There are seasons in life when we don't need another command, another doctrine, or another voice telling us where we’ve missed the mark or how far we still have to go. We need something gentler. We need a quiet place to breathe. We need words that don't push, shame, persuade, or perform.

That is the heart of Finding Our Way Back to What We Are.  I wrote this daily book as a yearlong companion. It offers 365 reflections for people who are ready to pause, notice, question, heal, and remember. It isn't a traditional devotional, and it doesn't ask anyone to adopt a particular belief system. Instead, each entry is an invitation to stop trying to become someone worthy of love and begin recognizing that we came from love and therefore are love. Love has been present all along.

Where It Began

Long before I became an author, spiritual life coach, recovery mentor, and podcast host, I was a seeker. From a young age, I carried questions about God, meaning, belonging, and the truths that seemed to live beneath ordinary life. At nineteen, a profound spiritual experience led me into years of religious study and pastoral ministry.

I also knew from an early age that I was gay. For years, that truth lived alongside the belief that something about me had to change before I could be acceptable to God. I prayed. I struggled. I denied parts of myself. I married, became a father, served in ministry, and tried to live within a framework that could never fully hold my humanity.

Eventually, I came to a realization that changed the course of my life: God loved me exactly as I was. That realization didn't make life simple. It made it honest.

I left my marriage and the pastorate and began re-examining much of what I had been taught to believe. What followed was a long season of questioning, grieving, learning, and slowly allowing love to become larger than fear.

Loss and Recovery

One of the defining heartbreaks of my life was the death of my first husband, Kevin. We shared eight years together. After a work-related injury, Kevin lived with chronic pain and went through multiple surgeries. When he ran out of his prescribed pain medication, he took medication from a neighbor, believing it was similar to what he had been given. It was a time-release form of morphine, and Kevin died in his sleep from respiratory failure.

In the aftermath, my grief deepened and my drinking escalated. Beliefs that had once offered certainty could no longer answer the questions loss had placed in front of me. That period became the beginning of a profound spiritual deconstruction and, eventually, a path toward recovery and a more expansive understanding of God, love, and human worth.

Recovery became one of my great teachers. Through Alcoholics Anonymous, I learned the importance of honesty, openness, willingness, responsibility, and surrender. I came to understand that responsibility doesn't mean blaming myself for everything that has happened, but choosing how I respond now. I also learned that even painful chapters can become part of a larger story of healing and service. Those experiences and lessons run throughout this book.

The Book I Wished Existed

After years of walking alongside others in recovery and spiritual exploration, I often found myself reaching for daily reflection books to share with friends, sponsees, and fellow travelers. Many of the ones I found, though, felt too narrow, too full of religious jargon, or too focused on the idea that what we need is somewhere outside ourselves and has to be earned.

One evening, after closing another such book in frustration, I asked myself “Rick, why don’t you stop complaining and write the kind of book you wished existed.”

That question became the beginning of Finding Our Way Back to What We Are. The result is a yearlong companion shaped by my own journey from certainty to curiosity, from fear-based belief to inclusive love, and from separation to belonging.

What's Inside

At the center of the book is the word LOVE, which I use in a broad and inclusive spiritual sense. For me, LOVE isn't simply emotion or affection. It is the source of life itself, a name for what different traditions have described as God, Spirit, Presence, Consciousness, the Divine, or the sacred ground of being.

My hope is that this creates room for everyone: religious readers, spiritual seekers, people in recovery, those healing from religious pain, agnostics, and anyone quietly wondering whether life might hold something deeper than fear and striving.

The structure of the book reflects the gradual nature of inner change. Each month opens a different doorway into awareness, through themes that include thought, honesty, forgiveness, compassion, oneness, surrender, grace, healing, gratitude, and love in action.

Each daily reflection contains a grounding passage, a simple way of seeing, a guiding quote, a question for contemplation, and a journaling space I titled What I'm Noticing Today. Rather than asking readers to master a spiritual checklist, I invite them to take one reflection at a time into their daily lives and notice what it awakens.

On Belonging

I understand spiritual displacement personally.

After I met my husband, Glen, we both hoped to find a church home where we could grow spiritually and belong. We attended a church we loved, built relationships, joined small groups, and went through the membership process. Then we were told we would not be welcomed as members unless we signed an agreement rejecting the sacredness of our marriage.

That experience deepened my sensitivity toward people who still long for spiritual connection but feel wounded, excluded, or unable to belong within certain religious environments.

I don't write against religion. My work moves beyond the limits of fear and returns instead to love, compassion, forgiveness, service, awareness, acceptance, and belonging.

That same spirit shapes the way the book approaches suffering. For readers moving through grief, uncertainty, transition, recovery, spiritual questioning, or inner loneliness, I wanted the reflections to offer companionship rather than instruction. They don't try to explain pain away. They make room for it.

Remembering, Not Becoming

One of the book's central themes is the difference between becoming and remembering. Modern life often tells us to improve ourselves, fix ourselves, prove ourselves, and become something more. I offer another possibility: perhaps the journey isn't about adding what is missing, but about removing the fear, shame, and conditioning that have covered what was there all along.

Again and again, the book questions the belief in separation: separation from others, from life, from the Source, and from our own worth. It asks whether belonging is something we must earn, or something we can simply recognize.

I don't present this as a dramatic spiritual breakthrough. What I point toward is quieter. Awakening can happen in ordinary moments: a conversation, a pause before reacting, a willingness to forgive, or a breath taken before self-judgment has the final word.

By the closing pages, the image I hope remains is one of finding the way home. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we discover that the road, the companions, the questions, and the courage we find along the journey all matter, but home may never have been as far away as it appeared.

I wrote Finding Our Way Back to What We Are for seekers, questioners, people in recovery, people healing from spiritual wounds, the spiritually curious, the tired, the hopeful, and those beginning to wonder whether what they have been searching for has been close all along.

I write to share the things I most want to remember. Through this book, I'm sharing them with the readers who may need them most.