The topic of step 3 at a Sponsorship through the 12 steps workshop in London, UK

OK, to set the tone for this meeting, I will read an extract from chapter 8 to Wives from page 120.

We never, never try to arrange a man's life so as to shield him from temptation. The slightest disposition on your part to guide his appointments or his affairs so he will not be tempted will be noticed. Make him feel absolutely free to come and go as he likes. This is important. If he gets drunk, don't blame yourself. God has either removed your husband's liquor problem or he has not. If not, it had better be found out right away.

Then you and your husband can get right down to fundamentals. If a repetition is to be prevented, place the problem along with everything else in God's hands.

And the topic of tonight's meeting is working. Step three with a Swansea and Tim will share anything between 30 and 45 minutes on the topic, after which the floor will be opened for questions rather than the normal sharing. And with that, I will now hand over to Tim.

Thanks. My name is Tim. I'm an alcoholic. I'm just going to share the screen if I can get that to work.

There we go. Has the big book appeared on your screen? I can't really see what you're seeing. OK, right. So let me go slow the right page. So there's a little bit of,

I shouldn't really call it fella, but there's a bit of filler between the end of Step 2 and the start of Step 3.

I think the book often does this. It sort of recaps where we've got to just to make sure that we're all on the same page before it goes any further.

And there's quite a lot of this stuff actually between 58 and 60 that I want to make sure that

a little sponsee is understood.

Some really basic points. One of the points that comes through loud and clear in these two pages

is it's a package deal. You have to do the whole thing. You have to do it thoroughly, and you have to do it promptly. So those three things, it has to be complete, it has to be prompt and it has to be thorough.

And there are some things which people miss sometimes. So let's put together some different lines. Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.

And it's going to say further down, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start.

Um, it says, where does it say about half measures? It says about half measures somewhere, half measures available, there's nothing. There we go, half measures avail, there's nothing. We stood at the turning point. So that's all pretty unequivocal. And then, you know, people often say back to you, they say, yeah, but it's progress, not perfection. And now it's absolutely right.

But my understanding of this is that what I shoot for

is to do everything as well as possible. That but even when I shoot for doing everything as well as possible, it doesn't mean that the result is going to be perfect.

What I find dangerous is to discount at the level of the effort. But then you're you're doubly shooting yourself in the foot where you shoot. If I don't make full effort, I'm, let's say coming down from eight, 100% to 80% and then because I'm not a St., I'll get a 60% results and I'm starting to get into a danger territory there.

So you, you aim for, aim for perfection, but recognise that even if you do everything right, you're still going to be messy in all sorts of material ways. The a couple of other points that people always pick up on when I get them to read this or usually pick up on, there are usually questions about these people who cannot give themselves to this simple program. Usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.

And so people ask about that and they ask about and then, well, I mean, it further elaborates. They're naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. And it then talks about the people with grave emotional and mental disorders. And I thought a lot about this. He doesn't. Bill doesn't elaborate about what this means,

and I I honestly, I do find people in a A,

even the ones who are who are perennial slippers. I've sponsored a number of perennial slippers over the years. I found them generally honest in terms of

admitting what they're doing. People are quite good in AAI. Think about being candid. So I, you know, I've wondered over the years what this means, what when something doesn't work. I look at my own experience and this is what I share with Swansea's is that

the, I think the honesty that I needed to get sober

and then the honesty I needed to get over some of the problems that I had was the honesty. Number one, I have a problem and #2 I don't have a solution. Now that sounds pretty obvious, except have you ever been talking to someone, you say, have you got a problem? They say, Oh yes, I've got a terrible problem with drinking or with their career or their relationship and I say, have you got a solution? And no, I don't have a solution.

And then

you say, would you like a solution? So I'd love a solution. And then you say, right, solution is this. And you tell them the solution. And then they say, oh, I don't like that at all.

