Steps 8 & 9 at the Stateline Retreat in Primm, NV

Thank you. My name is Clint Hodges. I'm an alcoholic. Good to be here. Thank you so much.

And thank you, Bob, for putting this together. I know you didn't do it single handedly, and I know you had a great committee, but I'm, grateful that you put it together. Because these, speakers are amazing, inspiring. I know some. I'm just getting to know some others, and I'm glad that you are here.

Somebody made the comment that there probably weren't too many new people here. But there may be some people that haven't tapped into the power necessary to make amends the way it says to do it in this literature of ours. And by the way, we're all very, very partial to conference approved literature. We're all very, very partial to the big book and to the 12 and 12, but we don't wanna be worshiping those texts. It's not like that.

And where there's, difference of opinion about their relative merit, whether a particular paragraph means one thing to one person and something else to another person is, largely a matter of where you are when you read it. There's, it means more to me than it did both of them. Especially the big book means much more to me than it did 40 years ago when I got sober and read it for the first time. It's become meaningful to me in the last 17 years in a way that I never thought it would. 17 years ago, my life dropped out from under me.

I had demanded so much out of life. I had demanded that my image carry me through every every situation. I was, all about my image. I'd gotten sober, been sober a while. I was I'd gone through law school, at night with the encouragement of a sponsor.

I had and I thought that, in looking back on it, I knew that the law school experience and having a license to practice law would in fact get me some power. Some power. Because I knew in some vague way that even after 23 years of sobriety, I didn't have any power. And I wouldn't have been able to use that language back then, but I really thought that it would make a difference. And it doesn't really help much.

I mean, it's, it's kind of fun work. It's the kind of thing that you it's easily prescribed. You practice your character defects and call it advocacy and send out a bill. And it drains you a little bit more a little bit more because you're trying to do things you cannot do. But I loved it and I still do that work.

And I'm glad to be doing it. Maybe because what I did before I went to law school was sell carpets, and that's not something you can really get your passion into. I I didn't much care whether those carpets got sold or not. Hard to believe, isn't it, that I just so I was glad to be doing that. And I had made some furtive stab stabs at amends.

This idea of reparation. This idea of atonement, this idea of knowing we have wronged other human beings and made a a try at evening it all up. But you need power to do that. You need power. You need access to power.

Even to make the list that it suggests in step 8, you need power. Wilson says that we have the list already from our inventory. The guy the guys that took me through the steps when I was 23 years sober didn't let it go at that. They said dig out your Christmas card, your business list, the whole thing. Scan of course you have a lot of amends to make from your inventory, from step 4, from step 5, but you need more than anything to absolutely find out everyone.

And if you make this little prayer, take me to my next amends and give me the power to make it. You will read all of these lists with something different in mind because you want to be free. You want to be free. And I had not been free at all. Because I was so caught up in in those days with how you saw me, I wanted to be admired.

I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be, seen as somebody whole and complete, as far as I can tell. I was deluded enough to think that you wouldn't spot the difference. And so part of going to law school was to cement that image. And walking around with an image is not really a very, interesting thing to do.

You know, have you ever when I was in the Marine Corps, they had us camouflage tanks with branches so they looked like trees. My tanks always looked like tanks with branches on them. And it's not exactly, where I wanted any when you get have an image, you're just some donkey carrying around an image all the time. And you see a girl you like to go high, and she hears you. She doesn't hear that.

She hears hee haw. Hee haw. Because she knows whatever she has is not real. Whatever she's got a hold of or talking to is not real, has no real depth. And I was sober.

And I was glad to be sober. And I was in AA. And I was going to meetings, and I was doing all of that stuff. And I at depth, I hoped that I could skate through. I had made a little stab at making amends.

I'd gone to dental school along the way. And, that was a whole tragedy all its own. I won't go into that, but I was thinking when Charlie was talking about fear, I was in dental school after college because one day my dad who scared me to death said, well, what do you I was in high school. He said, what are you gonna do with your life? And I don't know where it came from, but I said, I'm gonna be a dentist.

What the hell? What is that? You know? And he didn't hit me. So I thought, well, now we've got some kind of a decision about a career.

