recovery on Called by God

God of wonder and grace: You knew us from even before we were born; You loved us from eternity. Then, when we needed to know you most, You called us by name and saved us. Nothing escapes Your notice a...

The Relapse Brennan Manning’s relapse left him in a literal gutter. The best-selling Christian author and retreat leader had hit bottom  again.  His clothes were in tatters. His face was unshaven and...

God of grace, power and glory, and our Heavenly Father: You raise up nations in your grace and holiness; and You bring down nations who go after and serve other gods of their own making. You are good–...

God of grace, power and glory–Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer–and our Father: When we’re tempted to think it’s all up to us: to change the world, to overcome evil, to establish Your kingdom, to make ...

God, our Father: Your love gives us more than we can ever hope for, and far beyond what we deserve. You clothe us in the righteousness of Christ. You give us dreams and visions of what we can become b...

Prayer of Adoration Living and present Lord: You often surprise us, coming when we least expect it; or, You simply fold back the curtain to show us You’ve been there all along to give us hope and to ...

Lord Jesus—the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, and the author of change, who’s constantly doing “a new thing,” which makes us sit up and take notice. We admit, we’d be more comfortable with a pred...

Lord: In our times of weakness and our hours of need, Yours is the strength that enables us to carry on, Yours the shoulder we rest our heads upon. When our load is heavy and too much to bear, Yours a...

To be alive is to be addicted, and to be alive and addicted is to stand in need of grace.

On December 2, 1943, a German air raid in Italy sank over a dozen ships docked in port. Among them was an American vessel carrying over two thousand mustard gas bombs intended for the war. Soon, toxic...

O blessed Lord, you ministered to all who came to you: Look with compassion upon all who through addiction have lost their health and freedom. Restore to them the assurance of your unfailing mercy; re...

The road to character often involves moments of moral crisis, confrontation, and recovery. When they were in a crucible moment, they suddenly had a greater ability to see their own nature. The everyda...

For generations, psychologists thought that virtually all self-defeating behavior was caused by repression. I have now come to believe that addiction is a separate and even more self-defeating force t...

Not one thing in your life is more important than figuring out how to live in the face of unspoken pain.

Get to know someone really well, and almost without fail, you will discover a person who routinely struggles to get out of bed in the morning. And not just because they’re tired. They can’t get out of...

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They...

People in a hurry never have time for recovery. Their minds have little time to meditate and pray so that problems can be put in perspective. In short, people in our age are showing signs of physiolog...

Addiction goes deeper than obsession and compulsion. It is worship. It is giving my heart and soul over to something that I believe will ease my pain and provide an outlet for my fury at being out of ...

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

Alcoholics Anonymous has a great definition of how we change: We change when the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of changing .

One of the hardest things was learning that I was worth recovery.

Recovery is hard. Regret is harder.

When modern psychiatric and psychological researchers began studying addictions, they realized that most of the time, the addict does not live in a vacuum. Instead, he lives in a system of relationshi...

The marriage of Queen Victoria and Albert (otherwise known as Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel — quite a mouthful!) was one for the ages. Their love and devotion to each other was remarkable, ...