The Fellowship of the Spirit convention in Queens, NY

I've been listening to since I guess 2002, 2003 and he's just a, a wonderful, wonderful speaker and example of the power, you know, I'm really grateful to to have him in my life, even though it's mostly through tapes, you know, But you know, we do talk on the phone sometimes and he's a great guy, you know, he's a great guy.

And you know, Mickey, Mickey, I don't know too well, but I know

that he was very, very, he was the one who started a fellowship of the spirit. He's gonna, I asked him to talk about that, the history of fellowship of the spirit. And I'll tell you this, you know, I've, I've talked with him on the phone and every time I talk with him, I get this, this calm feeling, this calming feeling. You know, it's like the sunlight of the spirit. I don't know what it is, but he's got that effect

and you know, that's for real. And

Maria Marie M is going to be the Allanon speaker.

I don't know where she is, but oh, there she is. You know, let's, let's give a round of applause to the speakers.

And we're, we're really so, so grateful. Jack, the Marine is going to be here tomorrow and enough out of me. And we'll we'll have them start off any way they want. OK, thanks.

We'll start out with introductions. Thank you very much, Harry. And my name is Mickey. I'm an alcoholic

and it is

a it's a joy to be with you.

There are old friends here and new friends here and it's a pleasure to be in Queens, NY on this beautiful evening talking about life and death.

Umm, being saved from

a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. And give Peter a moment to say hi and then I'll get started. And Peter recovered alcoholic. Hi Peter, grateful be alive and sober and part of a sake of place called Alcoholics Anonymous. Want to thank Harry for this kind invitation. To Mickey, myself, Marie and Marion to be here to share this weekend with you. And to the committee who put this together. So if we can just give it up for the committee.

And so thanks President,

it's a treat for me to share this weekend with my sponsor Mickey and seeing some old friends and I'm sure a bunch of new found friends. I'm thrilled to be here and we hope God leads us to this book. We'll we'll kick it around, share our experience. We'll be coming at you experientially with this book

to illustrate what has happened to us as a result of this book, A power call God and the sacred fellowship called Alcohol Exonomous. So I'm thrilled to be here and get to share with you guys.

Thanks, Peter.

So Harry asked if I would. What we're going to do is I'm going to share a bit of my story with you so that you have some confidence that one of the facilitators this weekend is actually alcoholic. So we're going to do that and we'll each do that. But Harry asked me if I'd share with you a little bit about the origins of the Fellowship of the Spirit conference, says,

and I would love to do that. What happens is that

Don Pritz, who some of you may have known, and if you haven't, if you didn't know him, you may have heard him on tape and unbelievable gentleman in a lifelong, practically lifelong friend of mine and Marie's and Don and Marie and I talked about the fact that we would be invited to conferences around the country

and they were more intimate. They were more like this size than what we had in Colorado. What we had in Colorado was like 1500 people show up at the state convention and there were overflow rooms. It was videotaped, piped in and everything. And I'm going, we often have this great experience to be able to come up and shake people's hands and say hello and and get to know some people in these other conferences. But we don't have that in Colorado.

What do you say we give that a shot?

And so I understand you at Gary be out here. I don't know if it was last year or year before with Bob. Oh,

for those of you came, well,

it's one of those weird stories. We're sitting on Gary's kitchen floor in his double wide trailer in Indianapolis talking about this idea for this conference in Gary's from Cheyenne, WY and lived in Denver for years. And that's where I met

him 40 years ago. Pardon me. And we said, well, all right, we're going to go back to Denver. We're going to talk to Don, and we're going to get this thing rolling. And I said, Don, if you will provide the man and woman power to get this thing pulled together, Marie and I will go and find a hotel. And we each kicked in $250. We put up to 50, and Don put up to 50. And we started the 1st

what we called the Breckenridge Conference

in Breckenridge, Co in 1993.

And I came up with the theme for the first conference. And the theme was the Fellowship of the Spirit, because I feel so strongly.