And so, you know, about 18 seconds after saying I have a problem and I have no solution, suddenly you said that there's this holding on to the the safety blanket. And the safety blanket is it? It's like playing the Joker,

and the Joker is whatever you throw at me. I reserve the right to override you if I don't like your idea. Well, F you then. And that kept me trapped. I was in sort of work horrors for years and it looks like I wanted a solution. But what I couldn't be honest about was the fact that my thinking was inadequate to the problem and therefore I was to pay no further attention to my thinking. That's the bit that I wouldn't

admit even though I was in the most terrible mess. I mean this is true with the drinking, but it was true later on with the work stuff in particular and with the relationship stuff.

I what I couldn't admit was that my opinion and view was irrelevant then. It meant nothing that my assessment and analysis of the situation were useless.

They were useless with the drinking. They were useless with this. And I think that that's the honesty that's required. And there's a Sandy, wonderful Sandy beach story about this where he's talking about something to his sponsor.

And he says to the sponsor, you might be right. And the sponsor says, you mean to say you're wrong. And Sandy says, no, no, no, no, no. I, I think you might be right. And the sponsors, I want you to hear. I want to hear you say I am wrong. And he almost couldn't say he could admit the sponsor was right, but he couldn't admit he was wrong.

And I think that's the that's the key point here. It's that honesty which opens all of the doors

and without that I don't think anything can be achieved. I think I mentioned in the previous week with the chronic slippers, one of the with alcohol, one of the continual refrains is but my head keeps telling me now when I've, when I'm in a good space, my head still tells me all the same things. I just don't believe those things. And that's the key difference that those things cease to be relevant to me.

Let's have a look. This is this is the other line which I I always talk a lot about

to people. Some of us have tried on to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go. Absolutely. And that's really an echo of what I've already been saying, that I have to be willing to listen with an entirely open mind

and the habit I've got into with my sponsor. We have very strange phone calls sometimes where I say about 8 words, then he speaks at me for about 20 minutes. I take notes and then I say thank you very much

and I think about it later. I don't react

because I want, I want to be applying this. I want to say, well, if I'm calling him about a situation, it's because I don't want any of my old ideas. If I'm if I'm unhappy, I must have decided wrong, so I don't want that decision anymore.

What else do I go through? So I run through the steps with them and we've already talked about the

we're not Saints, so we claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.

And the AB CS really sum up everything we've done so far. That I'm going to die of alcoholism unless something significant happens. That

and no human power can relieve my alkalism. It doesn't mean that there isn't human power

used by God to help me,

and God could and would if he was sought. And at this point, I just double checked that people are down with those ideas

and people always, always are. Now how down they are with those ideas. Really, really, you discover that at the bottom of page 63 to see if the Step 4 gets started or not. But that's another question. At this point, people are usually very willing. And I talked about this a bit last week, but I'm, I'll obviously go into an improper detail now. Being convinced we were at Step 3, which is that we decided to turn our will and our life over to God as we understood him. Just what do we mean by that? And just what do we do?

And

it, before it answers that question, it goes on

one of Bill W's wonderful digressions, 2 page digression, which so it's just like with the step four later on, it's going to say we're going to do a moral inventory. But before it does that, it bangs on about resentment 3 pages, which has got nothing to do with our moral inventory. It's there for a reason, but it's not, it's not what we think it is. And it's a bit like that here. We've already decided we're going to, we're going to take Step 3.

And so the next two pages sets out a philosophical position,

which means that when we're turning, if we've already decided we're going to turn our wills and our lives over, the question is how we going to become really comfortable with that idea. And the the proposition here is while you running your life is a disaster, not just in relation to alcohol, but in relation to everything. So if you can see that

that you're a disaster in every other area too, that that sweetens the pill. So hopefully when you turn your will and your life over to God, it isn't going to be a tug of war where you're still holding on to it. You're going to be get it off me. Get it off me because you're so done with you being in charge of your life

now. These these two pages

have got some, as I say, some philosophical points

which I try and

I try and convey to people, but honestly, most people don't buy them. There will be some lip service usually, but people don't fully buy them. And I'll explain what I mean by that. The first requirement is that we be convinced that any life run on self will can hardly be a success, and

it isn't immediately evident

what that means. Any life run on self will. My understanding of it is that I organize my life based on what I want. And what do I want? Well, it's all the things which I think will make me happy. So the proposition here is if you live life based on what you want,

you'll you won't be happy, it'll be a disaster. And it goes on to explain why. And it gives a little description here of what running

the world around you starts to look like. And the problem is, and it says you might be nice doing it or you might be mean doing it, but the show doesn't come off very well. And so the basic idea is, if you go through life with a blueprint, you'll probably find that the world does not play ball. As Earl Purdy says,

if ever you're upset by something, it means you have a plan and the plan has been thwarted.

