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

Repentance is merely change. Recovery is a repentance process usually involving a 12-Step program. 12-Step programs are merely...

Every decade has its challenges, as my skin refuses to keep its elasticity and my hair refuses to stay in its follicle, my body parts...

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...