Carin S. Step 2 - Step Series at Twelve Step House - 7/22/2025

Carin S. Step 2, Step Series at the Tuesday Night Step Group, Twelve Step House, Fort Lauderdale, FL. 7/22/2025

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My name is Karen, and I'm an alcoholic happy to
be here. Right before the meeting started, Thomas, who I
love and adore, found me doing my thing before the meeting.
You know, you have to get into the mode before
you come up here and talk to God and do
all my thing. And he just walked over to me
and said, so, are you ready to have your big

(00:21):
number two? Well, I guess I am anyway. My sobriety
date is September the eighth, nineteen eighty eight. Most of
you know I got sober in New York City. I'm
from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I'm so glad
to see so many of you who came back. This week.

(00:41):
We'll try to pick up where we left off last
week and see what happens. See what happens. I brought
my glasses with me, so I'm bound to do better
this week than I did last week, so I can
actually see this. So I want to backtrack for like
two seconds about where we left off in Step one.
Last week. We talked about the recognition, the admission, the

(01:01):
understanding that if we were real alcoholics, and Step one
we were powerless over alcohol when we were drinking it,
not when we weren't, but when we were drinking it
and my life was unmanageable when I wasn't. And we
talked a lot about behaviors of the alcoholic when they're
drinking and when they're not drinking, and they seemed incredibly

(01:21):
similar to me. I don't know about you, but there
didn't seem to be a big line and between my
behavior between when I was not drinking and when I
was drinking. So here's the problem, and this is the
problem with all the steps, Just so you know, at
the end of the step you are like screwed. At
the end of every step, you're screwed. What do I
do now? What do I do now? You've given me

(01:43):
another set of information, another set of things to do.
You want my belief, you want this, you want that.
I don't know how to do it? What am I
supposed to do? So for me, when I did the steps,
I had to really think about the fact that that
for me, at the end of every step was kind
of like a comma. It really wasn't it a full stop.
It's a comma. You know, what do I have to do?
What am I going to do now? At the end

(02:05):
of step one and I am absolutely screwed. If you're
telling me that I can't live my life drinking and
I can't live my life without drinking, where does that
leave me? Well, it leaves me into step two because
that's the comma. It gives you the answer at the
end of the step, when you catapult into the next
step with the understanding that that's the answer to the

(02:26):
problem that you just found out about in the step prior.
Do is that makes sense to everybody. So when I
get to the end of step one, I'm like, Okay,
I know what to do now. So here's my problem.
I didn't like Step two. I had a lot of
problems with it. You know Step two, kid, Hello, have
a seat. Came to believe that a power greater than
ourselves could restore us to sanity. So here's my problem

(02:49):
with the step. First of all, I had no God.
I've talked about that before when I did my first steps,
I had no God in my life. So that was
the first problem. Second problem is, so I had a
sponsor who made me go to a lot of step meat.
That's a big problem because what you hear, how many
people here in this room read the Daily Reflections? Most
of us read the Daily Reflections. So it was pointed

(03:10):
out to me in the beginning. Thank God that the
beginning of the Daily reflection, the reading from our literature.
That's aa That second part is some drunks opinion on it.
It means nothing. I could write it, you could write it.
It means nothing. So I had to really focus here
on what people were saying about the second step and

(03:30):
what I heard. What I heard as an alcoholic who
had no God in my life, who had no faith,
who had no nothing, what I heard in there was
people just debating the hell out of what sanity was.
Let's discuss sanity. Well, here's the definition. And if you
think it's this, and maybe it's that, you know, I thought,
I don't care. Not only do I not care what

(03:52):
sanity is, I still don't know if I have any
and I'm sober more than thirty five years, I have
no idea. I still do with some of the same
crazy stuff that I used to do when I was drinking.
The only difference now is, thank god, I do it
with other alcoholics. That's the best cards. I don't have
to do this by myself. So I take a look
at this and it says it's going to restore me

(04:12):
to sanity. So I hear all this argument about what
sanity is, and then I hear all this argument about
what the power greater than myself is, and neither one
of these things holds much interest for me, because I
don't believe in either one of them. I have no
idea what they're talking about. The thing with the steps
is this, when you read a step, you're only going

(04:33):
to get part of it. There's only some of it
that's gonna speak to you, and the rest of it
is going to be hum I have no idea. So
you don't worry about it, because when you work those
steps with the next alcoholic, you're gonna understand a little
bit more, and then you got to understand a little
bit more. By the time you work these steps with
five or six people, you're gonna know exactly what that
step means. But for me, I was told by my

(04:54):
sponsor to focus on restoration because I didn't know what
it meant on restore me, because step two could be
the most intensely personal step of all the twelve steps.
This is a step between me and whoever is going
to become my God. This is a step between me

(05:15):
and whoever is going to be guiding me through the
rest of my sobriety. So the problem was is that
I really didn't know what to do because I had
no God. So he said, don't focus on God, don't
focus on sanity. Let's talk about restoring. Let's talk about
what restoration looks like for you. So eighteen months before
I came into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, it was