If you're upset a lot, it means you have a lot of plans and the plans being thwarted. So the reason I'm unhappy is not because of the world, it's because I'm going into the world with a plan.

And if you've got more than one person in the world, each of whom has that own plan, the plans are going to conflict unless by some miracle all the plans happen to be exactly the same. But because I'm over here, I have my plan. Because you're over there, you have your plan.

And

here is the key line. Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest happiness and satisfaction out of this world if he only manages well? And that's like a a sort of two stage punch. So firstly, it's recognising that. Oh yeah. OK. So

I'm operating on the basis that if only I function well, I I'll be happy.

And then the second part, which is worrying, then the second part of it is the fact it's a delusion. So I'm wrong in that. I'm wrong in that,

and the basic idea in these two pages is therefore this. So running life on on self will, in other words, based on what I want. First of all, it's almost impossible to get the world in its entirety to play ball. There will always be something which is problematical,

but my own experience, and if you're sober a few years, you may well have experienced this as well.

That you do the program, you do it very well. This gets rid of lots of your character defects. You discover yourself much more effective at work. You discover yourself more effective at home. People are suing you far less than they used to. Your relations generally are more cordial and you think, well, this is all right. And then you wake up at 5 years or seven years or 10 years sober having a panic attack in at 4:00 in the morning because

your life is never going to be fixed. And you don't know why because all of your ducks are in a row and they are quacking. But it hasn't fixed the underlying problem. So the point is that

it's almost worse when you don't get your own way. You can still hold on to the delusion. If only I got my own way, everything will be all right. So you keep pedalling in or you, you carry on being the hamster in the wheel. If only you can pedal fast enough or or run fast enough in the wheel, get the wheel to go fast enough, you'll be alright. But you can never get it to go fast.

On those rare occasions where you do manage to get exactly, you know, it's like the dog that catches its tail. What does it do with the tail once it's caught it? There's nothing it can do with the tail. It is no further ahead. It's now tired and it has its own tail in its mouth. And I think this is a perfect image of most people, somewhere between 7 and 10 years sober when everything comes right at last. Not it's not. There's anything wrong with those things. But they don't fix the problem. They don't fix the thing they were supposed to fix.

And if this is all, if this is the case,

then there has to be. This is the great line which gave rise to A Course in Miracles. There must be a different way

and the way I get people to try and see this,

if you know, obviously through my experience and their experience. But you look at society and you look at

most people have read glossy magazines or the sort of gossip pages of the Daily Telegraph or something,

and it's pretty self-evident that just because you're rich you won't be happy. Just because you're pretty you won't be happy. Just because you're fated and lauded and loved does not mean you'll be happy. All the famous people who've committed suicide when their lives were absolutely gilded.

You walk around Kensington, you go to a a meetings in Kensington. Are people cheerful and relaxed there? No, but they've got everything that you think will make you happy

and it hasn't made them happy, but you still want it. So the whole the idea is the whole system is insane. There must be a different system. People describe this as being the the about Alcoholics. And here's the interesting thing. It's not. This is why this isn't unmanageability. The second-half of step one, because

our examples, our actress, self centred,

egocentric as people like to call it nowadays. Here's like the retired businessman who lolls in the Florida sunshine in the winter complaining of the sad state of the nation. And there are there are several other examples. So what is being described here is not Alcoholics, it's describing human beings.

So if you identify with this, you're not identifying with your your alcoholism, you're identifying yourself as a human being. And the proposition, which is pretty radical on these two pages is the entire world has got it wrong. That's the proposition here. Do you want to sign up to that before taking Step 3?

