Recovery is about learning to live life….
Living Life is more than just recovery….
In 2005 when God challenged me by asking me the question “Why are you not doing something with people with addictions?” I realized God’s purpose for my life. Immediately on His challenge, I started looking for ‘Christian Principled’ recovery curriculum, which wasn’t as easy as you might think. I ended up through the Saddleback Church website ordering and receiving a ‘Leaders Kit’ which I began using to establish a recovery group at ‘The Salvation Army, Ferntree Gully’
Whilst planning the group I studied the material and felt that it restricted my use of other recovery curricula, should I decide to start a ‘Celebrate Recovery Group’ and rightly or wrongly I decided against it. Which left me with the curriculum I could use but not a name or identity for the group. So I prayed and said to God “God I am frustrated I want to be true to your challenge to do something with people with addictions, but I do not want to hinder the moving of Your Holy Spirit in the Group. WHAT SHOULD I DO?”
The next day I woke up and God revealed to me Living Life Recovery. He gave me the name, He gave me a logo and He gave me a slogan (Which is the two lines at the top of this page) You see I always felt, again rightly or wrongly that Alcoholics Anonymous created dependence on Alcoholics Anonymous and what I believed God was calling me to do was create a way to recovery that created dependence on Him, through personal relationship with Him.
Now, before anyone starts attacking me: I am not anti-Alcoholics Anonymous. A.A. introduced me to recovery and gave me Twelve Steps on which to rebuild my life, that saved my life. But I do believe at some point in recovery everyone comes face to face with God and has made a decision follow or don’t follow. That decision, in my opinion, determines how and where we spend recovery.
For me, I believe I reached that place in my recovery whilst attending Alcoholics Anonymous and I started searching for my One True Higher Power and when I couldn’t find him led me to relapse and searching for Him outside of A.A.
Armed with Living Life Recovery I commenced a Living Life Recovery group at Ferntree Gully Salvation Army and over the years, with various degrees of success and under the banner of numerous different group names Living Life Recovery, Alcoholics Anonymous, Alcoholics Victorious, Overcomers Outreach, Celebrate Recovery. The thing I have noticed over the years is that God keeps leading me back to Living Life Recovery. From Him I received The Twelve Steps The Preamble.
Today my God-given purpose is to introduce people to personal relationship with the Holy Spirit through the process of recovery, using the tools of Life Recovery God has given to me. If you are someone who thinks Living Life Recovery is the answer for you, someone you love or a friend get in touch and let’s work out together how we can make it a reality in your life.
Archie Boyle
