Hello and welcome to Sobercast, where we provide A.A. Speaker Meetings and workshops in podcast format.

We're an ad-free podcast, and if you enjoy listening, please help us be self-supporting by visiting Sobercast.com, look for the donate link and drop a dollar or two into our virtual

basket we hope you enjoyed the podcast have a great day and my name's taut and i'm an alcoholic

and i'm alive tonight and sober by the very special grace of a loving god in the loving program

of alcoholics Anonymous.

And I thank God that I'm an alcoholic.

And if you're a newcomer, why that'll make you want to puke.

But if you are new, I just pray to God that you can keep coming back until you can finally understand why someone can stand at one

of these podiums and be as grateful as I am. And I'm especially grateful to the committee

for asking me back up here to Grant's Pass. Grants Pass is very special to me for some personal

reasons.

And I was your Sunday morning speaker at the Rogue River Roundup in 1981.

And so it's been very neat to be house bearing.

And I hope that when my very dear friend, Doughty Shore,

winds this deal up tomorrow that you'll all be here,

because if you're not, you'll have missed somebody very, very special.

I'm not in a particularly good place these days and that may be a little bit discouraging to some of you

to hear somebody with 18 and a half years of sobriety

say something like that.

But this last six months has been one of the most difficult periods of my entire life.

Because in November I found it necessary to leave my wife of 16 years, and it was only

because of the program that I was able to do that.

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