(05:38):
New Year's Eve. New Year's Eve. It was nineteen eighty six.
It's a six eighty seven something like that. I was
in Florida. I was in Tamarack, Florida. My parents owned
a house in Tamarak, Florida. I was from New York.
I hated being in Tamarak, Florida, and for New Years,
no less for New Years. So so my parents, I

(06:02):
was married to my second husband's mind and my son's husband.
I had a little baby, little little baby. He'd just
been born a few months before New Year's Eve, and
my parents got tickets to something, some show or something
like that, you know where they have those long tables
that everybody sits around, like really long tables, and the
stages over there, and horrible stuff, horrible stuff, and so we,

(06:23):
you know, went to this or we're getting dressed to
go to this thing. And I'm in the bedroom alone,
because by that time in my career of life, I
had a drug habit that was so low bottom that
I was incapable of one day, one hour not being
high enough to get around. And I had a drinking

(06:44):
problem that was so horrendous that I stank that Jack
Daniels was coming out of my pores. I was three
hundred and forty pounds. I was a daily drug user.
I was a daily and nightly drinks. There was nothing
left of me. I dressed in black all the time,

(07:06):
head to toe in black. Blamed it on being from
New York. And as I'm getting dressed in the bedroom alone,
that's important to remember because by then I'm alone. I'm married,
I have a kid, I have a family, and I'm
alone and I'm in the bedroom and I look in
the mirror and I take one glance, and what is
looking back at me is a person with shark eyes,

(07:26):
dead eyes looking at me. And I don't know where
this came from. To this day, I don't know where
it came from. But I turned around and looked in
the mirror, and I said, God, I don't know have
to stop. I don't know how to stop. You have
to make me stop. I'll do anything, I'll do anything
if you just make me stop. Now, if I had

(07:48):
stopped my prayer at that point and not said anything else,
you'd have a different speaker in front of you, because
what I said after that was and I need a sign.
I need a sign that you've heard me, because I'm
an alcoholic that doesn't believe anything. I don't even believe
what he was saying. And I said, I need to
have a sign from you. And I got a tingling
in my mouth. I went, oh my God, I got
a sign from God. And so I got dressed and

(08:10):
we left, and we went to this place, and the
waiter came and took my order. My dinner order was
the same as my drink order was the same as
my dessert order. All Jack Daniels straight up puts it
down in front of me. I go to take the
drink and there's a tingling in my mouth. I went,
oh my God, So I put I put the glass down.
This goes on all night long. I'm cold, stone sober.

(08:31):
By the time New Year's comes, I have not had
a thing to eat or drink, and we leave. You know,
they blast off New Year's when we leave, and I
go home, and I go home with my husband with
the understanding that I have found God and God is
now talking to me through my Jack Daniels. It made
sense to me. And any way, I went home, and

(08:52):
you know, I, I you know all about you. But
that's not the sort of thing you tell anybody, that
God is talking to you through Jack Daniels. So I
just I went to sleep. He went to sleep. I
woke up in the middle of the night, somewhere around
three four o'clock in the morning, with the most intense
pain I have ever ever experienced. And I jumped up
and I fell to the ground because I had no
feeling on the right side of my body. I ran

(09:12):
into the bathroom. I looked aside and my entire right
side of my body was all sagging, all sagging. My
shoulder was down, everything was sagging. And I went into
my parents' room and woke my mother up and said, Mommy, mommy,
something's wrong with me. Something's wrong with me. Look at
my face, look at my body. Something's wrong with me.
And she goes probably a tooth apsess, go take a

(09:33):
value them. So I did. I did, and I went
to sleep, and I woke up the next morning and
I was worse than I was At three o'clock in
the morning. They rushed me to the hospital and the
doctor took one look at me and he said, how
old are you When I was young, you know I

(09:53):
was young. It was in my early thirties. And he said,
do you abuse drugs? Do you abuse alcohl? I've never
seen this kind of a stroke happen in a person
of your age. Do you abuse any of these things?
And I said, no, of course not. I'm a mother,
no way, And he says, I have no idea what
to tell you, but I will tell you this. He said,
you have to stay down here in the sun because

(10:17):
the cold in New York at Christmas time. You know what,
d in the winter time is going to exacerbate the
pain that you're feeling. He says, I can tell you this.
You're going to have to wear an eye patch for
a year. So you're going to have to go for
physical therapy, intense physical therapy, and maybe within a year
you will get back fifty percent of your motion. And
I left and went back and saw my mother and

(10:38):
told her what she said. And my mother took one
look at me and she said, oh, I'm so sorry,
you have to go. I can't have you in my
house looking like that. We entertain and so we got
on the plane and we went back to New York.
And I'd like to tell you that I did everything,
And he said, but I am an alcoholic. I got
everything I needed up a straw. I couldn't speak. That's
the other thing. I guess. I was a joy to

(10:59):
some people, but I couldn't speak, couldn't say anything because
this whole side of my face wasn't working. My arm
wasn't working, so I couldn't hold the baby, and I
couldn't see. And I had to go back to physical therapy.
So if you went to physical therapy the way I did,
you would have the exact same results that I had,
which was zero because I had to go loaded every time.

