06/02/2026
Celebrating my 40th sobriety anniversary this week, tomorrow's CwG Spiritual Support Group will be themed around my new book Conversations on Recovery. With that in mind, here is the introduction to the book. - J.R.
Introduction: A Path Revealed
This book is deeply personal for me. As I write these words, I am approaching my fortieth year in sobriety. Like most who struggle with addiction, I did not arrive at recovery in a single flash of clarity. I arrived through a series of painful, humbling, and often dehumanizing experiences. My first AA meeting was court-ordered. From that reluctant beginning, it would take five and a half more years of trying, failing, learning, surrendering, and trying again before I became clean and sober.
Those years were not wasted. They were formative. Recovery is never a single event; it is and continues to be a growth process unfolding layer by layer, revelation by revelation.
When I finally stabilized in sobriety, I believed the hardest part was over. Of course, I was mistaken but perhaps in the best possible way. If I could have seen the path ahead it would have felt far more hopeful but I was still struggling with living life on life’s terms. The rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous were and still are incredibly helpful to me. Those early years in recovery would unknowingly prepare me for a coming invitation at Fifteen years of sobriety, one that would change everything in my life.
Fully engaged in Alcoholics Anonymous. Sponsoring men. Leading meetings. Taking 12-Step calls. Volunteering at AA Central Office. Showing up whenever asked. Outwardly, I was the picture of committed recovery.
And I was...
..Yet inwardly, something remained unsettled. A quiet depression still lingered. Not dramatic. Not debilitating. Just a persistent grayness. An unnamed ache. A subtle but steady feeling that something essential was missing.
I did everything that had been suggested to me. I worked the Steps. I practiced service. I stayed accountable. And still, there was this inner angst as if I had followed the map faithfully but had not yet arrived at the places my mind longed to be.
One evening, sitting in a meeting, the mind chatter finally beginning to settle, I found myself looking off in the direction of the Twelve Steps posted on the wall. Not really focused on them at first just gazing in their direction.
I began to hear my inner voice casually reviewing the them. Then my eyes settled on the words at the end of the Third Step:
“God as you understand God.”
Something caused me to pause.
I had read that phrase hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. It was familiar, almost invisible in its familiarity.
But in that moment, the words seemed to stand out. And I heard my voice say:
God… as YOU understand God.
A stillness came over me. The meeting sounds completely faded into the background. The phrase opened like a doorway of possibility.
A question arose from somewhere deeper than thought:
What do I actually understand about God?
Not what I had been told.
Not what I had inherited.
Not what I had intellectually agreed to.
What did I know, in the silence of my own experience about God?
The question did not accuse. It invited.
And in that quiet contemplation, something subtle began to surface, an awareness that had always been present but never fully examined. I realized that while I had come to terms with an idea of a Higher Power in the program, I had never deeply explored the nature of this God that so many others spoke about with conviction.
I remembered that, coincidentally, at the age of fifteen I had rejected God, not because I denied the possibility of something greater, but because the version of God presented to me made no sense to my logical mind. Even more than that, it felt incompatible with what I felt in my heart.
I would later come to understand that the theology I had encountered was filtered through certain interpretations of Christianity, beginning with the idea of original sin. It started with the premise that something was fundamentally wrong with me, with all of us. And it began with a glaring contradiction: God’s love was said to be unconditional, yet certain conditions had to be met in order to receive it.
And I could not reconcile that.
I could not and would not accept the idea of a loving Creator whose story was rooted in fear, shame, and guilt. A God who would create human beings with limitations and then punish them eternally for failing to transcend those very limitations. A God who would condemn His own creation to the “everlasting fires of Hell” simply for being born.
That narrative never rang true to me.
How could the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the Source of all that is, create something that requires redemption?
The phrase “Alpha and Omega” comes from the Book of Revelation, where it is used to describe the Divine as the totality, the first and the last, the origin and fulfillment of everything.
If that is true…
If the Divine is All-That-Is…
If nothing exists outside of It…
Then what would redemption even mean?
Redemption implies error.
Error implies flaw.
Flaw implies limitation.
Limitation cannot belong to the Infinite.
From certain interpretations within Christianity, humanity begins fallen and must be saved. But if the Creator is perfect and creates perfectly, how does imperfection enter the equation?
Did the Infinite miscalculate?
Did Love create something unlovable?
How could that be possible?
Even at fifteen, something in me knew:
Love does not threaten.
Love does not withdraw.
Love does not demand perfection as the price of belonging.
If God was Love, as I had been told, then God could not be conditional.
The dissonance was too great.
So I did what many sensitive beings do when confronted with an image of God that feels smaller than their own heart: I stepped away.
My alcoholism and addiction thrived in the days that followed. A feeling of betrayal and resentment had built a wall around me. One of my reoccurring thoughts, “If I am going to be condemned to hell, I might as well have a good time before I go.”
The good times ended long before June 1, 1986. Thankfully, life intervened. And recovery became possible, one day at a time, through the grace of many helpful souls. Recovery has a way of reopening doors we once slammed shut.