It's like if you're in the fellowship of the Spirit, you know it

and we look for each other. You have to forgive me this weekend. I am very emotional about this.

How do you tell somebody how you feel about being given your life back and getting a chance to be useful? That if we die tomorrow and we go across the river and we're talking to our boss and he can say, did you do anything for my kids? We can say we tried. You know, we pitched in, we gave it a shot.

So the Fellowship of the Spirit was the first year theme and that name stuck. I didn't expect it to like everything else with this conference, we did not know what the heck was going to happen. We just started it. So I had this idyllic vision of people coming to the Colorado mountains. We would have a few speakers. You could bring your family. We could, you know, you could walk around, enjoy the mountains and it was going to be like that. And then Don says why don't we have

workshops for the steps? Now he's complicated my idea,

which turns out to be the heart and soul of the Fellowship of the Spirit. Conferences, workshops on the steps, this book, these steps as they're written and supported in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, our life itself. So we we went that way. What started out, I thought, we're all going to be walking around, maybe with flowers in our hair. It's an old hippie thing, but whatever

turned out to be, you don't have two seconds to turn around

before you're in another workshop with people from all over the country. And then something started to happen that was really interesting. We would have, I remember going at, we had people come from different sections of the country. So we had people coming from Louisiana. And so the the Louisiana folks would be making, you know, shrimp and, and jambalaya and they'd be cooking these meals in their room. And the people from New Mexico

would be coming up from Santa fantas and they'd be having enchiladas and God knows what Mexican food in their room. And we started bouncing room to room

and being with each other. When you'd get into the room, then

you would see a girl. I remember a girl, young woman from New York, leaning over to a guy from Lafayette, LA, and saying, now where did you find that 4th column in the fourth step or where's that? And we started to watch this thing happen and,

and it was noteworthy because we had people, we call it the Miracle on the Mountain. We have people who come and I tell people the Fellowship of the Spirit in Colorado,

there's no secret handshake. We don't wear the same letter sweaters. We don't do any of that stuff. It's all right smack out of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous,

but something happened in that and it continues to happen today where people will come up and they will find their programs get kick started. They just get this breath of fresh air. And there's and there's people from all over the country. We've had people come from Vietnam. We've had people fly in from London, Australia just to be with us in the mountains. It gives me goosebumps, right?

Gives me goosebumps and and they're coming in. What are they coming for? This is a head scratcher because I can be really very left brained sometimes

and I want to figure it out and I can't. Other than the fact that God has blessed us. We're trying to do what He's asked us to do and it is out of the book. It's not out of the book like I'm going to beat you with this book. It's out of the book. Like I'm going to love you with this book.

I'm going to share with you what this book and the principles and practice is in it have done for me. And then we have panels and we have panels from people from all over the country, all over the world, sharing their experience with what it was like,

what happened and what it's like now. So as a little bit of history for the Fellowship of the Spirit, we used to have 60 people come down from Seattle, WA to be with us and we look forward to every year and they come down like this big gang of joy and chaos.

And then the traders turned around and started their own.

We now have, I say we now have. That is a complete misstatement. There are now, I think about 11 Fellowship of the Spirit conferences. There's Fellowship of the Spirit Dublin. They just started one in Johannesburg, South Africa. We've got one in the Ukraine. The people in Mongolia are very interested about this. Do you understand why I sat down occasionally and say, what is this? What is this thing that

's so magnetic that's drawing people in? It's Alcoholics Anonymous,

but one of the things I want to be careful here, because this is a program of love and tolerance.

This is a program. This is a conference based on what's in here. There's a sense of orthodoxy about it, if I can say that. It's like, why don't we give it a shot? The way it's written,

what can we lose?

