james on Addiction

Lord–in the words of the Psalmist,“You have been our dwelling place throughout all generations,” our safe place to run to, and the One who opens the door when we knock–no matter what. Because of Your ...

As my AA, NA, and CA friends have repeatedly reminded me, rigorous honesty is the first rule of recovery.

Angela’s Ashes took the publishing world by storm when it was released in September 1996. It won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in the category of Biography/Autobiography. It was also a...

Father, Son, Holy Spirit–our God, Mysterious, Awe-Inspiring, Wonderful, One-in-Three/Three-in-One: You surprise us not with flashing lights, loud crashing noises, and constant activity. You surprise u...

Faithful and Good God–our Father, Redeemer and Companion. You know all about us–and love us anyhow; nothing we are or do surprises you or puts you off. Therefore, we turn to you with assurance and tru...

In her thought-provoking book, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes the tension in listening to our deepest desires: some of them these desires are integral to our identity, but they a...

Achievement is the alcohol of our time.

Alcoholism is the only disease that you can get yelled at for having.

Anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress are all ways of describing natural human responses to adversity and the experiences of life. And we all face adversity in many different ways: challengin...

Remember Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations? Her entire life was defined by the fact that she was jilted on her wedding day. People can become very attached to their pain and i...

Sin is a deep interior dislocation of the soul. It's a desire to keep control of your life.

We say we turn to our phones when we’re “bored.” And we often find ourselves bored because we have become accustomed to a constant feed of connection, information, and entertainment. We are forever el...

Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity. Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.

In her engaging treatment, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes both the beauty and pain of seeing our own sinful nature: It is often true that once we are made to see, we don’t like w...

Restlessness keeps the pedal to the metal. To offer a suggestive analogy in this vein: several years ago there was a recall on some Toyota vehicles. Evidently the cars would be given to sudden and unc...

Recovery is not a process we can will, but consists of experiencing many small deaths, the passing of significant anniversaries, until our identity is solid and natural in the pronoun “I.”

A possession ought to belong to the possessor, not the possessor to the possession.

If I were making a list of benefits like the one Mike McKinley imagines, only this time using the devil’s actual logic, it might look more like this: Experience the excitement of new romance. Get th...

In his classic fictional work on spiritual warfare, The Screwtape Letters , C. S. Lewis imagined a senior demon (Screwtape) corresponding with one of his protégés (his nephew Wormwood) as the latte...

Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.

If I am in denial about my own weaknesses and sin, there will be a concomitant blindness to the greatness and glory of God.

We readily confess our little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones.

The psychotherapist M. Scott Peck spent many years of his practice as an agnostic. He, along with thousands upon thousands of his colleagues were taught that evil was a social construct, and therefore...

A typical response to threat and burden is to want to flee it. It’s evacuation as the cure for trouble. If only I could get away is our mantra. Then I would be safe. Then I could enjoy my life. But wh...

Some years ago I had a pastoral relationship with a couple of people who were deeply in love with each other. They believed that God wanted them to get married so they could consummate their love. The...

In the vast, frozen wilderness of the Arctic, an Inuit hunter used a clever technique to trap a wolf. He took a sharp knife and carefully coated its blade with layers of animal blood, letting each lay...

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

There’s undeniably a dark side to restless ambition, however. You can see it in dramatic fashion in the documentary  Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop , which follows the comedian on tour after he left the To...

Many of life’s annoyances just have to be ignored. That doesn’t mean that we suppress, ignore, or deny every pain. Serious pain has to be confronted. But one mark of resilience is learning to tell whi...

The church fathers consistently acknowledged the beauty and goodness of desire (e.g., Augustine, above), but they were not naive to the potential for desire to be bent by sin. They knew that our longi...