Leslie G. AFG Female

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

As our spiritual speaker, so just to qualify that, sorry, Scott, you didn't quite make it.

No, I'm really excited to hear Leslie speak this morning. I had heard her a few years back at another conference, and I was somebody who always really struggled with the God concept. And at the end of her lead, I just couldn't stop crying. And I said to her, I've never heard anyone talk about God in a way that made so much sense to me. And so I'm excited to hopefully hear some of that again today, and with that, help me welcome Leslie from Indianapolis.

Leslie (0:43)

Leslie, alcoholic.

Can you hear me okay? Am I too loud, too soft? All good. All right. Let's see, where do we go? I'm supposed to read some, right? Where is it?

Oh, it is. Oh, it's just too big.

I'm an alcoholic. And through God's grace, the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and great sponsorship, I've been sober since September 18th, 1995

Gee, isn't this exciting? I've been excited all weekend. I mean, it just started with a barn burner of elite. I mean, Peggy just kept saying, yeah, it's hot in here. I'm feeling warm. It's hot in here. I'm like, yeah, girl, you're lighting the house on fire. That's why it's hot in here. And it just got, I mean, it just hit after hit after hit, you know, with Susie and then my gosh, Scott. We have friends in common.

And David, I'm a double winner, too. I've been two and a half years, and I got a sponsor in Al-Anon, two and a half years in Al-Anon. Like, why didn't I find this sooner? I love hearing. I tend to think that my favorite speaker is the Al-Anon speaker when I go to a conference, because I hear you guys all the time. I go to AA meetings. I hear this all the time.

And then with Jerry. Oh my God, Jerry, thank you so much. And Heidi, and just the people you look at, you hear the story and you see the face and their demeanor, and it's like, yeah, wow, something happened.

So thank you. And Kate, and Rhonda, thanks for asking me.

I get nervous. This never gets easy. And thanks for asking me to speak. I love going to conferences, but I like them a whole lot better when I'm not a speaker. And thanks to all the people on the committees. I mean, there's a ton of you guys. I see your little badges and people running around, and it just came on. I don't know how it's going in the background, but it's just come off perfectly, from what I can see. So thank you. It's a labor of love, and it's a whole lot of hard work, and it can be inconvenient. It goes on for a long time. It goes on for probably about a year.

So thank you to everybody.

Yet, you know what? I'm not a circuit speaker. I stutter and stammer and lose my train of thought all the time, especially the older I get.

So last Wednesday, I went to a meeting that I don't normally... Oh, let's see. Here we go. All right. So I went to a meeting that I don't normally go to, and it's real close to me, actually, but I'm a meeting attender. I go to a ton of meetings. I always have. I'm a bar drinker, and I just love going to meetings. I go all over town. I know people all over the place. And so I go. I'll get into a meeting. You know, I'll get into a Friday night meeting for a while, and then maybe I go over here for a while, and then I come back. I've had three meetings that I go between on Sunday and that kind of thing. And so I hadn't been in like three months or so. I go to this Wednesday meeting, and I want to see Virginia. You know, it's her home group. So I go, and they have the tables.

They have a speaker meeting on the last Wednesday of the month. And so they had tables out like this in the middle of the aisle, and then they had like six tables. And I thought, okay, speaker meeting. I go in, I sit down, I'm chatting Virginia up, and we're eating a cake and drinking coffee. And the chairperson, she already said hi to me. I know who it is. And she comes up, and she's standing over us, you know, like this. And she's just standing there, and she's staring at me. And I look up at her, and like, what's up, hi.

And she just looks at me, and she says, it's two minutes till seven, and my speaker's not here. And I didn't say a thing. She didn't ask a question, so I just shut up. And Virginia's just looking at me like, yeah, yeah, like this. And she says, and then she asked, she said, would you be my backup if he doesn't show up? And I said, yes, yes, I will. And then this earnest young man comes. So they start the meeting, they're reading the stuff, and this earnest young man comes in, and he sits down at the very front. Nobody's sitting in the front tables. I'm at the second table. And he sits in the front table. He's got the book with the 12 and 12, and the binding, and the medallion in the middle. And I thought, oh, good, I'm glad he's here. And it wasn't him. He wasn't the speaker. And so I get up there, and as I get up and walk up there, I realize I'm wearing these ratty sneakers. I've been out in the yard all day, and I got a t-shirt that I've been wearing all day at 7 o'clock, and I'm wearing a ball cap. I'm trying to let my hair grow, so I'm wearing this ball cap. It's a UK wildcat hat, so it kind of clasped up the whole thing. But I'm standing there, it's like, this is so uncomfortable. I have never stood behind a podium dressed like that. So I just start rolling into my story and everything, and there's a kid comes in, and it kind of makes it not a scene, but you know he's there. And he sits, he plops down in his chair, and then he goes back on two legs, and he's sighing like this, and he gets back on all four, and he's going like this. And then there's a gal on her phone, I can see her on her phone, she's playing a game, and then there's two women in the back that are talking, there's some guy looking out the window, and I'm like, oh my god, it's so not about me, you know? I mean, I'm up here saving lives, you know, and Brittany's just getting her paper signed. And so, you know, I mean, I just don't want to take myself too damn seriously. So, so I'm probably going to stutter and stammer my way through this. But, you know, ideally, I get up here and I can at least let God, you know, take over. A lot of times it feels like God is this, like I'm just a glove of invisible reality, you know, into which God slips her mighty hand and just kind of, you know, here we go. Here we go. So, so yeah, let's see. So I'm supposed to, you know, I do better with a topic. I'd rather stand up here and talk about the first tradition or something. But, you know, I'm tasked with, well, what it says here is what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now.