And it has an alcoholic as the last example, not the first. And then it goes in and then the last little bit

before we get on to the actual Step 3.

What we're looking at here is.

What is going on inside?

Selfishness. Self-centredness. So having yourself as the centre of the universe, making endless lists of things you think will make you happy, running after them and trying to manipulate the universe into giving them to you. Now as soon as you want something, you'll have

fear if yourself if a person is self-centered. When I'm self-centered, I'm the center of the universe. It distorts the entire perspective. So if you're self centred, do you think that the sun is revolving around the earth rather than the other way around? It changes it. The self Centennial itself creates a massive delusion.

I often talk to people who whenever they share in meetings, the person that shares after them, they always think the person sharing after them is sharing about them.

Or I don't know if you've ever had a situation where someone is very rude to you or unpleasant to you and you take it personally as though they were like Placid and pleasant and lovely before you walked into the room and you are so powerful you can actually change their personalities and turn them into arseholes. No, this person is 47. They've been an asshole for 47 years. And then you walked into the room and then they were just themselves. This has got nothing to do with you pumpkin.

So self centeredness gives rise to self delusion, and the more self-centered I am, the more fearful I am,

the more distorted my perceptions are. Yet the more right I think I am, the more upset I am, The more right I think I am, the more certain I am about everything. And the whole thing is corrupted.

Umm, sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation. But we invariably find that sometime in the past, we've made decisions based on Selfridge later placed us in a position to be heard. Now, this is tricky. I think this is true as an adult. Obviously children are placed in situations

which they did not choose.

And sometimes in in societal situations where there are massive power imbalances, this can be the case as well.

But I look at my own all of the most of the people on my step four out of all the people I met, those were the ones that I chose to be in some kind of work relationship or romantic relationship with. I picked them. Even if they were assholes, I picked them. And so, so now this all sounds very rough to thrust on someone, but the way I explain it to people is if you're right and you're a victim and everyone else is wicked and you're just misunderstood, I've got really bad

news for you. You're going to carry on being mistreated for the rest of your life. You're going to carry on being unhappy. If, however, it turns out you are the prime mover in your own unhappiness, there's hope because you can change you. So what would you rather? What would you rather be? Would you be? Would you rather be the one that has the power and the situation to make different decisions? And people usually buy that.

So our troubles, we think are basically about own making.

And again,

it's this idea that even if the situation is not my making my trouble, for this statement to be true, it has to be true under all circumstances. As suddenly as an adult, carving out children as a separate question, but as an adult, even if there is a situation which I didn't give rise to,

my trouble is my disturbance about it. And the disturbance about it is coming from self. Will is, in other words, is coming from wanting a talker. I'm understand from my Buddhist friends, of whom I have very few,

but they tell me that the problem is wanting that. That's where all of the problems start. And that's another way of talking about self well-being at the root of the troubles.

And we have to get rid of this and we aren't going to think our way out of it, and we can't do it on our own.

Now, exactly what that means is difficult to explain. The way I put it is this.

Whilst I still think I have I'm the one to figure everything out, for some reason I block all possible solutions

as soon as I say I don't know and I'm willing to listen. I'm open to influences from the outside and

people often don't believe in God, which is fair enough.

But the question is, can the individual trust other people on the basis that those other people are doing better than them? So the idea here is it the information isn't good enough. There needs to be a surrender, which as I said, is a recognition that I don't have the answers and I'm going to have to take action. This is the wonderful Clancy line. Taking actions I don't believe in because the person who is suggesting them

is doing better than me. Taking actions I don't believe in because the person who's suggesting them is doing better than me. Now we get on to good bit

and there's there's one last philosophical point which I think is worth making. We decided we had to quit playing God. It didn't work. Next we decided that here are hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our director. Now the point here,

the Indian Jesuit

Father Paul Coutinho says that material reality is about 1% of the whole show. So this drama of life, what I've been encouraged to do is to consider it the material world and everything that goes on. It is like a play going on on a stage where in a particular scene I'm playing a part. But in the same way that the actor is distinct from the part that they're playing, I'm distinct from the role that I'm playing.