(11:19):
So I want you to know for the next year,
fifteen months, I'll say the next fifteen months. First of all,
what I did is going to date me so horribly.
First of all, what I did was I went out
and I took a polaroid termera and I took a
picture of my face and I said, smile, motherfucker, and
I said, this is what you've done to yourself. And
I carried that photo around with me until I came

(11:41):
into alcoholic s nuns. So I want to say that,
you know, for a long time, you know, I absolutely
believe there was no God at all, Because there was
a god, God did this to me. This was not
for me. So that's the first thing. But the second
thing was is that you know, almost thirty seven years later,
I will tell you that if that had not happened
to me, you'd have a different speaker tonight. Because I
was absolutely positively on my way to dyeing and this

(12:03):
was the last stop for me. So by the time
I came into AA, I had done enough therapy and
enough exercises so that I came in and I looked
fairly normal, although I will tell you that, I mean,
I still get injections all the time to make sure
that my body parts are working. Because I didn't recover
fifty percent. I recovered probably seventy five to eighty percent,
but it still was a big deal. And sometimes when

(12:25):
I forget, and it's more often than I would like
sometimes when I would forget, you know, somebody who was
close to me will say to me, time to get
a shot. Somebody who's not close to me will say,
have you've just been to the dentist? Because my speech
becomes slurred again and my eye closes and it's, you know,
not pleasant. So I want you to know that that's

(12:47):
how I came into alcoholic synomus. And so if you're
cleaning the slates and you think you come into AA
and now show me about God, think about how I
came into AA. I was belligerent as all get out.
There was no you were going to convince me that
there was any kind of God whatsoever, because I knew
what God had done to me because I'd asked him
for help. What I didn't know was that I'd asked

(13:09):
him for help and I'd gotten it. I just didn't know.
So the problem is that when it talks about that
you came to believe if you're lucky like me. And
again I don't say that you should have happened to
you what happened to me, But if you're lucky like me,
that leaves you in exactly the place that they want
to leave you at the end of step one where

(13:30):
I have no place else to go. I don't know
what else to do. So if you tell me what
to do, I'm going to do it. So eighteen months
after I had this stroke, I came into Alcoholics Anonymous
and my home group was on ninety six Street Broadway,
and I lived on eighty seven Street in West End.
You do the math. It took me five days to
get into that room. Couldn't do it. Couldn't do it.

(13:51):
Walk in your bar, block away, have to go in there,
couldn't do it. Five days. I started on a Sunday
and I wound up in the room on Thursday, you know.
And and I came in sober. I did not come
in drunk. And in those days, some of you were
old like me. In those days when you came into AA,
we weren't going to treatment centers then, you know, Thank

(14:13):
God for me, Thank God. I still love the smell
of a newcomer. You know. I'll sidle up to you
and I skinny minute and I'll just take yeah, big
with us something.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
The smell is good, you know, and I'll say, sit out,
we're going to help you in this room. But you know,
there were there the women, especially in my home group,
were not uh, we.

Speaker 1 (14:30):
Weren't going into treatment centers because they took your kids.
That's the thing. They took your kids. It was a
very unforgiving system at the time. Much better now, much
better now. And by the way, I'm just going to
put a shout out to the women here who have
gone into AA and brought your children with you. I
brought my son in as a baby. He was a
baby and a stroller, and nobody ever told me not
to come. Nobody ever said anything. As a matter of fact,

(14:55):
don't make me cry. As a matter of fact, the women,
you know, the women I would come in and they'd
take the baby immediately. I never even, you know, really
saw my son for a good year when I brought
him into AA, and he spent the next eight years
of his life in the rooms of alcoholics anonymous who
worked out a system because he was bored. You know,
when the person finished speaking up there and people clapped,

(15:16):
that was our signal to go. But he was good.
It was good for AA for eight years. Anyway. I
came into AA because you know, I had no place
else to go, and at that time I was going
back and forth from Los Angeles to New York for work,
back and forth, and I had the opportunity, the good graces,
you know, to meet Clancy. And I met him young
in my sobriety, and he had no patience for me
or probably anybody else at that point, but really no

(15:38):
patience with me. And I and I said to him,
I don't I don't get this. I just don't get it.
You know, I've been here for maybe three months and
I don't get it. You know, why isn't this happening
for me? I don't believe in this God. And he
shook me and he said, nobody told you you have
to believe in God. Nobody told you you have to
believe in a power greater than yourself. Nobody told you

(15:59):
have to even anything that's on that list. But you
better learn how to believe in something. And I don't
care what it is. So for me, I had some racket.
You know what I really believed in at that time.
I'm sorry. It was money, you know. Money was a
good thing for me to believe. And I thought, you know,
from the bottom of my feet, if I had enough money,
that nothing bad was gonna happen. And I can tell

