This episode contains content that talks about suicide and self-harm that could be disturbing to some listeners.

Letting go of something we've been a part of for a long time, good or bad, can be painful.

Letting go of relationships, whether through a loss or through changing circumstances, can be especially heartbreaking.

Many of the stories you'll hear in this episode are from those who responded to either dire situations where letting go was required or who purposely chose to start something new that led them to a place where they could fully discover who God wanted them to be.

We'll start with a thought from country music singer songwriters, The War and Brothers.

We didn't drink it early in our lives. We waited till our, you know, early 20s and sort of started to sort of tiptoe away from the mothership.

You know, everything you'd learned in life, your foundation and spirituality was sort of all religion at that point, not much relationship.

I didn't really plan to go that far, but you just sort of tiptoe away from the boat far enough and all of a sudden you look up one day and it's a long way away.

And 9-11 happened and we lost our record deal and our father was dying of cancer and passed away two days before Christmas and we almost lost our publishing deal.

We had little kids and the party and the drinking and being in a bar band and just having fun and hanging out with other people that were partying and drinking turned into medicating pretty quick.

We were completely empty, spiritually bankrupt, probably about to be financially bankrupt but didn't even think about it and it was just physically felt terrible.

Everything was wrong and I'm like, well, it's all kind of gathering around this one thing.

I really believed that, oh man, I could quit drinking and I could not be able to be creative.

I was protecting this amazing career we had of zero hits. We had written zero hits and I was like, oh gosh, we're going to lose it.

I'm not going to be able to write songs anymore. I never stopped to think that you had no hits.

So we literally, the very first hit we had was our first year of sobriety.

We thought we were giving something up creatively. The truth is we were gaining tons.

I think I felt like I knew that I was going to wind up in recovery down the road several years before it happened.

I think Brett would probably say the same thing. We ironically got sober the same week.

I actually went to about patient rehab and our lives changed.

We surrendered that addiction and I found it, you know, it's the same God I grew up with but I found a different door way to God that I had ever found in church.

And I love recovery. It's a great system and a 12-step living is absolutely biblically winds up.

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