A few years ago, I facilitated an in-person women’s support meeting. In preparation for this meeting, I found a video called “Will the Pain and Suffering Ever End?” Will the Pain and Suffering Ever End? I took the video to the group meeting. As the meeting began, a young, petite woman sat down next to me and began to sob. I put my arm around her, told her she was in the right place, and gave her my phone number. No one in the room made a fuss. They just smiled compassionately

If the weight of past mistakes is making life joyless—even miserable—today, we should consider that we cannot heal the addict we were by using the recovery tools we discovered only last week. Recovery takes time and honesty (Step One). It is easy to look back with guilt and shame, armed with today's knowledge, and dismiss the truth that we were operating in survival mode, not malice. We probably broke generational patterns we didn't even recognize while suffering inside. We d

Almost a decade ago, during our first mission with the Church's Family Services in Arizona, the culture within the Addiction Recovery Program centered on carefully protecting participants' anonymity. We put up privacy screens over the meeting room doors, held meetings in homes, paid attention to where participants parked their cars, and emphasized the importance of maintaining confidentiality within the group. Then something happened that changed me forever. During one sharin

Lessons from Jacques Lusseyran's And There Was Light Over the past several years, one of my greatest teachers about light has been a blind man. Jacques Lusseyran, author of And There Was Light, lost his eyesight at the age of seven. Yet instead of describing his life as one of darkness, he insisted that true light comes from within. As a leader in the French Resistance during World War II and later a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp, Lusseyran discovered something ex

At each moment of her existence, Woman chooses Queenship or slavery as she confronts the workings of her thinking mind. When her thoughts...

An excerpt from Michele Noel’s upcoming book, Respect the Light “He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he...