And I went to college and I went to dental school for 2 years, and that was an awkward period in my life because by then I'm drinking and I'm taking dexamil, they had in those days, a combination of Dexedrine and Milltown. So you're supposed to just, you know, float through, I guess. Keeps you awake a lot of the time. But it makes you shake. You remember when the next morning you're off of that stuff and you shake?

That would have been bad enough, but they just come out with a new high speed air ribbon handpiece, and, my mornings on Saturday in the clinic were, a little colorful. They don't like to hear you say whoops. And during that time, I roomed with a guy. And one night, I set his couch on fire. He had the furniture.

I moved into his apartment. We were together to take care of this complex, do the gardening and stuff like that in Portland. And, I woke up and the couch was on fire. And I knew what had happened. I'd gotten drunk and light, and a cigarette had gone down in the cushions.

And it was, I'm struggling to get the couch out of the living room and out into the street. And he woke up, not a happy guy, found his way into the living room and the 2 of us carried this couch out, into the street and there it smoldered for 3 days and was finally dragged away. And then I'm sober for maybe 2 years, and you've been talking about amends and making things right and doing all of that. So I was working by this time. I had a job.

I had a, I was bothered by that couch thing. So I sent him a letter. I'm sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm so sorry about burning your couch down. Here's a check to cover that expense.

And he sent me a nice letter back with the check. He was thrilled that I was sober in AA. And he said, donate the check to AA. And I'm thinking maybe someday I will. I'm not, sure it could happen.

And that's about what I knew about amends. So now flash forward without any any further effort at that sort of thing for a long time. And I know why I stayed sober. I know why. God's grace.

Same way I got sober. I did not get sober. I did not make a decision to quit. I had no more power to quit drinking than the man in the moon. I got, sober in Glendale.

I I, just on the 14th August in 1960 6, one more time, went up the flight of stairs into the Alamo Club of Glendale, and a kindly guy named Bill invited me to come in and sit down, asked me if I was alcoholic. I mumbled some response. Boy, I told him I, been an alcoholic about a month now, is what I, trying to sell the idea that I was a mild case, that I wouldn't be any trouble, that I really needed to be in out of the weather that hot August day. He said, well, if you're an alcoholic of my type, you're gonna drink no matter what. And he was smiling when he said that.

And that cut through me, I can't tell you. Now, what my biggest secret was out in the air, and Bill knew it, and I knew it, and I couldn't imagine that anybody else knew it, but I drink no matter what. And I didn't drink again from that day on, and I didn't quit. Wilson said there at the hospital, I was separated for the from alcohol for the last time. I didn't even know that, But I felt better.

Telling the truth about that made me feel better. But I also knew that I had about 3 weeks before I hit Skid Row in Los Angeles. And this doesn't have a lot to do with step 9, but it does have to do with my growing awareness of the miracles that we all experience here. Because there's no way that I was the kind of drunk I was on 13th August and didn't drink on 14th. Wilson says, god comes to most men gradually, but his impact on me was sudden and profound.

Oh my. Yes. Yeah. Sudden. In a day, in the blink of an eye, I was my relationship to alcohol changed.

It was profound. I mean, when a power goes to that part of me that needs a drink all the time and heals it up, that's profound. That's deep. And he he didn't mull it over. I just had surrendered that I would always drink.

And he said, okay. Or words to that effect. I didn't know any of this for a long time. I couldn't quite get to the idea that I had gotten myself sober. And there are so many people in Alcoholics Anonymous that contributed and calmed me down and gave me security and love and affection and guidance that I didn't worry about it a hell of a lot.

But then all of the things that I had, accumulated to augment my image over 23 years were taken from me. They just disappeared within about 90 days. The house was on the market, and the car was gone, and the lady was gone, and my law partner was gone. The stream of income was gone. And I don't think I've ever been more frightened, ever.

Certainly not in sobriety. I knew that what would become I didn't ask I didn't wonder what would become of me. I knew that, like my little brother, I'd be pushing a cart in the streets of Los Angeles with my crap in it. I was as afraid as I had ever been, and I walked around bumping into walls. I was back in, Kentucky at a conference and met some guys that knew something about these steps.

One of them said I'm moving to Santa Monica in the spring, I'll call you. Because it was painfully apparent that I was lost, sober, and not doing at all well. And he called me. He called me. And said, you know, I don't know why it is that you've avoided the steps so long, but it's about time.