And the role is just the role that I'm playing. My reality is unaffected by the part by the character and what happens to the character. So the actor that plays Duncan or Mcduff

is not affected by anything that happens to Duncan or Mcduff on the stage. You know, at the end of, but well, by the end of Macbeth. I hope I'm not spoiling anything here. There's a little bit of blood spattered around,

yet all the actors sit on the bus on the way back to the east and having a lovely old time together afterwards. They're fine. So this gives me an entirely different philosophical way to look at the world. I can look at it one stage removed and not be sucked into everything. I have to play each role diligently, as though it's real. I have to inhabit the role, but I am safe. Which changes

everything. And I have a life and an existence outside the material plane, which changes everything.

So we've got several different images here for the relationship between us and God. The first one is director and actor, which is a pretty straightforward image. The second one is principle and agent. Now if you don't have a commercial background, that won't necessarily mean very much, but it's a very useful one.

The

image that I convey with this is if you imagine a ship owner who's got these ocean going container ships

and the ships call in at various different ports and in each port there is a shipping agent. So the ship owner is the principal and the agent in each port has to attend to the business of dealing with the longshoremen and the customs authorities and the railway authorities and the bunkering the vessel and provisioning the vessel and all of the other things that you have to do when a ship comes into port.

But it ain't the agents ship and it ain't the agents cargo. He's just got a job to do,

he and he's paid directly by the ship owner. So it kind of doesn't matter what is going on. He has to do his job well, but his job is to do things well. It doesn't matter to him personally what is going on with the ship, with the cargo.

Father and children

I don't have my experience of

parents and children is maybe not ideal. So this, I think this is so brilliant here. This is so helpful for sponsees is you've got

director and actor, principal and agent, father and children, and then employer and employee. And most people can connect with one of those. They've got a positive experience, at least in principle, of one of those,

and the employer employee one is one that works for an awful lot of people. A lot of people can't deal with the idea of God being the father because they've got bad experiences of parents,

but they can. They've had benevolent employers before where they just have to show up, ask the employer what to do, get on with it, and they get given money and go home.

The actual taking of Step 3, the first point is to understand what the contract is

and then to adopt that position and the position that the contract is. Very simple,

he provided what we needed if we kept close to him and performed his work well. So I need to do 2 things,

stay close to God in steps 10 and 11, perform his work well in step 12, and obviously do 4 through 9 to place myself in that position. And those are the only two things I need to concern myself with is staying close to God and the next right action. Staying close to God and the next right action. And that's the contract. And I adopt the position of God being the employer. In my case, it's the employer employee one that I connect with the most.

I mentally adopt that position in the same way that when you get given a job offer and you mentally assent to it, the job is already yours.

You're gonna have to sign on the dotted line. But essentially conceptually you've already signed up to it. The sign the the signing up to the actual signing on the dotted line I think is saying the step three prayer. So you've got two things now. You adopt the position mentally,

you sign by saying the step three prayer and then you get on with a couple of things

and the two things you get on with are

steps 4 through 9 as a discrete exercise, maybe an hour or two a day until it's done and then 10/11/12 instantly as a way of life. Sometimes people say it's the steps are in an order for a reason and there is some truth to that. Although it has to be understood that the original 6 steps, although exactly what those steps, 6 steps were, there's some contention about that. We're in a different order.

So the AA program, as it was acquired by the early AA members, was in a different warder. The idea was not that you move in a sort of stately manner from one to another. It's that you adopt the whole way of life all at once in a very short time and then spend the rest of your life living it. So the notion, for instance, that you don't start step 10 until you've completed step 9 is, is is is silly really.

Um, because if sort of 10 or 20 years, you need to be,

umm, directing your attention to doing the right thing. How much more? So if you're new and the same with 11, the same with 12, you know, I, I, I got put on to service really from day one. So the program I think has got three parts. There's one to three, which is your preparation, 4 through 9 which runs along one track, which takes a few weeks, a month to complete usually,

and then ten through 12 which is a daily cycle.