(16:20):
you that in my drinking days, I had a lot
of money. I was poor and I was rich. Rich
is better, by the way, but still it was a
real problem because money didn't change anything. So Clancy said
to me, you have to believe in something. You know.
Years later, I not just a year later, I had
my first sponsee. I will never forget this. I couldn't
stomach her. And she every day, you know, we would

(16:46):
meet to those days. You know, I understand there's no
cell phones and no computers, so if you have to
meet with somebody, you have to look at them, which
was uncomfortable for me because I didn't like her. And
you know, and she had aheadache every day, sho had
a headache. And every day she would say, have a headache.
I think I'm getting a brain to her, you know,
after you know, three months, four months, I was hoping

(17:07):
she would have a brain to her because she was
just too much for me. And so I said to her,
you know, why don't you believe Why don't you believe
in God? I didn't believe in God. I said, why
don't you believe in God? You have to believe in something. Listen,
when Clancy is your mentor, you just repeat everything, he says.
You don't even have to believe it. You just repeat everything,

(17:28):
he says. So I said, you don't have to believe
in God, I said, but you got to believe in something.
And she says, I want to believe in God, but
I can't find God. I said, okay, hold on, I'll
get back to you. By the way, that's the best
kind of sponsor you can have, the sponsor who doesn't
know what they're talking about, who says, hang on a second,
I'll get back to you, and they check with somebody else.
So I called Clancy and I said, I have this
girl and she won't believe in anything, and I don't

(17:48):
really know what to do with her. He says, give
me your number. So I give him her number and
he calls her up and he says, you're on the phone.
You know, this is Clancy and she said this is whoever?
And then he said, you know, hey, are you doing today?
And she goes, I'm fine. He says, you think I'm
doing better than you? And she sayes, well, I guess
you are. He says, congratulations, I'm your new higher power.

(18:09):
And he hung up the phone, and she called me
up and she said, I will do anything you say,
as long as he is not my higher power. Anyway,
when I when I came into AA, I sat, you know,
they sat me in the front. The old timer sat
me in the front, and I sidled up to the back.
I just had to sit in the back. I you know,

(18:30):
I don't know. I had to sit in the back.
I couldn't be a part of I was angry, really
angry to be there. I still didn't feel well physically.
People weren't talking to me because I would make an
announcement every day that said, you know, I'm Karen, I'm an alcoholic,
and I don't want to talk to anybody. So that's
what happens when you say I don't want to talk
to anybody. Miracles happened. Nobody talks to you. And that
meant that nobody, you know, held my hand after the meeting,

(18:51):
and I didn't have any these deep conversations. And one
day a woman named Janice came up to me and
I saw her. I saw her that one day and
I saw her thirty years later, and that one day
she turned around and she said to me, when you
identify your unmentionable wrong, you will begin to get well.

(19:12):
It was pretty intense, pretty intense, and I kept that
with me for a very long time, and eventually, you know,
when we get to talking about the fourth step, we'll
talk a lot about that unmentionable wrong because I did
identify it, I did find it, and when I found it,
my got it came pouring out of me. So people
one by one came and talked to me a little bit,
and I was not a good aad person. I need

(19:33):
to tell you, this is very civilized group here. My
group on the Upper West Side was called the Wild
Wild West, and we had fistfights in there. People threw
things at each other, you know, smoking meeting, I mean
eating meeting. You brought your own food, thrown on the floor. Terrible,
terrible meeting. And I owe my life to them. I
mean I owe my life to them. And that's how

(19:54):
I found my sponsor. So I want to tell you
a little bit about my sponsor, out Rogers, who took
me through my first fifteen years of sobriety, and we
began to focus on the restoration of the second step.
He said, you know a lot of people think that
the second step said you're going to return to sanity,
you're going to return. You don't want to return to anything.

(20:15):
Trust me on this. You don't want to return anything
you were doing. You don't want to return to anybody
you knew. You don't want to return to anything but restoring.
If you think about if you think about a building,
a beautiful architectural building that has class and it has style,
and you can look at it and say, I know
exactly what era that building came from, and year after

(20:35):
year after year after year, the city doesn't take care
of the building, and ity roads and ity roads, and
then the glasses, the glass panes are cracking, and then
the foundation starts to go, and the next thing you know,
people aren't stopping to look at the building anymore. They're
driving past the building because it's really a piece of crap,
and they're waiting for this, for the city to condemn it.
And that was me, That's what I was. I was

(20:56):
condemned the building in Manhattan. And he said, now we're
going to talk about what restare looks like for you.
He says, because you start at the foundation, you start
at the bottom, and you build up, and you build up,
he says, and don't listen to what people are saying,
whether it's the journey or the destination, just trust me
on this one. It's neither. It's the company you keep
along the way. So choose wisely. Choose wisely. You know

(21:17):
that horrible expression. Stick with the winners. How do I
know who the winners are? No idea? How about the
ones who raise their hands and say their sober over
a year, they've worked the twelve steps and they have
a sponsor. Well, they seem to be winnerous to me.
And then he said, because this is how I chose him.
He said, make sure you choose someone you don't like,
because you will listen to them. You will not listen