Isn't it? And I said, yeah. I'm living in a little apartment at the bottom of the hill. I'm driving a sturdy Chevrolet instead of that Mercedes. I'm trying to rebuild the law practice, and I'm terrified.

He said, we'll go on a journey together. He kinda got a little snippy with me. 1, somebody did. They said that I had the perfect cake mix kind of approach toward the big book. Like he I said, I don't know what that means.

He said, well, if you wanted a chocolate cake, you'd go out and buy a box of cake mix, you'd bring it home, and your style would be to read it carefully, every word on it, and then complain that you didn't have any cake. And so you gather some people around you and you'd read it with a group and you'd read it in unison and you'd translate it to French. And you do a lot of tricks with that box of cake mix, but it's not going to produce any cake for you. You have to actually breed it and get it and do what it says to do. Nothing short of that is gonna get the job done for you.

And we're gonna go on a little journey together if you want to. Neither one of us is coming back. And I was frightened enough to be hounded into that awful commitment to read the first 164 pages, to agree that I was willing to do what they said to do. And I didn't even know what that agreement meant or what they would tell me it meant. I just started in.

And I started in by And everything I did in the book up through those early steps augmented my sense of powerlessness, my sense of total inability to manage my life. I began to see that more clearly than ever. I didn't believe it up till that point. I didn't believe I couldn't manage my life. I mean, I'd gone to law school.

I was successful in trial work. I was, I I could do, I did everything I tried except get along with people and rid that my myself of that knot of knot in my gut. And have a decent relationship with another human being. I couldn't have that. Oh, I had arrangements, to be sure.

And there's a terrible difference between an arrangement and a relationship. And I wanted a relationship and there's nothing wrong with an arrangement which is just a contract. You do this, I'll do that, and it always has a punitive clause in it in case they don't live up to what you think they should do. You can scold them, or take a beating if it's your part to be deficient. An arrangement can be great if everybody's on the same page because the idea is for security.

You know who you're going to the prom with. But a relationship is a different matter. And I say it only because the book never talks about a arrangement with God or with our fellow humans, nor does it talk about a partnership. Not really. We're given some examples in the book that use the words father and child as one possible relationship, Employer, employee as another possible relationship.

Director and actor as another possible relationship. Agent and principal, there are 4 of them. All those sounded just fine to me but they didn't mention partnership. And Thomas Merton says we know you want us to be real partners with you in this business of living, but that won't work much for me. I don't I think it'd start out God and Hodges on the letterhead, But it would be, no time before it was Hodges and God, and then we don't need any partnership meetings.

And then it's of counsel over there on one side, God of counsel, if I need him. And that had been I tried at just about every conceivable way. I'd been brought up in, the hell, fire, and brimstone of the Church of the Air in Billings, Montana. And I learned by the time I was 14 that God didn't care. I've learned by the time I was probably 5 that God didn't answer my prayers.

I learned by that time that he doesn't shield me or anybody else from terribly painful events. My mom got sick with cancer when I was 12. She died when I was 14. And I stood at that graveyard in the low rent part of the cemetery at Billings, Montana as they poured dirt on her coffin, furious with her. She loved my sister more than me.

My sister was born when I was 4a half or something. And I didn't know that gone were the days when my mom would tuck me in, say a prayer with me. Those were the happiest moments of my day. We'd whisper our little secrets, we'd laugh, I could make her laugh in the middle of World War 2 with my father overseas and nobody knowing how that was gonna come out, I could make my mom laugh. Give her a moment of levity, and I took great solace from that.

And one day that was all over because she said, are you do you mind if I bring a little baby home from the hut? No. Bring her home. Bring her home. And that was the end of it.

They had a little room set aside for this kid. And my mom spent all her time in there or so it seemed to me. And I devised, even then I was an expert at managing things, and so I devised a means by which I could solve that problem and get my mom back. I decided that I would encourage my sister, who was maybe 7 weeks old, to move out. So I'd go in there and thump her on the head and, you know, give her a little, you're through here, pal.

I'll help you pack, but it's time to go. Love you. Get out. My mom caught me with those shenanigans and threw me out of this the nursery. And before I hit the wall in the hallway, I I knew.

We know in an instant. I knew she didn't love me. I knew she loved my sister more. I knew she had betrayed me. And I knew it to the depths of my soul.

