During a recent interview with PEOPLE, actor and singer Dennis Quaid opened up about his battle with sobriety and his finding faith in the wake of his addiction battles, a reversal in the right direction that began years after the now 69-year-old actor became famous for his performance in 1983’s “The Right Stuff.”
Commenting on how he views life after he made it out of rehab, which he jokingly refers to as “cocaine school,” the actor said that he views everything through the prism of gratefulness and trying to ride the tiger of life and enjoy it along the way, ups and down.
Speaking about that, Quaid said, “I’m grateful to still be here, I’m grateful to be alive really every day. It’s important to really enjoy your ride in life as much as you can, because there’s a lot of challenges and stuff to knock it down.”
Continuing, he noted that he decided to turn his life around when he had a come to Jesus moment of sorts, though the religion came a bit later, when he realized where his current path in life was leading him. Not content with fading into a miserable, obscure death of addiction, Quaid checked himself into rehab and fixed the addiction that was haunting him.
Speaking about that moment when he decided to change things for the better, Quaid said, “I remember going home and having kind of a white light experience that I saw myself either dead or in jail or losing everything I had, and I didn’t want that.”
He added a few details about what was going wrong in his life when the band in which he played broke up because of him while on the precipice of success: “I was in a band and we got a record gig… They broke up the night they got it, and they broke up because of me, because I was not reliable,” he said.
Quaid told PEOPLE that what saved him was refinding his Christian faith. He said that addiction forces people “to fill a hole inside us,” but that religion can replace the empty hole drugs or liquor had filled, saying, “When you’re done with the addiction, you need something to fill that hole, something that really works, right?”
He then added that it was when he realized that fact about addiction and the hole inside him that he decided to develop his relationship ith God and rebuild his life with the faith he grew up as a kid in Texas, saying, “That’s when I started developing a personal relationship [with God]. Before that, I didn’t have one, even though I grew up as a Christian.”
Commenting on his childhood in the church and how he views faith, Quaid said, “I grew up at the Baptist church; I love the hymns that I remember from being a kid. The songs are self-reflective and self-examining, not churchy. All of us have a relationship with God, whether you’re a Christian or not.”
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