Why don't we give it a shot like as it's written and why don't we share with each other out of our experience for what happened in our lives as a result of having done this? So it's it's really catching on around around the country. We have it in the South, we have it here, we have it on Mid-Atlantic. We have all of these. We don't have anything. We're not affiliated with each other except that we do look for each other around the country. And there are phone calls that come, hey, I got somebody who's getting sober in in

Minneapolis. Who do you have, you know, somebody in Minneapolis? You got anybody in Lafayette? Do you know anybody in Queens?

And I'm going to have a yes for that.

So

Harry, that's my shot at it. And in the course of it, I can say we, because we have people will call us, we've got in touch with the people from Johannesburg and they, they said, how did you structure this? What did you do? And we shared with them what we have done, what we did to incorporate to become a nonprofit organization for safety reasons and for prudence and so on down the line.

So

I've had the privilege of going and speaking at, at some of these conferences and,

and I miss Don,

I miss him. That guy was Mr. Moonlight. I don't know, he was something else. And so that's a bit about the Fellowship of the Spirit conference. It is a pleasure to be at the Fellowship of the Spirit New York with you,

and you will surely meet some of us as you trudge the road of happy destiny, right?

Something happens to a person who has alcoholism,

who encounters this big book and somebody who's works out of this big book.

The Greek Orthodox have a term

for actually the Blessed Mother, and the term in Greek is theoticos, and theoticos means God bearer. So literally Mary, you know, is a God bearer. OK. But I think what happens if we work this program out of the book is we become Theotokos.

I'll tell you this and then I'm going to, I'll get the qualifying.

I do you remember this terrible Aurora theater shooting that happened in Denver?

Well, I was a couple of years ago and we were at Marie and I were up with friends up at the Fellowship of the Spirit conference. We came back and our whole intersection was filled with news vans and, and, and journalists running around. We didn't know what was going on. We didn't know why we didn't know that the shooting had occurred. And it turns out that Marie and I live across the street from the psychiatrist of the shooter,

OK, which we also didn't know, which has now been blasted all over the world. And so I'm, I'm sharing this with you about what it means to become Theoticos. And so

the reporters would come up to ask and ask us about her. She's our neighbor. So it would say she's a lovely person, she's a great neighbor. And that's all we have to say about her, period. And

so the dust died down. And then one day we work out of our homes. So the garage is converted into a custom cowboy boot shop. So Amen. And so I tell people I got a convertible shop. I can just raise the door and everybody can come in. Whatever. Let's all get together. And we saw this nice young woman going across the street to knock on our neighbor's door. And our neighbor had the good sense to go into hiding because she was just being inundated. OK,

so she turned around and looked at Marie and I, we were in the shop and she came over and I thought, 00 and she's from Texas. And I've got all these feet, they're called lasts, and they're all hanging from the ceiling and it's what you build boots on. So I've got all these feet hanging from the ceiling and she looks in and she says, hello,

are you a cowboy bootmaker? I said I sure AM. And she says I'm from Texas. She came in and we started talking and I'm thinking to myself, in my cynicism and myself protection, she's softening me up and us up so she can start pumping us for information about our neighbor.

Two hours later we know everything about each other's lives. Now she doesn't have any questions about the neighbor.

And and so a year and a half go by and she says it was great being here. And she called and left a message and she says, Mickey, I want you to know that I think about you and Marie often. I don't think about you every month. I don't think about you every week. I think about you every day. She's ACBS producer

and she says I would like to talk, come talk to you. And I said OK. She says, I want to put you on Sunday morning on CBS.

And so she says, but it's not about the boots, it's about you. And I'm thinking,

what do you want to put me on CBS And it's taken me now and that she I met with some higher ups and it's not happening and I don't think it will. But what it took me all this time and it's taken me months to think about it. I'm thinking to myself, what does she want to talk to me of for? I think she wants to talk to me because she met the God in me.

It's not me. She met the God in me, which is how we are. A program of attraction. Would you agree?

And that's what we're trying to do is create a God sized hole that God can take up residence in, work for us and work through us.