And some ideas were formed that day for me that I didn't even smell for years. But I had the bad effects of those ideas. When you can't trust your mother, and by reference your grandmother, you don't have much of a chance of being able to trust any important women in your life. And you can't form a relationship on that. I neither respected nor trusted women and I knew they'd go for it for about 4 years and then it would be all over.

And that's how it turned out. I'm, what we call much married, and, all those marriages are 4 years in length or thereabouts. One longer than that while I was going through law school. Not that she I was just too busy to get a divorce. I guess I don't know what it was.

Always uneasy around women, especially the ones that were powerful women. Women whose approval I wanted. Always, always feeling at the effect of that. And, of course, I was scared to death of my dad when he came home from the war. He's, he was a bad drinker, and, he was quick with his fists.

And I just hated to be around him. On Saturday morning, we'd seem to be having fun and then he would reach in into the cupboard over the refrigerator and take that bottle down. And I knew I quickly learned that we were not gonna see much of him anymore. He didn't want to be with us anymore. And he would drink for a while and then leave the house, and we wouldn't see him, and wouldn't see him.

And my mom got increasingly angry and increasingly frightened, and we didn't know what was going on. And so now I can't trust male authority figure. I can't trust men that I should be able to rely on, and I can't trust women that should be endlessly supportive of my nonsense. And I've got some amazing material to work with. I got some old ideas, as Wilson calls them.

And I did a lot of damage believing that that's just how life is. And I gotta hurt you before you hurt me. And I gotta leave you before you take off, before you stop loving me. And and if I could have said the truth about any of that, I would have If I had known it, I don't think I would have said it, but if I had known the truth, the truth would have been, hey, you know what? You're a very nice person and I know you like me.

You're a pretty lady and I know you care about me, and I wish I could love you too. But you see, I didn't get the love I needed when I was a kid. I don't have any left for you. If I ever get all the love I need, I'll be, you're gonna be the first on the list for me to love. But I couldn't say that, but that's kinda how it floated out.

And so I withheld and I withdrew and I did all of that. And over time, their dignity leaves them. And you add in the joys of alcoholism and, we easily take their dignity away. We easily invade the power of men we should respect. We easily wanna get them before they get us.

And so it was with that and I had a twin brother who I began to suspect that my mom loved him more than me. And so I and we would fight. You know, when he's like 7 years 7 minutes older than I am. And when we were teenagers, we'd go out in the backyard and go at it. And, you know, when you're popping each other with everything you have, 10 minutes of that is a long time.

And sometimes I tagged him, but too often too often he nailed me and I'd go down. And I would be impotent and furious and angry and determined to nail him the next time. And there would be a next time with the same result all too often. And then he started competing with me scholastically, and he's a good student. And I couldn't even kick his ass in the classroom.

And you kinda get a sense that there's something wrong here. There's some I am deficient in serious ways. And that drink And then he we're 16, and he This is my this is my companion. This is my guy. We finally knew learned how to not give in to the toughs in the neighborhood, but to stand side by side and stay together, and we were formidable.

And then he fell in love with a girl, he left me for all intents and purposes. Where'd you go? What happened? Oh, I was with Barbara. And you swallow that.

I guess he doesn't love me. Doesn't not interested in me. And Barbara was clearly giving him something that I was not gonna give him and so, he was very taken with her. And given all of that given all of that, and that's not much, it's just a a screwy way to start a life. When I was 16, I had that first drink in high school after a football game.

I loved it. I loved that drink. I I it gave me a feeling I was in touch for a moment with something in me that I could not have explained in those days. Today I think I was in touch for a moment or 2 with the divinity in me. There was something about that booze that moved the clouds away and the hatred and the anger and the sense of inconsequential conduct, the sense of being just another blob on the earth went away, went away.

And I thought the booze had done that, and I think the booze just moves those things aside for a minute, so we get a glimpse of what we really want. But as long as we think the booze did that, We'll go after that booze as long as we can. So I'm 16 and now I'm drinking. It wasn't long before, it had me pretty good. Pretty good.

And it worked for a while. It worked for a while. And I made that holy declaration to my dad about being a dentist and got through college and started dental school and got thrown out at the end of, that time after burning the couch down. Drank on Skid Row for, 6 months. Couldn't hide the deferment thing from the military, and I'm now in the Marine Corps.