(21:37):
to someone that you like. And he says, in a
prime manipulator like you is never going to listen to anybody.
So he said, things like sanity and higher power are fluid.
I didn't understand that. What do you mean they're fluid?
He said, because we have a disease of perception. Whatever
day of the week, I'm waking up on whatever my
spiritual condition is at that moment, that's how I see

(21:58):
the world. That's how I see you. You know, there's
this passage. I'm not going to tell you where it is.
Ha ha. You gotta go find it yourself in the
daily reflections. But I'll tell you it's summer in November.
About the guy that every night he comes home and
the dogs are barking next door at the neighbor's house.
He doesn't care. And one night he comes home and
the dogs are barking and he wants to take a
rifle out to shoot all the dogs. What changed? He

(22:18):
changed because dogs bark. And so this fluidity of what
sanity looks like and what higher power looks like is
in direct correlation to where I am in my work
as an alcoholic. And I'm not saying where my spiritual
condition is that doesn't come for a really long time.
Don't let them fool you. There's no spiritual condition other

(22:41):
than showing up in the beginning of alcoholics anonymous. You're
not coming into this room somehow spiritually fit. You're coming
into this room hoping there's a seat for you, and
no one talks to you. That's my condition when I
came into AA. And so my other problem with this, though,
is that I really thought that I could do it myself.
I don't know about you. You could be an alcoholic

(23:02):
like me. I don't want anybody's help for anything. Nothing.
Even when I got sick, I'm going to do it myself.
I did not want your help for a single thing.
Asking for help was a sign of weakness. Believing in
God was a crutch. I didn't want, you know when
these these were tenets that I ascribe to my entire life.
Now you come in here and you tell me that

(23:23):
unless you do this, you will die because you're not
going to be able to drink, and you're not going
to be able to not drink, and so the only
choice you have is to just sort of get your
arms around something that just says you gotta believe in something.
I don't know what it is, but something so that
we can begin to restore you. I cannot restore myself.

(23:49):
I can't really even hammer or nail in. I can't
restore myself. You have to do it for me. And
there's an old expression which I love to this day.
I get to come to aid to see God with
the skin on. I don't even know that that's what's
happening to me. But sometimes you're in a room and
somebody will say something it is just going to go
right through you, right through you. When you think by God.
You know, one time I was at I walked I'm

(24:11):
an alcoholic that walks into wrong meetings a lot, and
I walked into a meeting that I had no business
being because I didn't do that substance, and I didn't
care because I really needed a meeting. And it was
New Year's Eve, it seems to be my favorite night
of the week. And I walked into this meeting and
a guy got up there and he had six weeks
of sobriety and he was the speaker. And I thought,
I was great. They couldn't get anybody with more than
six weeks of sobriety to be the speaker. And he

(24:34):
got up there and he said, I know that that
people believe in New York's Resolutions. He said, I really
don't believe in New Year's Resolution, but if I did,
I would have to pray that all my problems moving
forward are me. That took me twenty years to learn,
twenty years to understand that I was the problem. This
guy knew this at six weeks. So listen, listen hard

(24:57):
when you're in the meetings, because you're gonna hear God
with the skin on. You're going to hear somebody says
something that is not even possible with the amount of
time that they have under their belt. Anyway, the next
thing that I had to do, and I'm saying that
I had to do it, I didn't say that I
liked it, and I didn't say I wanted to. This
is what I had to do, because this is what
I was at that place, that beautiful place where somebody

(25:20):
tells you what to do when you do it. I'm
not at that place anymore, by the way, but I
used to be. And Albert would say to me, look
for evidence of things you don't understand. You know, this
was his beginning to show me where God was. He'd say,
look for evidence of things you don't understand. I said,

(25:41):
like what, he's a go out in Central Park and
look for evidence of love. Now, if you want to
be leveled, go out there and look for evidence of love.
Because I can't tell you what it looks like, but
I do know it when I see it. And I
would go to Central Park day after day and I
would look for evidence of love. And then i'd come

(26:02):
back and you'd say, good, Now, go out there and
look for evidence of the wind. Because you can't see it,
can't hold it, can't smell it. Look for evidence of
the wind, continue to look for evidence of things you
don't understand it, because that is the essence of step
two of trying to believe, of being willing to believe

(26:25):
something that I don't understand. That's all it is. It's
not some big equation out there. And the longer you
don't understand it, the better it's going to be when
you get it, because the longer it will stay with you. You
turn around and you go out to Central Park one
day and you go, I got it all. I got
evidence of the wind, and I got evidence of love,
and by the way, I found some evidence of God.