So that's what this weekend is about.

God bless our time together, huh?

So

I started drinking when I was five years old.

I grew up in Europe, and in Europe they would give the kids wine, cut back with water for the evening meal. And aren't we European and ain't I alcoholic?

You know what I'm saying? So when I got sober, I came into the club. I got sober in 1974. I have 40 years of continuous sobriety, which I I'm, I'm sincerely going to tell you, I came to Alcoholics Anonymous at 27 years old for two weeks of sobriety.

I had been drinking all my life and I could not. It's like I got on a train and I knew I couldn't get off the train. I knew it was not going to happen. I'd been on that train all my life, but I was so sick.

I was so exhausted. I was so discouraged

and I wanted off the train and I thought if I could get two weeks of sobriety, I would be so grateful to you in Alcoholics Anonymous because I came to you because you had alcohol in your name. I knew nothing about Alcoholics Anonymous.

I'd seen a movie, The Days of Wine and Roses in 1960, something, and they told me, people told me that AA was in that movie. I don't remember it. I could tell you how much he drank. I could tell you where he hit his hit his bottles. I could tell you how he tore up the greenhouse. But I didn't remember that I, I was in that movie. Think we're not in danger?

It's right in my face and I've got this thing and I don't even remember it.

So if I could get just two weeks where I wasn't that sick, if I get 2 weeks where I wouldn't wake up and my hands would be crippled. I called her friend. I said what's wrong with my hands? He said it's the booze dummy. And I'm thinking, how can booze do this?

To my hands, I don't understand. It's like I came in from Mars or something.

I did not know anything about this disease except I would go over to the University of Colorado Medical Center library. And I'm looking up for what is it in Coors Beer that's making me so sick?

And I was getting close to him, to the rice.

This guy cannot live.

You see what I'm saying? I think it's the rice

and and I found out,

I found out that you had God and Spirit that was going to solve the problem.

And I thought I have got to get out of here.

I'm like, are they going to cure me with fairy tales or what is this? I'm going to die. They don't understand I'm going to die. I got to don't give me fairy tales. I am going to die. So I met with my sponsor. Now my sponsor it turns out was kind of like a Siamese twin triplet, quadruplet guy because I said, can we have lunch? He says, sure. I show up. There's like six guys at the table

always.

And I tell him, guys, I made a discovery. I'm not alcoholic

because if you're alcoholic, you got to do this, you know what I mean? And I'm going to die. So I'm going. I'm not alcoholic. And the the head thug over in the meeting and I was looking at me and he said his guys were about 6-6 and an old sheep rancher. And he looks at me and he says, really

great. He says, you know what? There's a bar on the other side of this restaurant. Come on over, I'll buy you a beer. I said what? He said seriously, come on over and I'll buy you a drink.

I said I can't do that and he said why?

I said, if you, if you buy me that drink, I'll go to hell.

And he says, and you're not alcoholic. It was like my rear end was riveted to the chair. I could not move. And that dispelled that. And the only option that was offered to me was to walk this road, to walk this road, Fairy Taleville, thank God, right? And so it was on this road that my life was given back to me. And I got more than two weeks of sobriety. What was it like when I drank?

I can tell you this,

if you talk to any newcomer at Alcoholics Anonymous, they have a plan.

Everybody's got a plan, right?

Here was my plan. I had a loaded 32 automatic pistol in my top drawer

and if this doesn't work I'm putting my brains on the wall. It was not a great plan, but it was true. And I had that gun up there for the 1st 3 1/2 years I was sober

and my wife is not alcoholic

and she had to live with the knowledge that that gun was in that drawer for 3 1/2 years.

A suicide is not the mark of a flexible personality.

I only had one plan. This doesn't work. I'm out of here. I couldn't tolerate it

and I used to be in a a meetings and I want to put this out on the table here. I am not here this weekend to talk to you about drinking. I am here to talk to you about alcoholism

for real. This is because I got in here and you notice how everything is competitive. Everything

I drank more than you spilled on your tie. First of all, I didn't wear a tie, but you know what I mean. So that makes you king alcoholic. And what am I? I'm a loser again.

