Celebrate Recovery Blog

If you don’t have it out there, how can they read it? How important is it to have materials available? Well, let’s start with a reminder of who our meeting nights are for. All together now, “It’s all about the Newcomer!” (Mary said that was pretty cheesy) but it’s so easy to forget that it’s not about me.

The most natural thing to do on meeting nights is to look for all my friends in recovery. And forget that there are going to be people that show up who know nothing about recovery. Or if they are familiar with recovery it will be secular recovery. And I know this, the last time I was at an AA meeting, we didn’t start off with Praise and Worship.

So having literature that explains what CR is about and brochures on different struggles, as in photo above, that can be addressed at CR is a must! It’s kind of like God and his relationship with us. He didn’t just tell us about having a relationship with Him (okay He did at first, but we didn’t do too good a job at retaining the info). So He made sure it was written down so we won’t forget.

I’m continually discovering new ideas on how to have a better group by reading and re-reading the material written by John Baker and CR team. I mean, really, how about that Life’s Healing Choices book? Just when I was wondering how I would teach the same lessons we’ve been doing for five years, I've found great new ideas from this book while using the same acrostics! And then there’s the Celebrate Recovery Bible that is packed full of great Bible character studies of men and women in recovery who were leaders in God’s church.

In Louisiana, we plan everything we do around a meal and most of us really love to cook. A vital ingredient to a successful meal is presentation. It’s got to look good before I’ll eat it. Same thing with your literature table…don’t haphazardly throw things out there. Make sure the table looks pleasing to the eye. Set up your resource table in a way where the Newcomer will want to feast on the information you have presented.

Also your resource table is the perfect place to show CR T-shirts and caps. There are some great ideas for sayings on shirts out there. We’ve been collecting these sayings for years. Maybe next time, if you want, I can give you a list of the shirt quotes we’ve collected.

Thanks for all the comments…keep them coming.

Mac