“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable” You knew you needed to get sober. Everyone was disgusted with you, and you were disgusted with your own behavior. Still smarting from the last time you parked your car on the neighbor’s lawn, you swore you wouldn’t drink like that again. So, you go to a meeting […]

“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Before becoming an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous, my prayer to God was something like this, “God, if you just get me out of this mess, I promise I won’t do that again.” When I drink, I would think of a lie on how I was […]

“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” I didn’t want to become an alcoholic. I became one after my first drink; that drink was the solution to all of my affairs up to that point, for seventeen years. At the age of thirty-eight, I was ordered to […]

“Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” The following preface to this subject matter is a poem I wrote after the last fourth step I finished: The choices I made yesterday are no longer the redeemers of my destiny. I stand today a man not governed by his predisposition to self-doubt and misguided self-will, but as a man […]

“Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” The principle of Step 5 is integrity – an unimpaired condition; soundness; adherence to a code of moral, artistic, or other values; the quality or state of being complete or individual. What a principle! I don’t know about you, but this vocabulary was never […]

“Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” Am I entirely ready to have God remove all of my defects of character, not just a few? Not always. Some of them are like a security blanket. They are a smelly blanket of comfort and familiarity. The smell keeps people away, forcing me to put my blanket […]