Well, I'm more spiritual than that guy, really. Now we got that one going for us. That's a good one.

But I would sit in meetings and I'm thinking I want to die. I'm coming out of my skin. What is wrong with me? What a a do I go to? What anonymous do I go to? I can taste the bullet. I I need help. Where do I go? Who's going to help me

and why I bring that up now and we have still not heard about Mickey's drinking is that the drinking is a like a red flag

that flies. My relationship with alcohol is like a red flag that flies, that tells people because of this addictive relationship with a non addictive substance already we got heresy on the table.

This individual has alcoholism. If this individual has alcoholism, there's a whole lot more wrong with him than the way he drinks.

And I say I'm addicted to a non addictive substance. What does that mean?

It means that nine out of 10 people in this world, give or take, these are mother-in-law statistics. 9 out of 10 people can drink alcohol with more or less impunity.

One out of 10 people

has a deadly addictive allergic relationship to ethyl alcohol, and nobody's been able to tell me how many drinks do you have to drink to catch alcoholism?

Seriously, if we're going to talk about what's up, well, I drank so much I became alcoholic. Is that how it worked in your life? I was down to shoot when it started.

You don't have to buy what I say. We know that nobody speaks for Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm here to share with you my experience, strength and hope. But I'm putting this out because I want, I want to say something. I want to say this is a real disease. And when I stop drinking, I ran into Mickey

and I couldn't handle him. And he thought these terrible things and he was erratic. One minute he's depressed, the next minute he's going to run IBM. What is who is this guy? And I'm stuck with him. And I got to bring him into the room. Oh, let's have a potluck. I got to bring Mickey into the room.

Scared me to death. I'd be in an early AA meeting and people would say it was a discussion meeting. Mickey, what would you like to say about this? And I had to pull the committee inside of me for who was going to speak because I've been wearing so many masks for so long. Trying to be whatever I thought you wanted me to be, so you wouldn't reject me, so I wouldn't be isolated.

So I had that go in my whole life. What did it look like?

I I got drinking with my parents. I stole alcohol from my parents. My parents would have a party and I would drink what they called a dead soldiers. The dead soldiers were whatever drink it was. Now the ice is melted in the thing and we just eject the cigarette butt. Now we're going to, you know, social drinker, social drinker

and

and I got kicked out of every school I went to until I got to high school. I got kicked out, but it wasn't like let's have a parent teacher conference. Mickey seems to be disturbed having some trouble. It was get the hints and do not come back to this school.

And I want you to know what I did with addicts, those experiences, I thought, what is wrong with them,

right? We are bulletproof. We're going to die behind this thing

and we don't even know we're in prison. And I'm, you know, I got to think so in the eighth grade,

which I also got kicked out of, I got it figured out for the first time in my life. I found a book about a man that I could identify with completely. His name, It was a it was a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon Bonaparte was kind of a runt Corsican. And he sat back and he said, you know, he looked at the world. He says, I think I can take it. And he did a good job, right?

I read this book and I thought, my God,

I'm a genius.

I mean this sadly, I'm a genius and they don't understand. Sooner or later they're going to understand that I'm a genius.

Now this genius is about to get kicked out of another school.

Because I would do things like the teacher would say something I didn't like, and I would stand up in the classroom and tell the teacher what I thought of him. It doesn't wash

and I pulled other things which I shudder about. Today

I was an altar boy and a vandal

and I never knew which one was going to show up. And I meant both of them.

And you know Bill Wilson, it talks about him going into the Winchester Cathedral when he was overseas in England in World War 1,

and he walked up to the altar and he said he knew there was a God.

