Do you think this is just another day in your life? It’s not just another day. It’s the one day that is given to you – today. If you do nothing else but learn to respond as if it were the first day in your life and the very last day, then you will have spent this day very well.

The idea is similar to weeding your garden. You have valuable and desired character traits that you would like to see flourish, but they cannot as long as you have character defects preventing their growth. A garden cannot weed itself, so you're going to need the help of others to identify your character defects and you'll need God's help to remove them, taproot and all.

...we've also figured out how we can do those things—eating, sex, getting an adrenaline rush—recreationally, instead of for our survival. And sometimes the craving for that feeling can take on a life of its own, and so, by doing those things, we have created addiction.

If we want to be emotionally sober, we need in the here and now....we want to make sense of the world around us while we're living so we have many more choices, much more aliveness...