To this day, I am unsure where the will to walk through them came from, perhaps the same grace that more than once kept me from pulling the trigger, thinking a bullet was the only way to end reoccurring emotional pain and shame. Instead, with no place else to turn, I made a reluctant choice to search for a way to heal the pain and find a life worth living.
It would ultimately lead me to the study of comparative religion, which began with an honest inquiry that arose during that pivotal moment in my fifteenth year of sobriety:
What do I actually know and understand about God?
Is there even such a thing as God? If so, who, or what, is God, really?
I had more questions than answers.
I enrolled in divinity studies, not to become anything, but simply to discover what was true for me. What I uncovered was unexpected. Across traditions, beneath doctrines and dogmas, I began to notice a consistent undercurrent: a current of love, unity, and divine presence that transcended fear-based theological interpretations I had once encountered.
Then, one extraordinary day, Conversations with God entered my life, not once, but three separate times, in three different ways. In the span of a single day, its name crossed my path again and again, as if it refused to be ignored. Each encounter appeared unrelated, yet together they formed something undeniable. It did not feel accidental. It felt orchestrated, as though life itself had planted three billboards directly in my path that read: Here’s Your Sign!
So, of course, I ignored it!
The first time, I simply brushed it aside with the thought I had plenty of textbooks to read on the subject and studies to complete. The second time, I dismissed it again, thinking to myself, wow interesting coincidence but I really I don't have the time to add one more book about God.
But when it appeared a third time an hour later, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I could no longer ignore it. What I had labeled as coincidence began to feel like something more, it felt like an intervention.
Despite the stack of academic responsibilities waiting for me, I set them aside. The invitation was unmistakable now. And an hour later I opened it for the first time.
What I found within its pages was a gentle revealing of living wisdom. It was recognition and revelation. The questions Neale Donald Walsch was asking and the answers coming through, articulated what my heart had always yearned to be true but had never trusted after my experience at fifteen. God is Love. And Love has no conditions.
Here was a vision of God I could embrace and understand. “God as I understood God,” as expressed in Alcoholics Anonymous, was no longer an abstract idea; it was beginning to take shape as a living truth within my mind and heart.
This was not conceptual theology. It was an invitation, an invitation to make that understanding my own through lived experience.
And that recognition changed everything.
I began volunteering with the Conversations with God Foundation and eventually had the privilege of working directly with Neale, presenting spiritual renewal retreats across the country. During this same period, I became a certified addiction and grief recovery specialist, integrating spiritual insight with psychological understandings. For more than twenty-five years, I have walked alongside individuals and families, witnessing again and again how transformation unfolds when love replaces shame and awareness replaces fear.
Now as the Director of the CwG Foundation and it's Head Coach, my conviction is simple but profound: the messages found in Conversations with God are for anyone who is suffering. Addiction is just one expression of a deeper human condition, the belief in separation, unworthiness, or the illusion that we are fundamentally flawed. When those illusions begin to heal, behavior begins to change naturally.
Like Conversations with God, Conversations on Recovery is not about promoting doctrine. It offers perspective, an integration of recovery principles, neuroscience, and spiritual insight. It meets you exactly where you are emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. It invites you into a larger understanding of who you truly are.
This book guides you through recovery as a growth process rather than a recurring shame cycle. It reframes addiction not just as a collection of character defects, but as an adaptive strategy, an attempt by the nervous system to regulate pain, trauma, disconnection, or unmet needs. We will explore the neuroscience of craving, the psychology of attachment, and the biology of stress. At the same time, we will explore the spiritual truth that you are never separate from the Divine, never outside of grace, and never in need of redemption, because what you are, at your essence, is already whole.
Here you will discover how to meet yourself exactly where you are; how to distinguish between feelings and reactive emotions; why setbacks are invitations rather than failures; and how your thoughts, words, and actions shape your lived experience. You will find practical tools that align science with spirit. You will encounter surrender not as giving up, but as remembering your true nature.
This book does not ask you to adopt a belief system. It invites you into a conversation, one that is meant to be a dialogue, not a monologue.
Too often, our relationship with the Divine has been presented as something one-sided: rules handed down, doctrines to accept, answers given before the questions are fully asked. But a true relationship cannot exist without a dialogue. It requires curiosity, honesty, and the willingness to explore what is true within your own experience.
What follows is not meant to replace what you believe, but to invite you to examine it. To question what you have been told. To listen more deeply, to life, to love, and perhaps even to the quiet voice within that has been asking these questions all along.
At its core, Conversations on Recovery offers three essential shifts:
• From shame to self-awareness.
• From powerlessness to conscious choice.
• From isolation to connection with yourself, with others, and with the Divine.
Recovery in this context is not merely abstinence. It is alignment. It is the gradual and sometimes sudden realization that Life itself is in Conversation with you, inviting you to choose who you are becoming.
If you are struggling, you will find hope here.
If you are sober but searching, you will find expansion here.
If you guide others, you will find language here. If you are Friends or Family of an addict, you will find understanding and potentially a transformation of your own here.
Most of all, you will find the reminder that healing is not about fixing what is wrong with you. It is about awakening to what has always been right within you.
You are not broken. You are becoming.
Welcome to the Conversation. - J.R.