(26:47):
That's going to leave you in about a week. But
if you go out there and you're talking out loud,
and you take a little book with you and you
write it down, and you write down all the things
that you see evidence of that you don't understand, and
that little book fills up that stays with you the
rest of your life, the rest of your life. And
then if you are lucky, you know, when you begin
to actually have real conversations with people you know that

(27:09):
are not drunk conversations with people you're going to recognize
evidence of love. That's what AA is about. But you
can't recognize it until you've been practicing it long enough
to say, I don't actually know what love looks like.
I don't know what the wind looks like. I know
what evidence of the wind is. And I certainly didn't
know what God was. And he said, now go back

(27:31):
out to the park and show me evidence of God.
That was hard. That was really hard, because you know,
I'm a New Yorker, I'm not like a nature person.
I couldn't stand the fact he was sending me out
to the park. You know, I just I didn't know
what I was supposed to be looking for. But what
he did was he prepared me for looking for evidence
of other things that I didn't understand. And by the

(27:54):
time I got to evidence of God, I was calm,
you understand I was. I wasn't anxious that I couldn't
figure out what evidence of God looked like. And that's
the most important thing. That I went through a process
with him where I remained calm. And then one day
I saw it and I saw it and I saw

(28:16):
it in the park, and I saw it between a
man and woman and I came back and he said,
how do you know that that wasn't evidence of love?
I said, I'm not saying it wasn't, but what I
saw was evidence of God. And he said, you have
to remember what Chuck Chamberlain said. What you're looking for,

(28:36):
you're looking with. God is within us. God is within
each and every one of us. So what you're looking for,
you're looking with. So if you're looking for God, God's
inside of you. It's not far to look. It's a process.
It's a process. And by the way, the nicest thing
about it is no wrong way to do it, Absolutely

(28:58):
no wrong way to do it. You know, Chuck c
who was Clancy's sponsored, was a terrible analogy. He was
a deer hunter and one day, you know, I don't know,
he shot a bunch of deer, I guess, and he
was coming back out and some guy came over and
he goes, oh my God, look how lucky you're worth.
And where are they? And Chuck Sea goes, you see
him where they are, you don't see them where they're not.

(29:20):
And that's exactly how we find God. You see him
where he is, You're not going to see him where
he's not. So this took time. I'm just saying it.
It took a long time for me. And I went
out there, and I was in the park, you know,
for a very long time. And I've said every person, man,
woman that I've ever sponsored outside looking for evidence. Sometimes

(29:41):
I make it up. Look for evidence of this. Look
for evidence doesn't matter what it is, as long as
you don't understand it, as long as you don't understand
what you're looking for, so that you remain teachable. And
we'll talk about that when we get to the seventh step.
So the book tells us that there are three kind
of alcoholics, you know, those who won't believe, those who
can't believe, those who believe that God exists but he

(30:04):
can't help. You know, I really, with all due respect,
I so disagree with that, so disagree with that. I
wish I could have gotten it down to three. You know,
many many many more. You know, what about the person
you know who once believe? And what about the person
who wants to believe? And what about the person who's
afraid to believe? Look what I'm putting on the line.

(30:26):
I am afraid at this moment to put myself into
a power greater than me that I don't yet believe
is going to do something, and you're asking me to
do it. That's why you have to have a good sponsor.
I just, you know, a smarter sponsor than you. He says,
you don't have to do any of those things. He said,
you believe that I believe, so that I believe he

(30:46):
is good, then you're halfway there. And I did that
for a very long time. And I remember when, oh
my god, I was newly sober, not sober a long time,
and I came into First Things first, and in the
back row were four rabbis. Never forget this, four Hasidic
rabbis sitting there. And I looked at Albert, who by
the way, was black with dreadlocks, and you know, I
said to him, look at those guys over there. I said,

(31:09):
if they can't find God, what choice do I have,
What chance do I have? I'm screwed here. And he
said to me, Karen, you misunderstand what you're looking at.
He says, those four guys, those four rabbis, they found God.
He says, they're here because they have no faith. And
we'll talk about that a little later as well. Because
there was a big difference between finding God and having
faith and having faith. So then my next you know

(31:33):
wall that I hit was don't talk to me about
God's will really, because if you're an alcoholics anonymous long enough,
you will hear one hundred and fifty thousand versions of
what God's will is for me. I have yet to
meet anybody who had a cup of coffee with God
and told him what his will was. It doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist. It's an intuitive feeling. It's an intuitive feeling.

(31:54):
They tell us that in the ninth step. You get
it in the promises, but you get it right from
the beginning, right from the beginning, when you're sitting there
and you're discussing God and you're talking about God, and
you have an intuitive feeling. You know, it helps in
this program to create some enthusiasm for being here. You know,
I know many of you don't want to be here,

(32:14):
but it helps to create some enthusiasm. You know. The
Greek for enthusiasm comes from end, from the inside, theo God.
So to become enthusiastic about AA pushes your chances for
success even further along. And you want that. You want
to be successful at AA. So anyway he pushed this

(32:35):
on me and talking about God's will, he says, don't
worry about it. Don't worry about anybody says about God's will.
I love that he said that it's important to know.
I love that he told me not to worry. Don't
worry about it. Everything's going to be okay. Everything will
have its own time. And he said, when you stop
thinking about what God's will is for you, then you'll
know what God's will is for you. He says, because

(32:57):
generally it's the same for everybody. We just like to
complicate things like we just like to make up different things,
but it's pretty much the same for everybody. You all
have it in this room right now. I mean you
take a look around, you're sober, the other shoes dropped,
You're here in a room of alcoholics. Anonymous. I'm pretty
sure that's what God's will is for me. You know,
when I lived it to you to live another day
and tell another story and be sober another day and

(33:18):
help another alcoholic. I'm pretty sure that's what God's will was.
Because I thought God's will to me be happy and
wealthy and all this stuff. Then God has failed me.
But that's not what it is. You know, if you're
an alcoholic like me, I waited my whole life for
the other shoe to drop, always waiting, always looking over
my shoulder, always waiting for something bad to happen. Well,
it's already happened. The other shoe has dropped. You're in AA.

