Steps 2 -3 with Chris, Dave, Elia AA WKS

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Three, and we are going to go in order from your left to your right, with Chris C., Dave A.,
and Noelia V.

**Chris Campbell** (0:15)
Build my nest here. Can I? All right.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:20)
All right.

**Chris Campbell** (0:21)
Well, too low now.
Now I can't see my book. All right.
Evening, everybody. Chris Campbell, alcoholic. Hi there. I would like to thank Stephanie that asked me to do this, but since I don't know if she's even in the room, I don't know how to thank her. So is Stephanie not here? There we go. Okay. So wherever Stephanie is, thank you Stephanie out in the ethers for asking me to do this. Yeah. Actually, I'm really delighted to be here, and I love the steps. I love the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. So when I get asked to share my experience on taking these steps and walking through this book, it's not that I want to get up here. I'll tell you the truth. I would much rather be sitting there one-on-one over a cup of coffee with somebody back home with the big book cracked open. But what I learned is vitally important. I didn't even start my timer. There we go. I learned it's so vitally important what we do behind this podium, too, because I've had a personal experience with somebody carrying the message out of the book from behind a podium. And I learned not too long ago that someone had an experience like that with me. And if you're here tomorrow night, that might come up. A lot of times it does. I don't want to take the time to go on that when somebody asked me to talk on a step. And step two, I was thinking about it, you know, and it came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could resource to sanity. And I walked in to you on October 29th of 1994, so 31 years ago, agnostic at best, at very best. That was giving myself some credit.
You know, I just couldn't understand a world that operated the way our world operates. I still don't understand a world that operates the way our world operates. And that there could be any loving, powerful presence underlying that. You know, the things that had happened to me and all, you know, the typical backstory. You know, it really, I was challenged with that concept. And what I was fortunate enough, one of my first sponsors, she told me, she said, I'm not asking you to believe in a power. I'm asking you to believe that maybe there is one, just that, not in. I don't need to know what, I don't need to know. And I was so grateful for that. And she sat down with me and, you know, she said, it can be anything that you want it to be. And it was super simple my first time around. Like, I wanted to be loving, and I wanted it to be forgiving. Because I had done so many things wrong, that I didn't think I was ever going to be able to connect with anything. And I believed that while working with her in this book, I believed that with all of my heart that, you know, and then we did my fourth step. And that was truly the moment when I came to believe that there really might be something that I might really be able to connect with. And the reason that was, I had one of those take it to your grave things in my fifth step, right? And so I'm talking, and she's this sweet little old church lady with these thin blue lips and this white hair. She was literally the organ player at the local Catholic church. And I thought, there is no way I'm telling you. This is not happening. That sweet little old lady was only 63 years old. I turned 64 this week, so I'm like, I'm realizing that, yeah, my perception was a tad off.
But at the end of my fifth step, she looked right at me and she said, and there's something more.
She knew. And so I thought, and then she took me right to the book that told me I was probably going to drink again. And that horrified me because you see, I've been given a sufficient first step experience that I knew in and of my own power. There was no way I was not going to not drink again. And all bets were off, and I could no longer control, enjoy, do anything with my drinking. I wanted to be done, but you guys had convinced me that I didn't have the power to be done. So when we got to this point, and she explained that, I just, you know, and blurted out this horrific tale, and she, this little church lady went, and I'm like, what is so funny? I don't find a thing funny about this. And she goes, oh, honey, when I was 27, I did the same thing, let me tell you about it. And I was like, what? And she had been restored to this amazing, beautiful life.