Will you help me pray our serenity prayer? God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen. I am to this day still powerless over alcohol, and yet I'm sober and as happy as I let myself be today. My name is Tom Needham. Hi, everybody. The business at hand. Step eight. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. Couple things I like to remind myself because I needed to be reminded. It's a list. It's not a drama. Most of us, we've gone through the fourth and fifth step, sixth and seventh, we get to eighth. And we look at that list, and most of us, honestly, if you had any resentments at all, you had a list of people already. At least I did. But I hesitate. I said, what the heck is the purpose? What do we need to do this? You know? I'm going to steal one thing from step nine. I'll apologize to the presenter. On page 77 at the top, it's my favorite quote of the book. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us. Not to improve my personality to not be such a jerk, although that can happen. You know. It's not really a self-help program. If it was a self-help help program, I'd be dead. I have alcoholism. It's a chronic disease. It's a killer. It wants me dead and it wants everybody around me to be sad. But if it can't kill me, it also can make me and everyone who loves me absolutely impossible to live with. So we are at the eighth step. Long time ago, an old timer told me that, believe it or not, more than half, like seven of the twelve steps, have something to do with some kind of an inventory or what to do about an inventory. When I first heard it, I was uh, well, they use a nice word here, but I won't use that word. I was skeptical. From step four up to step ten, every one of the steps is about an inventory or what to do about your inventory. It helps realize for me how deeply important the inventory is. It sent me back to advice in the big book where they said we tried to find an easier, softer way. You know, my home group guys, uh we all know about how it works. You know, rarely have we seen a person fail who was thoroughly. Well, they made up a version for me. Thoroughly have we seen a person fail who rarely follows our path. I made a lot of mistakes in a lot of the steps, but this one um I was having trouble with. And I mentioned in some of the breakout meetings when I was about eight months over, a bunch of old timers from my home group uh took me to a place called Cook Forest. And it was a conference, and uh I was I've been back there many times, and uh I was at that conference and I saw all kinds of things, and that's where I took my third step, you know. The lead speaker on Saturday night was a guy. I guess I can use his full name because he's passed on to the big meeting, a guy by the name of Al Myers. He was out of Texas someplace. And he said he had the same problem I was having. Once he got past the resentments, he didn't feel he had harmed anybody else and couldn't understand why he had to make this list, you know. And uh he said he came to the conclusion. Uh now I felt like somewhat of an amateur alcoholic in my home group. Uh we had a thing called Murderer's Row, and there were guys that were in the psych unit several times. It seemed like everybody had a DUI but me, and you know. And Al said he had trouble with that because uh he had to really take a look at his life, and he said, you know what he found out he was like an alcoholic cockroach. He never really did anything all that bad. He just showed up and made a mess out of everything. And I said, Man, that sounds like me. That sounds like me. So I had to go back and take a look at all of the things that I originally looked at in that four step. We have a list of all persons we'd harmed and whom we are willing to make amends. We made it when we took inventory, and that statement is true, not necessarily complete. We subjected ourselves to a drastic self-appraisal. Uh I did not have the advantage of taking the the twelve the four-step guides. They they really weren't available when I uh took my inventory. I had to do it the old-fashioned way, buy the book with a sponsor. And I had a sponsor that knew the big book backwards and forwards. I think he sobered up half of old Berea on his own. So we subjected ourselves to a drastic appraisal with a lot of prompting. If we have not the will to do this, we ask until it comes. Prayer and meditation were a big part of it. It is suggested in the big book, if we're having trouble with this, you know, we can't figure out how we harm people. It says, make a list of the people who harmed us. Start with that. And then the next part of this is we're going to be looking in the next step for forgiveness from these people. So why it suggests don't we start by forgiving the people who we feel have harmed us? Sounded pretty good. And one of the things I found from it, and the book uh goes into this, you know, that uh to understand the struggle that some of the people we are going to go to in the next step, we have to struggle with forgiving them first to understand how hard it is to forgive. And I don't know if any of us yet to this day still haven't forgiven ourselves for some things that we did in the past, but it is essential. So I had to go back through my list again and take a look at this. And then uh I was having some more trouble, so one of the wise guys in my home group uh said, What's the matter? I said, I don't know. I'm having a hell of a time remembering some of these uh things, you know. And he said, Oh, really? He said, Well, it's easy. We have a tool for that. Just get a resentment, you'll never forget it. He was right. You know, the one thing I've learned through the years, uh if we stay sober, we work the 12 steps, we help others, we can become exactly like the people we couldn't stand when we first got here. So back to harm. We might ask ourselves what we mean when we say harmed other people. What does that mean? What kind of harm do people do to one another anyway? To define the word harm in a practical way, I guess we call it the result of instincts in collision. That sounded pretty good. Which can cause physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual damage to people. You ever go to church, sit next to somebody you couldn't stand? You ever stand outside in the parking lot trying to listen to a widow explain how lonely she has been since her husband passed away and doesn't know what to do about it, and you can't wait to get the hell away from her? Spiritual hymn. Alcoholics are not the only people in the world that need to tell about their antics and their sorrows. You know, the presentations up to today have been fantastic. Now, right from the first one, uh, the realization that not only is the first step important to us the rest of our lives, it's important to me, too. And so are the other 11 steps. It's not a one-shot deal. You know, uh at the end of a couple of the meetings I go to, they always re-read uh page 465, you know. That uh we know but little, more will be revealed. You know, and my first thought on that was, oh yeah, somewhere along the line after Bill and Bob go to the great meeting in the sky, somebody's gonna come up with some other hip slick way to get sober and live a good life. That's not what that meant. More has been revealed to me about me just by not drinking, by putting the 12 steps into my life. Wow. So if you are at the point where you're going to do a fourth, fifth step this weekend, and you feel like a cockroach, you're right in home. You know, take a look. I remember uh some things about work. I was always I I had a buddy that I went to meetings with for the first 25 years of my sobriety, and then he had the unthinking audacity to die. But he used to call me Tom with three lives. You know, I was one way in AA, I was a different way at work, and a third way at home. He said, you have to become one person, even if it's rotten. And I mentioned earlier my grand sponsor, you know, he said, anything worth doing well is worth doing terrible if that's the best you can do. He also told me that there is no wrong way to work any of the steps except to not work them. Fear was a big driver in my life. I always had this thing about uh even sober have to straighten out the world. You know, family members weren't allowed to have opinions if they disagreed with mine. And I had to set them straight. And my daughter, God love her, she would be uh probably 12, 13 years old at the time. She'd just look at my wife at the dinner table and say, there he goes again. You know, my two sons, they uh they they really resented that their father was a bloody drunk. Really resented it. I understood that because I had that experience with my own father. You know, so a lot of rebuilding had to be done. But the important thing was, you know, what is it that uh I did to them that harmed them? And you know what the answer was? It wasn't necessarily the things I did, it's the things I should have done and didn't do. That did more harm to people than anything else. So, in closing. I lost it. Just remember that it is a process, and the whole idea of the eighth and ninth step is to set us right with the people we harmed. And in the future, how to conduct ourselves with the people in our lives. Will you join me in the Lord's Prayer?