It’s been 2 1/2 years since Stan woke up in a Nevada hospital room after a drug overdose.

He immediately began to question God.

“I looked up and said, ‘You didn’t take me again. What do you want me to do?'” he recalls.

Stan – his real name can’t be used because of Alcoholics Anonymous’ rules – is a Lawrence resident. He has been weaving in and out of sobriety, relapses and treatment centers for depression and drug and alcohol addiction for 32 years, since he was 24.

For some reason, he says, this latest relapse – and the period of sobriety that has followed – has brought him closer to God than he’s ever been.

“I really have something to rely on other than me,” Stan says. “For myself, I couldn’t do it without the spiritual side. It would be too overwhelming.”

Church role

Faith and spirituality often are intertwined with recovery from addiction. Many AA meetings take place in churches, so addiction issues become a mission for some congregations.

A similar program, Celebrate Recovery, meets at Lawrence Wesleyan Church, 3705 Clinton Parkway. Instead of focusing on a particular addiction, it advertises itself as a way to deal with wide-ranging “habits, hurts and hang-ups.”

The Rev. Nate Rovenstine, the church’s pastor, says while AA guides attendees to believe in a “higher power,” Celebrate Recovery specifically is a Christian-based program. It follows the 12 steps and also uses the Beatitudes as a source of principles to follow.

Rovenstine says his church feels called to offer the program, which meets for three hours on Friday evenings.

“It merges what we think the Gospel is about – eternal destiny as well as their present reality,” he says.

He thinks recovering addicts draw closer to God because of a sense of powerlessness.

“When you get to the point you’re ready to admit you’re an addict, you get to the point where everyone should get – that we don’t have (life) figured out, no matter how scientific or logical you are, and people realize they need someone to help them,” Rovenstine says. “So many of us have already fallen in the hole and don’t realize it, and we forget our need for God.”

‘Quality sobriety’

Bruce Beale has seen that attitude play out many times.

As director of DCCCA, the local government-funded addiction counseling center, the programs Beale offers can’t specifically advocate for religion. But he says the most successful recoveries usually have a spiritual component.

“It’s a very important part of it,” Beale says. “‘Spiritual’ is what we use more readily than faith. We don’t want to screen anybody out.

“They say ‘higher power’ because there are people who don’t believe in God, but they also don’t think they’re the most important thing in the world, either. That’s a kind of spirituality. I have known a number of people who haven’t believed in God, but there’s something that guides them and helps them, and they don’t put a name on it.”

Beale ranks the spiritual component nearly as important as the mental decision to deal with addiction and the physical challenges of physical needs and withdrawal.

“The physical, mental and spiritual is pretty well-accepted by everybody as a third, a third and a third,” Beale says. “They’re all kind of equal in importance. There’s no way of getting around the spiritual aspect. It certainly makes for a more quality sobriety – a person seems to be more fulfilled.”

‘Why not me?’

That’s the way it’s been for Stan, who attends recovery meetings several times a week and is writing a book to chronicle his experiences. He also wants to become a peer counselor.

“I consider alcoholism and mental illness to be a gift,” he says. “Without them, I wouldn’t have found a God of my understanding.”

He admits his addictions remain a daily struggle.

“Every time I have a negative feeling,” he says, “I go to (God) immediately with that and ask him to remove it.”

He doesn’t ask God, however, why he had to deal with the addictions to begin with.

“You can’t ask the question, ‘Why me?'” he says. “Why not me? ‘Why me’ is just a form of self-pity. It happened to me. You can accept it, or wallow in it.”