I loved him. I loved him. And I loved the insurance guy with the money. I really loved him.

Loved him. Finally, I went over there after a few minutes and I said to the the cop, I said, I wanna talk to you. His attorney was right there. I said, I wanna talk to you. The attorney said, we can't do that.

I said, I can I wanna talk to both of you? Let's go out in the hall. And we went out in the hall, and I sat down with the cop and with his attorney, and a little bench along there. And I sort of talked past the I said to the police officer, what do you want? What do you want from this case?

You're not gonna get your leg back. You're not gonna get your job back. You're not gonna get your hazardous duty pay back. What do you want? What would seem fair to you?

The only thing they can do is give you money. What's the number? And he had never really talked about that with anybody before. And he didn't nobody had ever said to him, here's the deal. Nobody can they can't go make that guy driving a Mercedes take off a leg and give it to you.

You can't do that. The only deal you got is money. What's the number? What would seem fair? And he finally threw out a number.

And I said, you can't have that. The jury will not give you that number. And even if they gave you something like that, your attorney would take his fee, and the costs, and all of that stuff would go on. I said, the jury will probably come back with a number about like this. And I gave him the number.

And I said, and even then, here's what's gonna come off the top. Really, what we want to know is what you want to put in your bank account. What you think would be fair. Fortunately, there was a lot of insurance on this Mercedes. And we talked at some length.

And I talked to him in a way that I really I really felt. And he got it that I felt his loss. And I felt his his sense of there's not man, there's not enough money in the world. Do you know what I'm saying to you? There's not enough money in the world.

I know. But that's all that you can get. That's it. That's all that the system allows you to have. And we finally came up with a number.

And it was sure more than they wanted to pay. And I would have to add to that what the city had spent. And I checked it with his attorney who he's gonna lie. He'd never talked to a guy like this. But now we had a number.

And I went over to the, attorney that represented the donkey and the Mercedes. Did I say donkey? Yeah. Loving that donkey. And I, I asked him, I because it wasn't really his money, his insurance money.

But I said, do you want to go through a 3 week trial here? He said, I really don't. I don't have time for that. And I I commiserated with him. I could've what occurred to me to say is, well, you had plenty of time to almost kill a cop.

But I didn't say that. And I don't judge. I think you've learned that about me by now. But I did say I understand exactly how you feel. Because this isn't what you do for a living.

This is what we do for a living. And you need to get about your business. Because he was a high earner. And, I said, what you need to do is, get with the idea of settling this case. Because the truth of the matter is, whether you like it or not, the jury is gonna find you responsible for the injuries to the police officer.

And all your squirming and kicking and ranting and raving isn't gonna change that. They're gonna nail you. The jury is gonna come back with a verdict against you for that accident. They will not believe your testimony about the light changing suddenly and all of that hot comedy that you've come up with. And he's just kinda looking at me.

And I go but I get their general agreement that they don't want a trial. And I go over and I sit down with the insurance guy who's sitting there stony faced, and he's not gonna budge, and he's not gonna do this and that. And I paint him a little bit of picture. But I'm loving the guy. I'm loving the guy.

And I loved him, and, talked to him, and laughed with him. And I've been in his position many times where I'm on the defense of a case, And I've got the insurance guy in my hip pocket. And we talked and we met each other on other cases and stuff. And, and I said, you know, this could this could be a runaway case. The jury is gonna like that cop.

And they're not gonna like your insured over there. They're not gonna like this arrogant guy. They're not gonna like him. And the more he screams and wiggles and carries on and refuses to admit he was responsible, the more they're gonna bang him. And you need to really, open up that purse just a little more and get us some money here.

Well, we went around a little bit more, but by the end of the day, by 4 o'clock, I called my client, the city. And I talked to the deputy mayor over there and I said, we got the case settled. And we got it settled at a good figure. And we put it on the record and it's all over. And he said, God, that's wonderful.

He said, did you get some money back for the city? I said, I got every nickel that you spent. He said, my God, how did you do that? And I didn't wanna tell him, Well, I'm just loving people today. So I say, I don't know what I said.