Loved the marine corps. Acted badly in the marine corps. Got out of this marine I was an officer, a first lieutenant in the marine corps when I got discharged. And thank God I was given an opportunity to stay in the reserves, which I did for 5 years after I got sober. And I was so grateful for a chance to put something back in by commanding reserve troops.

And I'm sober. I'm sober. 29 years old and I'm sober. And 30 and 35 and so on. Charlie mentioned the yard, Clancy's yard.

I'd since moved over to the west end of town and I like going over to that yard. I'm no great athlete and didn't really pretend to be, but I had the moves, you know. I looked like I knew what I was doing. And I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that sense of exhilaration of just playing.

Just playing. And it was easy because there were rules there like there was in the Marine Corps. And as long as you played within the rules, it was like having a fence around everything and you couldn't fall off. You couldn't get lost. You couldn't do any and I it was very, very good for me.

And, I would take my youngest son over there. He was the only one that lived with his mother in Southern California, and I would go by and get him. And we'd go over to the yard together. And I didn't know anything about what a child needed and I didn't seem to care much. I mean by that, I didn't look into it.

I didn't get the counsel from anybody that was being a successful parent. And I say it only because when it finally came time for me to make amends to that boy, I found out something very interesting. We had talked for some time, and I asked him what was the most painful piece of it all. And he said, you know what's funny? After you were sober, you take me over to Clancy's place.

And I was left with a feeling that I I wasn't enough. I said, how did you get that feeling? He said, because you never took me alone anywhere. We always went to other adults and you paid more attention to the other adults than you did to me. And that is so painful to hear that.

I didn't know from an exemplary parent or grandparent quite how it went. I had no idea. And I wept with that. Charlie and I were talking the other day about his relationships with his kids and how sweet and precious they are. And it makes you wanna go back and redo it.

Now, I have, finally, at 23 years of sober sobriety, this guy, this young man is, married with kids. This young man is making a very good living in Orange County, California. This young man is, the guy that heads up all of the commercial real estate for a fella named Brynn that owns the Irvine company, and he does real well. And he has a beautiful wife. He has 3 beautiful kids.

And, I somehow or other missed his childhood even though I was sober, and somehow or other missed so much that I went traipsing down there and had that talk with him. But before that, I had to get in some kind of fit spiritual condition. There, I brought this little book up here because it has the little bit of, the 12 and 12 in it. The first paragraph in the 12 and 12 on step 9, step 9 says make direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or others. And the first paragraph says, good judgment, a careful sense of timing, courage, and prudence.

These are the qualities we shall need when we take step 9. And I guess it's just as well that I waited till step 9 to make amends because I was not fit to do that first. I didn't have good judgment. I had no sense of timing. I tended to wanna get things over with.

I had no courage, no courage, no moral courage. And prudence? No. I'm not careful about anything. I just, self will run right as me.

But I'm sober all that time. And somebody said it up here today, We have step 1 where we admit we can't we cannot do anything about our alcoholism. Cannot. Can't even quit really. It should say, shouldn't it step 1, quit?

We don't hear that. Uh-oh. No. And I think it's because we can't. Not really.

For whatever reason or another, we go back. And so when that and I began to look back. I began to look back on those remarkable early days. I began to look back on those people in Glendale that were so kind to me, that set a place at the table for me, that welcomed me. Even though they knew I thought that I was gonna be on Skid Row in 3 weeks, they welcomed me.

And how Bill Kennedy was so kind when I was new. He died last year. He had the most beautiful smile of anybody I ever saw. He was a huge factor in my life and I may have spent 1 hour altogether with Bill Kennedy, but it was that critical hour. You made me no promises.

He didn't say if you do this and that. And the third thing, you'll be able to stay sober. He didn't say that. He just said, if you're like me, you're gonna drink no matter what. Good people in AA will tell you don't drink no matter what and you will drink no matter what.

And that would have seemed like a death knell, but to me, it cleared the air. Got it. Got it. My worst fears have been said out loud and it gives you a sense of relief and there's a surrender attached to that. He said come in and sit down.