One of the things it says here, which I get people to do, most people are fine with the step three prayer. If they don't like this, they can reword it as long as it doesn't say something completely mad. The NA step three is amazingly good. There is a little step three prayer in the NA book, which is in sort of plain English as opposed to King James.

One last thing, a couple of last things

with this.

I get people to consider overnight. By the time we're about to take step three, I get them to consider whether they're willing to go at steps 4 through 9,

go through those like a dose of the salts, or whether there's any reservation to doing that. Because there's nothing worse than getting halfway through and discovering you've run out of steam because you've got the handbrake on for some reason.

So and, and very often very major reservations come out of that like 24 hour consideration period before they take step three. Sometimes I get people to take it over the phone with me. I haven't really done it in person with people much. I don't see any correlation between whether or not people take step three with me over the phone or in person and whether they get through the remaining steps. I think it's entirely an internal thing. I've had people where it's been terribly moving,

the wonderfully moving step three, and you literally never hear from them again. So I don't know what that was about. And other people, it all seems very perfunctory and business like, but they get through the steps in a few weeks. So you can never tell from the outside by the sort of external manifestation of religious or spiritual sentiment whether there's any depth to it. You only tell if you

given the the first instruction of Step 4

and see if they get on with it or not. So I'm going to pause that. I'm going to suggest, Alistair, that we see if there are any questions on that. And if we have, if there aren't many questions and we got some spare time, maybe I could start the Step 4

this evening. What do you think? Sure. OK, Tim. Thanks.

Yeah. So at this meeting, as I have mentioned at the beginning, we it's more of a workshop and the floor is now open for questions

if you have any. And this can be done by the raised hand option or just waving a hand at the at your camera.

Or you can send me one on the chat. I do have that open as well. So

Sarika never had embraced.

Hi, thank you so much. I do have a question. I've often had the experience of working with a sponsee who says to me, I have a very strong belief in God, but I think that God hates me and is punishing me. I mean,

maybe this technically comes under Step 2, but the problem is when it comes to Step 3, they're reticent to turn their will and their life over to this, you know, person who, well, not a person, I'm sorry, but a being who hasn't been in their opinion has not been fair with them

for that. Absolutely. But can you say a little bit more for us about give an example of, of what they're characterizing as God hating them or God punishing them?

Umm, it's like God hates me. He never gives me what he wants. You know, my life is

horrible. And of course, in my opinion, this person has a perfectly fine life,

but they're looking at it as I'm not getting what I want when I want it because God hates me. And perhaps that's a punishment.

Maybe I'm being punished for some reason because if I, if God was so loving and kind, why don't I have what I want? That's, that's the, the gist of it, right? That's a really good question. You've actually, there are actually seven or eight individual questions buried in that one question. And with your permission, I'll go through

what those are. I'll take a little notes to make sure I get through all of them

because they cover basically the full range of of issues you have. It's much easier dealing with atheists and agnostics because they are sophisticated enough to have thought it through. It's often religious people are the hardest because they've been thinking about it for the last 40 years. So there's a lot more deconstruction before you can get to Step 3.

But sometimes, you know, even without much religious background, people can build up a real animus against God.

OK, so the first thing, the first problem is where you people's image of God is Santa Claus or some kind of personal servant or skivvy where the relationship should be. You snap your fingers and God does what you want. And the, I think that the way you, I don't have a huge amount of patience with that

one because it, it, it rather sort of it that that should be a fairly easy bubble

to pop, at least intellectually, that the purpose of God is not to serve you. The purpose should be the other way round. What, what's much harder? What's much harder? You've got a second situation. So the Santa Claus one, I find people, if that's the only thing they've got going on, that's a fairly easy obstacle to overcome. Most people are good intention, well-intentioned enough to realize that there's selfishness inside that

the second situation

is where you've got basically a complicated messy life

where it's just like regular messy. So, you know, lots of entanglements and, you know, you're surrounded. There are lots of of difficult schmucky people around you and it, you feel very much victimized by it. So it's it's not that, you know, God hasn't given me a Rolls Royce in unicorns and lollipops.

It's that everything is a mess and God's doing it to me.