And I was in Rapid City, SD, at Cathedral Grade School, and I went in there

on a hot afternoon all by myself. And I stood in that church and I stood before the altar, and I knew there was a God,

and I knew that the train was waiting me, waiting for me at the front door of the church.

I had the God. I walked out. I got back on the train and I went to hell.

I was a student of history. I'll give you an idea, they said. What will you like, Mickey? I'll tell you what I was like.

I grew up in Europe. When I was in France, the flea market looked like 5th Ave. in New York.

Racks and racks and racks of clothes. What kind of clothes? Not to uniforms. They turns out they didn't need them anymore.

Helmets, decorations, swords, daggers, guns, all of this. I grew up with that. I walked across the battlefields of World War Two, World War One. I got immersed in all of that, and I got fascinated because of total ignorance with the Nazis.

So it's 8th grade Rapid City, SD Cathedral grade school. If they're going to have show and tell,

can you see this one coming?

So I'm going to bring my Nazi memorabilia to the

just ignorant. They headed me off at the pass.

I had a reaction to this in those days, the nurse, this was in 1960. In those days, the nurses, for instance, would have these liquid shoe Polish, right, the cotton dauber at the end and they put it on their shoes with their uniforms, right, and go to work. I got a hold of

one of these.

Honest God I'm so sorry.

I just want to give you an idea.

So on Saturday night I got one of those things and I put swastikas in the school windows this big

in a Catholic grade school in Rapid City, SD

And

I showed up on Monday morning and my henchman was pulled out of class 1st by the principal. Now Dan's gone, my compatriot in this thing and, and I, I, I know this is it. The jig is up, man. I'm, I'm going down on this thing. He never shows back up. She calls me out in the hall. I walk out, the first things out of my mouth. I didn't do it. She says you didn't do what I said. I didn't put this

nailed.

So while my classmates graduated and you graduated from 8th grade in their suits and the girls were in their pretty dresses and they got to go to the first dance, I stood across the street in my vinyl motorcycle jacket smoking old gold cigarettes and drinking grain Belt beer. Into hell with you. That's what I was like.

It's like I'm talking about somebody else. I was never geared to carry that weight. I was never designed by God to live that in, that alienation from my own soul. And here's the kicker. I applied to two seminaries to be a priest. Please talk to me.

I don't know if anybody can relate to the duality of these positions. They are completely nuts. And I really wanted to be a Catholic priest. I really did.

But the train, you see, and I wish I could tell you that it was the ethyl alcohol that caused the psychosis here. It was not the ethyl alcohol. If I told you that I drank to control my alcoholism, would that mean anything to you?

I tried to get my medicine to put out the torture, and I wanted to be a good boy. I sincerely did and I could pull it off sometimes.

So that's what I was like

and it just

got wetter

and the medicine didn't work.

And, and you know, Marie talks about my wife talks about how she'd be in a car with me. We'd gone to the party. I get in the car, we're going home, she's driving and and I'm really friendly. She looks left, turns back to me and I'm somebody else.

Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

And I did not know what was wrong with me. And I saw psychiatrists, psychologists. I I went and talked to priests. I talked to anybody. Please help me. I don't know. I'm coming. I mean, I was sketchy. I was like this. I was, I was in motion. So finally I got to this satellite health thing from the Denver, Denver County Hospital. They had satellite offices

and I got to go there. And how much did it cost? Nothing. Thank you very much. Because

I wasn't working.

And I go in to see the psychologist and we do not talk about drinking ever. I'm just bobbing and weaving over in this chair. And she says, you seem nervous. Really. And she says, why don't you take this Valium?

So I'm trying to fix my hangovers with Valium and alcohol. That's nice. And I'm in there for a few weeks. And after a while now I'm seeing her. If you've ever been under any kind of psychiatric care, you know, there's such a thing as a 50 minute hour. You got 50 minutes. Go for it once a week. So I'm doing it. Here we go. I don't know. I'm just coming unglued. And

SO

she she finally, I said to her, listen,

few weeks and I said, how am I doing?

