“Half-measures avail us nothing,” are words spoken in Twelve-Step recovery that are meant to reveal the importance of keeping our recovery efforts on the front of our minds and actions. This day-at-a-time commitment to discovering a new way of life and maintaining it...
As we get further into our recovery journey, we find that prayer is at the heart of what helps get us sober and an essential element of keeping us in recovery. Our first admission of a problem may have been a prayerful, crying out to what seemed to be only ourselves....
The Twelve Steps of recovery and the sacraments of the Catholic Church work in a very similar way. While some of the steps and each of the sacraments have great ritual and reverence around them regarding initiation, each are to be continually practiced. Finding a...
This Sunday the Church celebrates the Feast of Corpus Christi (the Body and Blood of Christ). All three readings this weekend move toward finding nourishment, perseverance, and true freedom after having to journey through a spiritual desert. The Egyptians traveled out...
“You and I are going on a journey together, and neither one of us is coming back,” Michael said as I gazed back at him, utterly confused yet somewhat understanding at the same time. Then he started to wash my feet. I was bearing witness to the practice set...
We are in the grips of spiritual warfare. While God is our source of life and salvation, the enemy uses some of our God-given desires to pull us away from His sunlight. One of the paramount tools that is used in this fight against good is addiction. Often starting as...
I remember my first stretch of Christmas and New Year’s while in recovery quite well. I had about two and a half months free from alcohol and drug use (which seemed miraculous at the time, as it still does today), and I was preparing for what I knew would be a test of...
If you are wrestling with the idea that you need help overcoming your addiction—either from drugs, alcoholism, pornography, gambling, an eating disorder, or other psychological dependency—it is likely that this is not a new idea to you. I had enough evidence to be...
On my way to church yesterday morning I was stopped at a red light where a young man, about my age, was crossing with his Bible in hand. It seemed to me that he was heading to a church service at a nearby Methodist or Presbyterian church, and I envisioned him to be...
For the longest time I hid from everything. I would hide myself from the reality that my life was unmanageable and that drugs and alcohol had taken everything meaningful away from me. I hid from the outside world, from my responsibilities, and from human interaction....