(33:39):
That's it doesn't get any different than that. The other
thing I want to talk about, just a little bit,
is about my first when I wasn't looking for it,
my first act of seeing God with the skin on,
when I wasn't looking for it. And that's in my
home group of first things first and used to count days,
you know, pretty much like this, only look difference. They

(34:00):
used to count days up to ninety days in the
beginning of the meeting, and people would say their name
and they would announce their time. You know, I have
seventy days, clap, clap, and you know I have fifty days. Clap, clap.
And I never shared my time. I didn't like it,
so it wasn't your business. So you know, I never
said anything at all. And one day I was in
there and they're, you know, counting days, and the guy
in the back of the room said, you know, my

(34:22):
name is my name was Tom and she has eighty
eight days. And that is the first act of unconditional
love I ever experienced in AA. And that was God
with the skin on it. This guy didn't know me,
he didn't want anything from me, but he watched me
get sober. He watched my days day after day after

(34:43):
day after day. I never counted days. And so the
next day I came in and I kind of felt
a little obligated and I said, you know, I'm Karen,
and I have eighty nine days, you know, and everybody clap, clap, clap.
And then the next day I came in and I said, yeah,
I' Karen. I have ninety days. And they brought me
up and and they gave me my bro There was
bronze token in those days, bronze, and I said, thank

(35:04):
you so much. I would sit down, and they said,
where are you going? You're the speaker. Now. If I'd
been paying attention at all in that meeting, which clearly
I hadn't, I would have seen other people with ninety
days who were the speaker. And I said, there's no
way I can stand up here and speak. I have
nothing to say. And the chairperson says me oh, I'll
just do what Lloyd did last week, I said, Lloyd.
Lloyd got up there and said my name was Lloyd
on my alcoholic and he cried for twenty minutes, I said,

(35:27):
and then they gave him a standing ovation. So I
don't know what I did. I said something, but that
was that was the first time I ever spoken in
AA anyway. At the end of that meeting, when I
got my ninety days, yeah, when I got my ninety days.
You know, Albert said that, take a look at step two.
There's another thing in there that's not true. Get a
sponsor that reads these steps. Get a sponsor that knows

(35:50):
what they're talking about. They're gonna kill me, by the way.
You know, last week I said, get off of Zoom.
You have no idea how many text messages I got
from people who were on Zoom saying I'm so sorry
I was on Zoom. I'm so sorry. Listen. Just to
clear the record, I do two Zoom meetings a week,
so you're all off the hook out there in zoom Land.
Two meetings a week. Anyway, Get a sponsor who reads it.

(36:15):
You know. Clancy used to say, just read the black parts,
don't interpret what they're talking about, because nobody in this
room anywhere is smart enough to interpret what this guy's
writing in here. Just read the black parts, and it
says that this is the rallying point for us. And
Albert said, what do you think about that? I said,
I don't think that's true. He said, because it's not.

(36:36):
It is not a rallying point. You are not a cheerleader.
You're not gonna get up there with pom poms. You're
a nasty, belligerent, regretful, rueful, angry alcoholic. Do you think
someone is rallying with you? He said, no. Step two
pushes us into uncertainty. And here's the deal about uncertainty.

(37:04):
We have to embrace uncertainty with every fiber of our
being because the fact is that some of the most
beautiful chapters in our lives won't have a title until
much later, and we'll be living in that uncertainty for
quite some time. And that's what step two does. It
pushes me into uncertainty. It makes me hold another alcoholics

(37:27):
hand and say, I don't know how to do this
by myself. You have to help me. It helps me listen,
it helps me commit, and when Albert Rodgers said to me,
I will be your sponsor if you are willing to
stay sober somebody else's way. That was the entire requirement.
If you have a sponsor that has more requirements than that,
look around, look around. He never said call me every day.

(37:49):
He never said you got to do this no computer,
So he never downloaded on any of those crazy like
step sheets that they download. And this is how you
do the fourth step is that you go along with
these sheets. Here's the reality. Where are the sheets we are?
Where your foundation? Where are your answers? You need to

(38:10):
get it from another alcoholic so you understand the language
because we're the only ones that get each other. And
it has to be that way because when you're in
the second step and you're trying to get that second step,
you got to be next to somebody who gets you.
You've got to be next to somebody who understands you.
Otherwise you turn around and say, my case is different.