Well, that's what you hired me to do or something like that. But it's effective living. It's growing and understanding and effectiveness. It's step 10. It's a huge chance to take in the middle of a courtroom scene to just begin loving people.

But if it works there, it'll work anywhere. It even works at home. Although, I hesitate to suggest that you actually love people in your own home. That could be dangerous. They won't recognize who no.

I'm kidding. They'll, they respond very well. Let's take a a break and come back in a few minutes. 12 and 12. To a certain extent, Wilson gets into the business of forgiveness.

And the whole point of step 8 is forgiveness. And he doesn't really say much about how to do it, either in the 12 and 12 or in the, big book. And what he says is, among other things, we're as we go into step 9, we're about now about to ask forgiveness for ourselves. Why shouldn't we start out by forgiving them, one and all? And we slam right through that.

Another place in step 80 says, these obstacles, however, are real are very real. The obstacles that we step 9. The first and one of the most difficult has to do with forgiveness. The moment we ponder a twisted or broken relationship with another person, our emotions go on the defensive. To escape looking at the wrongs we have done another, we resentfully focus on the wrongs he has done us.

This is especially true if he has, in fact, behaved badly at all. Triumphantly, we seize upon his misbehavior as the perfect excuse for minimizing or forgetting our own. And we and his, antidote to this is forgiveness. And forgiveness is an extraordinarily powerful thing. A few years ago, a good friend of mine, brought me back in touch with, a writer in the thirties in New York by the name of Emmett Fox.

Wilson really loved Emmett Fox and had, done, had a lot of contact with him. And he was a very effective human being. And he wrote, among other things, a book called the Sermon on the Mount. And in the Sermon on the Mount, he dissects the Lord's Prayer. At the end of that book, Sermon on the Mount, he takes a look at the Sermon on, but he also takes a look at the Lord's Prayer.

And he, takes each of the seven clauses of the Lord's Prayer and, takes that apart. I was reading this. I took this book with me on the airplane to go someplace. And on the way back on a Sunday afternoon, I'm in the airplane, and I just happened to open this to the, Sermon on the Mount and to the Lord's Prayer. And I read the part in the Lord's Prayer that had to do with forgiveness.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And he does a very remarkable job there. And I realized, not withstanding the fact that my amends were completed, not withstanding the fact that I had done all this work on myself, I realized sat there in that airplane and read what he had to say about forgiveness, that I was still suffering from the fact that I had not forgiven. I had not forgiven. It didn't seem to me, it hadn't really come up in a sharp way during the process of the steps.

And I read what he had to say about it. And I read what he had to say about how to do forgiveness. And I read what he had to say about the price of not doing this simple act of forgiveness. And I made a list of the people that I had yet to forgive. I just wrote it down on a piece of paper on that airplane.

And before that airplane landed, I had gone through this act of forgiveness as to each of those 10 people. There were 10 of them. And I, can't tell you how I lightened up in my thinking about these people. Because I just had never let them off the hook. And this is a remarkably effective thing.

I do this in my home, in my marriage. Because my wife, loves me very much, and I love her very much. But we step on each other's toes. She, corrected me in, front of, people, a month ago. I remember, feeling really hurt about it because the the truth of the matter was I wasn't being clean with what I told them about some certain thing.

Friends of ours, and I was embellishing some story so I looked better. And she corrected me. And she didn't do it out of any venom. She just said, oh, no. You know what?

That wasn't quite and, man, she just blew my covers, you know. And did it really without any kind of, anything on it, as far as I could tell. But, boy, I wanted to punish her for that. Yeah. And, instead, I forgave her for that.

I just let it go. A few years ago, I was with somebody, and I learned it here that I was with a gal this is some time ago, but I was with a gal and I was raising that boy with her. And we all lived together and we bought a puppy. And I woke up on Sunday morning and let the pup out the back door. And then I called him in and I went out to get the paper and I put some coffee on.