If you get hungry, I'll fix you a sandwich. We have a little kitchen in the back. And now 23 years has gone by and I'd forgotten all about Bill Kennedy. I'd forgotten all about any notion that I was as powerless as I was. I'd forgotten about anything except my life was not working for me, and worse than that I was very terrified, extremely terrified.

And we finally got to step 8 which is making a list of all these people we had harmed. And I went to my inventory for that. That's the last official act I did with that written 4th step. But I took all of those names under suggestion, under orders, and made a list of everybody on there that it seemed to me I could have harmed in any way. And it was a pretty good sized list.

And then I went to the Christmas card list, and I went to this list, and I went to that list, and other names appeared. And I, asked to be shown the truth about who I had harmed Because by this time, I had the solid beginnings of a relationship with God and that whole thing is another story, but I think we need significant power to effectuate 6 and 7, to really admit those are our old ideas, to really get it that we can't get rid of them no matter how hard we try. If if we could have gotten rid of them, we would have gotten rid of them, but when it began to be so clear that they were ruined us. And we were sober, it could have gone to a 100 people. What am I gonna do about this?

And I think just about all of them would have said, well, you're not gonna do anything about it, but you can ask God to do something for you, like take them away. These old ideas, and Bob was talking about it, It says now these are about to be cast out. That is a huge promise. And they're cast out at 7 when we ask that they be cast out, knowing what they are. And it's fun to sit and listen to a 5th step and the guy hates his wife, but we've started much earlier than that.

Turns out he hates his mother. And he hates her because she wouldn't give him money for a Halloween mask. Now, what would a guy have to believe? What would the old idea be that would drive a guy to think that his mother betrayed him by not burping up the dime for the Halloween mask? Well, he has to believe that, she thinks he needs a Halloween mask and won't give him one or doesn't understand the need or doesn't have the dime to spend, he has to believe that if that's what love amounts to, love ain't much.

I mean, we get all kinds of goofy ideas in our head. I adored my son, but I didn't know what to do with him. And I took him to the yard and kinda let him play with the other kids. I thought that was good shepherding. He did not.

Made him feel inadequate. And you sit and listen to a 5th step and watch those ideas begin to pop up, float to the surface. What would a guy have to believe to believe that his mother or father loved his brother more than he was loved? You'd have to believe there's a limited amount of love. There's not enough to go around.

That's what you have to believe. You must believe that. Is it true? Oh, no. No.

No. No. It's not true. But we believe that and our lives are bound to that idea, not to be given up. We don't even know it's our old idea.

We just think that's the way that it is. Or do you have to believe to hate your brother because he can out point you in a fist fight, out point you in grades? Oh, not every time, but far too often. Do I believe that he's smarter than I am? No.

I cannot believe that. I can believe only that God hates me, or he would not have me playing this stupid game at the effect of fear of my brother who loves me. So, the ideas come floating up if we're looking for them. And we must look for them because they run our lives. And we get through that in 7 and then 8, we have a little more courage from the first seven steps, and we make the list.

And then and only then can we throw that inventory away. We have no further use for it. I was told throw it away. Get it out of your life. The written inventory can go now, but don't be disrespectful.

Whatever you do, be conscious enough to realize you're putting aside some description of somebody you never were. You can take it to the beach, make a little fire, take it up to the mountains, bury it, put it in your fireplace if you have one of those. Put it in a trash bag and put it in the garbage. Whatever you do, be conscious about it and don't try to retrieve it. Let it go, let it go.

It's been very important to you, time to let it go. And so the list of people to whom we owe amends is reduced to, in my case, and as somebody said, there's a lot of lot of ways to do this. And it doesn't much matter as long as it's easy to manage. So I wrote those names down on a 3 by 5 card. One person with maybe 2 or 3 ways I had harmed that person.

I wrote their phone number down. I wrote the harm in the in the middle of the 3 by 5 card. In the upper right hand corner I put it plus or a minus depending on whether I was willing to make amends to them. They said tell the truth, tell the truth. If you're not willing to make the amends, it will come.

But don't make amends to anybody unless you're willing to do that. And by the way, look up willing willing in the dictionary is gladly ready. Can I just conjure up gladly ready? No. How am I gonna get gladly ready?

You're gonna ask for that. Take me to a place where I'm gladly ready to make amends to this person for this harm. And then, I had a stack of 3 by 5 cards. Some of them had a minus, some of them had a plus. And I sat down with this guy that was taking me through and we looked at him.