She says, do you really want to know? If they ask you that, say no.

I said yeah. She said, Mickey, you are the most negative human being I have ever met in my life. She says, I don't know how it's possible for you to be able to walk around the streets. Whoops. Time is up. I'll see you in a week

if you don't think Alcoholics Anonymous is like the greatest show on earth, the biggest gift from God. I don't know what, 50 minutes in an office with somebody who doesn't know what's wrong with you and you don't know what's wrong with you, and you got to wait a week. I was coming unglued, so

I came into AAI, called one night at 10:00. Marie was out at a class, a pottery class. I was with our daughter. I drank for the first three years of our marriage. She was out. I called Alcoholics Anonymous, as I said, because you've got alcohol in your name. And they said, can you come over to the 1311 York St. in Denver? And I said no, I got my daughter and they said, look, would you like us to come to your house? I said please,

Marie's gone.

So she comes home right before these guys arrive at the front door. Meanwhile, I'm nervous, like what are the neighbors going to think?

Like they wear sweatshirts with a on him or so I don't know. Nobody gives you a blueprint for your own 12 steps. So I'm I'm cleaning up. I don't want to think I'm a drunker.

And so Marie gets home. And I said, Marie, I've called Alcoholics Anonymous and she said, and I said they're coming over. And she said, should I stay? I said, I don't know. I said, we'll ask him.

So the doorbell rings. These two guys are there. They come in. I said, listen, my my wife is not alcoholic. Is it OK if she stays? And the guy looks at her and he says, can you be honest? And she said yes. And I vouched for

and, and he looks at my wife and he says, the first thing I want you to know is you are just as sick as he is.

Thank you, God, right? Not by way of being vindictive, but by way of recognizing the fact that alcoholism is a family disease and my wife has alcoholism just as badly as I have alcoholism, only without the bottle.

And the Al Anon family groups are, listen, I'm a booster. I'm all over that. So the 12 steps started from there. I came into Alcoholics Anonymous. I went to my first meeting the next day, and God supported me. I'm telling the whole time, obviously, but I'll tell you this last thing and then I'll shut up. I went. Now I'm getting about to get ready for my first. I was in advertising, my first national ad agency job.

Because I'm a drunk and I'm going to go see my boss and I'm going to tell him Bill, I know what's wrong with me.

So we're going to have this meeting at the airport and I'm there and I'm ready. Man, I got my London fog raincoat on. You know, it's the only thing on me that had any spine.

We meet at the airport. I said, Bill, I found out what's wrong with me. I'm an alcoholic and I'm going to my

1st a a meeting today

and he just looks at me and the guy was a telephone freak and he just looks at me, doesn't say a word and gets up and leaves.

Here my first official act on the way to payday and glory here is I'm going to lose another job. I'm going to lose my job.

And he comes, but he just because I tell you, the telephone freak, he just had to make the phone call now. So he goes up, he makes the phone call, he comes back and he sits across the table from me. He doesn't say a word and looks me in the eye. He reaches into the breast pocket of his coat and pulls out the 24 hour a day book.

Right. I had no fancy footwork. I got nothing. I'm bringing nothing

to the party and the first thing I get, I'm in God's hands and it's going to be OK. How many of us have been waiting for that sense it's everything's going to be OK? And we tell each other that in here. And for 40 years, I've had the privilege of being able to tell people it's going to be OK, you're going to be OK.

Follow the yellow brick road.

You're going to be OK.

I just love you. I'm so glad to be with you tonight. Anyway, thank you for listening.

So we're going to take a bit of a break now. Let's call it 10 minutes and then we'll get back together and Peter will share.

How'd I do, Coach? Was that all right? Thank you.

Where are you from? Harlem. Where you from? God bless. I remember you up there.

Thank you very much.

Not not time you, yes,

so could you see you again?

I met this lady the first fellowship and experience.