personal development on Sobreity

Sobriety is the counterweight that must balance out success. Especially if things keep getting better and better.

The beginning of my sober years felt much like waking up to my mother’s song. It was a slow waking from some dreamy death spiral. And as I’ve talked to others who are in recovery from their own coping...

There is a way to live in the wakefulness of true inner sobriety, and it begins with proper attachment to Christ, the Divine Love, the first light of the morning.

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

“[Cast] all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. Be sober-minded; be watchful” (1 Peter 5:7–8 ESV). Sober and watchful—what does it mean? To Peter, it means casting our anxieties on the Di...

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility o...

'He hath ever but slenderly known himself."

Be less concerned with what you have than with what you are.

Contentment makes much of little; greed makes little of much. Contentment is the poor man’s riches and desire the rich man’s poverty.

[T]here is no goodness that is not bodily and realistic and local.

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. On the near side of complexity is simplistic; on the far...

A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act li...

Bumper stickers—and their counterparts on social media—make Simplicism seem virtuous: “Look at me! I’m a good and brave person for distilling this complex issue down to its essence and righteously tak...

Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God's majesty.

Naked need is the occasion for God's giving, not a need adorned with the clean, elegant robes of respectability and good works.

The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, “Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can...

Surrender your poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers y...

“I'm not much but I'm all I have.”

I have a lot to be humble about.

Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty.

Where there’s humility there is majesty; where there’s weakness, there’s might; where there is death, there’s life. If you want to get these things don’t disdain those.

"Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and i...

There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.

Hence, whatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor.

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Moments of more may leave us with lives of less.

Philip Yancey writes of a spiritual seeker who interrupted his busy, acquisitive life to spend a few days in a monastery. “I hope your stay is a blessed one,” said the monk who showed him to his simpl...

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.