And there were a significant number of them where when it got right down to it I had not harmed the person. I might have thought bad thoughts about them, I might have resented them, but unless I actually harmed them, he said, no, that's not for that. What about if I gossip? But no, don't go to somebody and tell them you've been gossiping. That's under, except when to do so, it injure them or others.

What will I do to make amends? You will start talking very highly about that person to the same people you bad mouth them. Oh, what an order. Is that it? Is that really it?

Sure. You don't want to stir up more trouble by telling that guy you've been stabbing him in the back. Okay. Okay. Because you can't harm him that way.

Not really. Make him feel bad, but he's not harmed. She's not harmed. So I had a stack of 3 by 5 cards, and they contained each one of them. The name, the type of harm, whether I was willing.

And I said, what am I gonna do about these that I'm not willing to make amends to? And they said, you will become willing. Right now, your fear has you by the neck and you are Everything looks terribly undoable to you. You're gonna ask for power to make the amends and because you're gonna get some satisfying, rejuvenating, wonderful responses, and you will, your unwillingness to make amends to other people on your list in the cards is gonna drop away in large part in large part. Start with the easy ones.

Don't, tackle some terribly something you see as dangerous. Don't do that. And so I started. I was in those days, this was 16 years ago, 15 years ago, I was dating a lady that had a small boy, a son. And I knew beyond any doubt that I owed his father an amends.

And I owed him an amends because I had totally dismissed him. They'd been separated, divorced for some time, but he was drinking and drugging and in terrible shape. And I dismissed this man. He loved that boy. And I was coming to love that boy.

And I didn't have a competitive thing in him in me about that, but I was afraid his father would, injure him. I was afraid the kid would get heartbroken, and so I didn't encourage that relationship. And somehow that seeps out, you know. I'm disdainful of you, John. I never said that to him, but I was.

And one day I was over to I was doing a little his mother had asked me to go over to school for a Halloween festival of some kind and he was in a part, he had a sophisticated part in the Halloween magic. Kind of like last night up here where you had a high level sophisticated, theatrical display. And he was up there and he turned around, he saw me and he waved, and then I looked over here and his dad was in the room. And I thought, oh, man. Oh, man.

What am I gonna do about that? That morning I had said take me to my next amends and give me the power to make it. And I knew. I knew. After this thing was over, I went over to him and I said, how about you and I having a cup of coffee?

And he was clean and sober that day and he said okay. We went to a coffee shop, and that's the way to do it. Amends don't take very long, it doesn't take long to tell the truth. It doesn't take long to say what we have to say. But we don't wanna make it around a meal.

We don't wanna have people coming in and out and bringing food along. We don't wanna do anything. We don't have any agenda beyond making the amends. This is not anything that we want. Something may good may develop out of that, but not at that time.

I was told, keep it brief. Tell the truth. Thank him for meeting with you. Tell him that you've been looking back over your life and you've made a lot of huge mistakes involving other people. He's on the list.

I'm here to make amends to you. I'm here to clean that up, if we can and I hope we can. And so thank you for meeting with me. And here's the amends, here's the harm that I see that I have done. And you tell them the harm.

And you ask them, do you need to tell me how any of that made you feel? And sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. Once in a while, 1 or both of us will be crying by this time. Amen. Somebody's, is this a participate?

Never mind. And you, as it says in the 12 and 12, judgment, courage, and it's very much a feel your way through the thing. And if they say yes, there's other harm, and he did. He had his own list that was pretty extensive. And you just sit and listen to it.

And it's not easy to hear. And finally, you get down to the last question. What can I do to make this right with you? And I asked that question. And at this time, we were, this lady and I were talking about setting up a household together.

I had come to love that little boy very, very much. And I, didn't know what he would say about that. I thought he'd say stay away from my kid. He said, after thinking about it for a long minute, he said, take care of my boy. And a crazy man named Don Pritz had told me 6 months earlier that whatever the answer is to what would you have me do to make this right, that is very important assignment for you.

Don't dismiss it out of hand. There's no better way to know God's will than to honestly and fully and completely respond to whatever you're asked to do. And I did it with a heavy heart. Oh, god. I'm not when I was my kids were young, I was an undependent undependable and dangerous parent.