Excerpts

Excerpt from Chapter 1
The End The Beginning

Somehow, while suffering the indignities of my addictions, a pliable humility took root within me. I was defeated inside and out. I’d had enough. I became desperate enough that I was willing to try something new. I was ready to call on and trust something, Someone bigger than me.

Enmeshed and promoting all of my addictive behaviors, was a familial way of thinking, distorted personal beliefs and self-centered agendas that returned me again and again to my insane activities. My personal problem was deeper than my behaviors; it was at the very core of who I was. I can’t count how many times I changed some of my habits. This only brought temporary success. Inevitably I always sent myself reeling backwards, deeper into failure. I could change the outside temporarily, but it was changing my insides that seemed impossible. How could I change the disposition and formation of myself?

Excerpt from Chapter 3
A Change of Heart

There is no such thing has a “hand me down faith”. Ultimately, everyone will stand before God (and himself) with his future literally in his own hands and make his life decision for himself in his own personal way. Some of the men in my recovery group, when they made their decision to entrust themselves to God, experienced immediate and profound gratitude with dramatic emotional outbursts. Others experienced only a quiet sense of relief that their life would change. Whatever the experience was, each of us knew it was far better to make the decision to surrender and trust than continue on the way we were going. It all became very simple; we could no longer trust ourselves alone with our lives.


Excerpt from Chapter 12
Destiny Arrives and Show Up

If we think our healing is ours alone, we have not been healed. When we believe that our healing is to be lived for others, we have been healed already. There is one choice to be made and this choice never changes. We face it day in day out, minute by minute, with every breath we take. Who owns us? Will we live for God and others or die in addiction and shame? But, healing and serving others in not the end, it’s just the start. Too easily, we compartmentalize our lives, gaining ground in some ways and losing ground in others, but it’s the whole package that counts. We’ve got to be willing to give the whole of our lives to God the best that we possibly can or our life as a whole will not be His at all.