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Good evening everybody.

My name is Chris and I am an alcoholic.

This is kind of a new town for me so I'll give my AA vital statistics on or around

December 28th 1989 the grace of God separated me from alcohol.

Oh, the willingness born in desperation pushed me into Alcoholics Anonymous and I started to do the things that I thought I needed to do to survive.

And that's helped to maintain my spiritual condition over the years.

And I haven't had a drink since that crazy night back in December of 89. I'm very grateful. a 2, I've always had a sponsor, uninterrupted.

And I pay a lot of attention to how much time in my life goes to AA and goes to the spiritual life and helping others.

Because I know it's in direct proportion to any serenity or any survival I might have,

the amount of attention I pay to AA stuff. The topic tonight is a little bit about

the history of the big book and I'll warn you that this is my perspective. History is a fickle thing. I love reading about history and history is flexible in a lot of ways and it's not really an exact science.

All you can do is you can gather information and you can gather documents and you can take personal statements and you can put it all together,

but then you have to kind of develop your own perspective on what actually happened. And I've got my own unique perspective on the early days of AA.

It works for me.

Anyway, alcoholism has been around thousands of years.

You can read about it in the Bible, the people who drank too much wine.

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