You Won't Stand Any Closer to God Than This - AA Speaker - Tom L.

A Methodist minister admits that his darkest years came after he first entered AA, then explains how Big Book sponsorship, family reconciliation, and service taught him where God had been hiding.

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In this 1971 Alcoholics Anonymous talk, Tom shares how a five-day blackout, a worried wife, and an ultimatum from his employer brought him to his first AA meeting in Chattanooga. He attended to save his family and career, learned to describe himself as sick, and then kept drinking because he accepted the advice to discard whatever parts of the program he did not like. After losing his job and family and being found by two AA members on a New Orleans park bench, Tom returned to the fellowship but still tried to recover without surrender. Three years after his introduction to AA, an honest inventory and a sponsor who insisted on one clear path finally let some light into the darkness. Tom describes discovering that God had been hidden behind his ideas about theology and religion, then following a spiritual call from engineering into the Methodist ministry. Through anonymous help with his education, his wife's medical crisis, an embrace from the son who remembered his drinking, and carrying the message to another suffering alcoholic, Tom returns to one lesson: God appears when the door is opened through honesty, love, sponsorship, and service. He closes by honoring the three sponsors who taught him how to say "I love you," value what a person is over who they are, and leave Alcoholics Anonymous no less useful than he found it.

Tom L. from Luray, VA speaking in Palm Springs, CA - June 6th 1971

Music: Deep by KaizanBlu