As a human being I feel it is important to have purposes. Purposes help set a course for our lives. All too often the purposes we choose are self-centered purposes such as becoming millionaires.

Many authors write because they feel they have a marketable book that will bring them fame, wealth, and prestige. Let’s face it. Many of us have been there. I wrote for that reason for many years.

As I reported in my bio I am a recovered addict. I spent decades caught up in the cycle of addiction. If I reported the amounts of my drug of choice I was consuming on a daily basis at the end of my active addiction most people would not believe it.

Doctors have told me numerous times that the amounts I was taking were lethal. They scratch their heads in wonder that I survived. I found in the end that the primary cause of my addiction was self-centeredness.

I was too self-absorbed to know that there was a world around me suffering as badly as I was. Thus addiction recovery became one of my purposes along with writing. I am now a certified peer recovery support specialist. I am also a chaplain.

If you ask me what is important to me today I would tell you that the most important thing in the world outside of my faith, is to bring a smile to the face of another human being. Jesus told us that there are two great commandments. We are to love God above everything.

Then we are to love others more than we love ourselves. It is impossible for any mere human to save the world. How many of us have seen high school students and college students who high-minded and idealistic, only to encounter these same people twenty years later and find that they have set aside their high ideals for a mundane existence scratching and clawing to survive?

Ideals seem great for the young, but older generations soon tire and give up. I gave up for the longest time. I was caught in the struggle of addiction and it is a continuous downward spiral into death.

I no longer have to live that way because I heard a loud popping sound one day and realized it was my head coming out of my backside! There is a suffering world around us and all we have to do to find a modicum of serenity is help ease the suffering of another human being.

I did not realize until years later that I had long stretches of sobriety scattered throughout my addiction and every one of those periods was a time when I intentionally served others.

I served as a volunteer emergency medical technician for a long period of time.

I served as a volunteer in a hospital.

I served as a volunteer with the Salvation Army.

At all these times I stayed sober because I was concentrating on the welfare of others. We are herd animals. We need each other in more ways than most of us realize.

You may ask “Okay, but what does that have to do with writing?”

The answer is that I write not to make money and line my own pockets, but to bring a smile to my reader’s faces. I want to bring comfort and I find that I can do that by entertaining others with my words.