(38:30):
You don't get me. You don't understand what's going on
with me. If you had the life that I had,
hold on a second, I have had the life that
you have. That's why it's so important to recognize somewhere
in there that we are not alone, that we go
through these steps with another human being. So the last
thing that I want to talk about here is, you know,
in the principle behind the second step is hoping, and

(38:53):
it may not feel that way when you're getting into
this area of uncertainty and you don't know what you're
doing and you can find God, and you know, you
feel a little hopeless here because you're not really sure
you're doing it well or you're doing it right. So
this is what I'm going to say, and stick with
me here. In the second step, help ceases to become

(39:15):
this verb like I hope you stay sober, or I
hope I see you next week, or I hope we
can do this together, and it becomes a noun and
a noun alone, and it becomes I'm an alcoholic and
I don't know how, but I have managed to stay

(39:35):
sober for ninety days. And I can't tell you how
I did that, but I can tell you that if
you do what I did, you will stay sober for
ninety days. And you give it away, and you give
that little piece of hope, that little gift of hope away,

(39:55):
and then you have nothing. So you got to stay
sober so you can get a little bit more hope
inside of you. And then you meet another person and
you give away a little bit more help over there,
and you give hope away as much as you can,
because God and nature of horror vacuum. And as soon
as you give away the hope, you get it back,
and you get it back more. And then someone talks
to you and says, this is what's happened to me.

(40:19):
I want to say that when you give away this hope,
and when more hope comes in, it comes in in
extraordinary ways. Well, and I'll go into this, and I'm
not sure where we'll do this, but we'll do this somewhere,
and I'll talk to you a little bit about what
happened when my husband died. But I talk about it
ad nause and him in the room. I couldn't get

(40:40):
over It took me years, couldn't get over it. It
wasn't that he died. It was the way he died
and was violent, and he was killed, and it was
not wasn't what wasn't the script I wrote, wasn't the
script I wrote. And he died on my fifth anniversary,
and my fifth anniversary is coming up, and I have
this thing, and I talk to my sponsor about it.
I have this thing that comes up every year on
my anniversary sober anniversary fifth year, that I have this

(41:04):
choice to make, and I can take that fifth year
anniversary and I can think about him all day long
and cry, cry, cry for the life we never had
or weren't gifted, or how much different my life turned
out the way it was, or I can turn around
and live the joy through the sorrow and celebrate the

(41:24):
fact that I've this many years sober, that I've connected
with this many alcoholics. You know that I've had this
kind of life. And so here's the thing.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
It may seem like an easy decision that it's not what
I do do, because this is what I was taught
was give myself the grace the time to make that
decision every year, every year, and by the time my
anniversary comes, I know what to say when I pick
up my coin.

Speaker 1 (41:51):
You know, I know what to say. And it's no
coincidence that, you know, for almost thirty seven years, I've
chosen to live the joy through the sorrow. But I
still make the decision. And that's what we're going to
talk about next week. In making the decisions. So the
last thing that I want to talk to you about
is the last time, the first time that I really
kind of felt this whole God prayer thing and didn't

(42:13):
understand it. And it can come in any time. I
was six years sober, seven years sober or something like that,
and my second husband took me to court because because
he wanted to, and he took me to court for
custody of our son, and the judge, I don't know,
he brought up experts that talked about alcoholism and pretty

(42:34):
much convinced the judge that I could pick up a
drink the next day. I was already six years sober.
And anyway, they took my son, they took him, and
it was hard to come back into the rooms and
talk about, you know, your sober six years, you can
have what I have like that. And so I left.
I didn't leave AA, I just left where I was
and I was in I went down to North Carolina,

(42:55):
and every day I would go into the cornfields, because
don't go to North Carolina if you look them for
the city, because all it is is cornfields and all
these other fields. And I used to go out into
the fields and shout f you to God. At the
top of my lungs. I was so angry. I thought
I had done everything right. I thought I had done
everything you asked me to do. I thought that I
had attendant enough meetings, and I've helped enough alcoholics, and

(43:15):
I was in this program and I was doing it right.
And I hadn't had a drink or a drug in
sixty years, and why is this happening now? In fu?
And I came back and I called Albert and then
he said to me, well, at last you're praying, And
I thought, well, I need a new sponsor. I did
not like that response at all. So in closing up,

(43:40):
I just I want to say that we have a
lot of work to do in here, because God is big,
and it takes a while, and it takes a while
to feel comfortable. But you know, the truth is all
we got is time, right, That's it. That's all we
got is time. And so the last thing that I'm
going to leave you with is that the thing that
happens when you get hope is it has two sort

(44:00):
of like evil stepsisters that come with it, trust and love.
And we get these things. The more hope we acquire
as a now, and the more we give away what
we get back. In kind is trust what we get back,
and kind is love. And if you think it's easy
to receive those things, it isn't. And I know it isn't.

(44:22):
And I was hard and I didn't want to receive it,
you know. But eventually my armor came down and I said, Okay,
the other shoe dropped. I'm here, So I think that's
it for me for tonight. We're going to talk about
the third step next week. And this is a joy.
Thank you for letting me share this great Dan shar