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. Good evening, everyone. My name is Michael Caholic. And what a pleasure it is to be here tonight. I want to thank Larry. What a great host. Pick me up the other night really late. And thank you very much for the introduction as well. I want to thank Bob, Marnie, and the rest of the committee for offering me the opportunity to come out and share a little bit about what God has done for me in this thing we call Alcoholics Anonymous. And, man, these speakers, these friends of mine, how amazing are they? Can we give them a run more round of applause?

It's been great.

Really been great.

And I want to mention one other group of people, and those are the tapers.

These guys carry a great mission in Alcoholics Anonymous and often overlooked.

And just the AV people, I mean, if you can get this many chins on that small of a screen,

this is talent. This is talent.

I came to Alcoholics Anonymous when I was 24 years old.

I called you when I was 16 and when I was 18 and when I was 21, I put myself into treatment

because I knew I needed help.

And yet, it took me another three years to get sober.

Now, I didn't join AA, I didn't quit, I wasn't a slipper, I never really got in.

I was around it.

I heard about it, I made a call.

It didn't take, right?

I mean, truly, like, there was a hotline number and I called and nothing happened after the call, right? But when I got here when I

was 24, there was some things that I heard that I didn't hear before that. On August 27th of

1991, I wanted to do whatever I could to be and to stay sober. And on August

26th, just the day before, I wanted to do whatever I could to be and stay loaded. I have no idea

what happened that night. No idea how that motivation changed, that idea changed. I have no idea.

Some sort of act of grace, perhaps, at least that's what we've been hearing from the other speakers this weekend. Likely, that's true. Here's what I do know.

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