Step Four

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Step 4 is the most intimidating of all of the steps. We have stopped our behavior, turned it over to God, and now you want us to go back and look at our lives and write down every thing we ever did wrong? What? [...]

The Gift…

contributed by plspicker, a C the J attender
A few weeks before Christmas, during the Sunday church service I attend, I received a piece of paper and an envelope. The heading on the paper was something like -”How is God working in your life?” It was a brief writing assignment, just a quick example of how [...]

Steps One thru Three– Walking on the Bridge of Faith

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step. - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
For some, steps one, two and three all blend together.
Once we have admitted to our powerlessness, we are automatically saying that there is a Higher Power who [...]

The Undertow

contributed by: plspicker… a Celebrate the Journey attender
When I was a young boy we took vacations at the Jersey Shore. I remember lying in the sun and playing in the sand, enjoying the simple life. I had taken swimming lessons and was a good swimmer for my age. Like anyone else I enjoyed swimming [...]

Welcome to Recovery

by Shelley E. (Celebrate the Journey Leader)

This winter, I started in the 12 step group apprenticing. I sat in for a couple weeks before my leader mentioned to the group that I would be helping out. Slowly I got to know my group, love them, pray for them, and have a deep admiration [...]

But what do I get?

Sometimes when we face change, we get scared because we have to give up who we are. We don’t always know what happens next. The big blue book titled Alcoholics Anonymous mentions a list of things that we will see if we decide to change and develop.
We are going to know a new freedom [...]

David and another man’s wife

The following is a summary of Diane’s teaching from January 29th.

Sometimes we feel like we cannot go to church, or come to God until we get ourselves all cleaned up, or maybe you have a friend that feels this way. Certainly no one is perfect, and the Bible is full of stories of people that [...]

Step Three

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
As addicts, we tend to make ourselves the center of the universe. Its a bad cycle, because the self-preoccupation just creates more pain, which drives us deeper into our addictions, which isolate us and give [...]

Step Two

Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
We have to do some wrestling with ourselves and with the world here. In order to accept any Higher Power, we have to stop playing God ourselves. In step one we admitted we are powerless, so now in step [...]

Step One

We admitted that we were powerless over our dependencies - that our lives had become unmanageable.
Many people have found themselves in a place where they have tried everything within their power to fix their lives and nothing worked. When we admit that we cannot do this alone, that we need help, that we are [...]