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 link, and drop a dollar or two into our virtual

basket. We hope you enjoyed the podcast. Have a great day.

A wondrous spirit is rising in this place.

It is, of course, the spirit of gratitude.

And that spirit, could it speak, would thank God for this wholesale miracle of regeneration

that has befallen us with alcoholics and knowledge.

And then the spirit of gratitude would look about and see seated here,

our friends,

friends of science, of medicine, of religion,

our friends of the press, and without this group especially,

A.A. could never have been what it is. To them, our gratitude goes up.

Someone once said, fittingly enough, that Alcoholics Anonymous is like a farmer's three-legged milk stool.

And we might suppose one leg to be medicine, another religion, and the third our own experience in drinking and in recovery.

And were we to take out one of those pegs, it would fall down immediately.

So our debt of gratitude to the friends who have seen us long is beyond work.

Then was nearly everyone in this audience who has suffered alcoholism, there is some particular person who has stood by,

be it father, mother, wife, sweetheart, employer, somebody who stayed on to the end and saw us out of the cave into the light.

And it seems only fitting that as a token of all of these, I introduced to you the first symbol of them.

My wife, Lois Wilson.

Will she stand up?

Where are you, Lois?

...