If people are genuinely open minded that you can usually have a conversation. You take a couple of worked examples of the situation on page 62 where it says we made a decision based on self, which later placed us in a position to be hurt. And you can help people see, and I'll do it with my own experience. There's a particular story that I tell.

To help people see that their fingerprints are all over the scene of the crime. So it ain't God that's doing this. It couldn't have happened without their full participation. And some of you have heard this. I apologise. French novel

where this kid, his best friend, over the course of the summer, disappears with the family. They go and move somewhere else. He has no idea where the family has gone. So he goes and sees this old Russian emigre photographer

who's is confidant who's 40 years, 50 years his senior. And he goes to see him and the man is fiddling with his cameras. And he the, the, the kid tells the old man, the older man, his story, wanting sympathy, wanting sympathy from the old man about how to and basically an ally against this terrible boy, Nicola, who has deserted him.

And the old man, he says,

I'm afraid it's your fault. He said, this boy Nicola has behaved very badly. Is that right? And the boy says, yes, he has. And he says, and you say he was your best friend. Yes, he was my best friend. He said, well, best friends do not behave like that towards each other. Therefore he was not your best friend. He was not a friend at all.

Your problem is that you believed he was a friend.

You're lousy at picking friends. You need to pay a lot more attention about who you decide to be your friend.

And

he says whether something like with affairs of the heart and friendship is an affair of the heart, wishful thinking will often take the place of rational thinking.

And usually it doesn't take long to find a few situations. And the most obvious one is, is, you know, with marriage. Well, who said yes at the altar

with terrible jobs? Who said yes when they offered you the job? Did anyone force you to take that job as opposed to another job? Usually, you know, there are choices there.

So, so that's like sort of regular, regular messy life.

The third type of problem

is

basically the way the world is created,

which is that we first of all, CS Lewis talks about this. So the book that people want to read is the Problem of Pain. If you're not Christian. It works just as well with a tiny bit of adjustment. There isn't much Jesus stuff, I don't think in problem of pain. There is a little bit more Jesusy stuff in there. Christianity, for instance, but but even there

it's transferable in many ways. But anyway, and the problem of pain, he talks about material world, about the creation of the material world. So if you think about human suffering all form, if you think about bad events that happen, everything from sort of hurricanes to diseases to pandemics to, you know, your neighbours spitting on you and they walk past you on the street. Everything is some combination of natural events

in which are simply a function of the material universe plus the exercise of human will.

Now I'm not going to go into the full philosophy of of why God would allow a physical world where bad stuff happens, but one of the ways out of that is what we were talking about earlier, with material reality being only a fragment of the bigger picture. So the fact that bad stuff happens materially is only part of the picture. There is a bigger purpose behind the whole thing,

but more specifically, most of the wrongs that people are worried about actually boil down to other people behaving badly. And if you can help people see that they are exercising free will in their lives, other people are exercising free will in their lives. God is not taking people over like zombies temporarily to make them act badly towards, you know, you just encountering human beings operating with whatever software they have loaded.

So it's the set up of the world is not, I think the sort of deterministic.

The deterministic approach, which is literally everything is determined by God implies that we have no free will. In which case why are we even talking? Why? Why have a conversation? Why go and have a cup of tea if it's all. I think the premise behind this whole thing is that we have will. If we don't, then there's we shouldn't even be looking at a program. As soon as you've got the concession that people are exercising will it's difficult to blame God

for those, for those things. The 4th situation,

and this is this is a tougher 1. Some people have genuinely had

extraordinarily difficult

circumstances. I'm thinking of

parents who've lost young children, that kind of thing, and I've had sponsors here in that position

who blame God directly for those, and now I'm not about to get get in there and try and rewire someone on a subject like that. I think the closest you can get is suspending disbelief, as it were, and saying, are you willing to set aside the question of why that happened and whether there was a direction behind it, whether there was a purpose behind it? Are you willing to set aside that question for now and return to it later once you've done

steps and maybe you'll be in a better position to figure out what was going on there then. And most people, if the the flames of that alcoholism or that al anonism are licking sufficiently at their heels, that will be sufficient motivation to set aside that. So sometimes there are.