by James Coulter
Family. Fame. Fortune. Andy Blair had it all. But he just as quickly lost it all thanks to alcoholism. Not only has he since recovered, but he has also helped countless others achieve their own recovery.
Andy Blair is the Executive Director of Refuge on the Ridge, a faith-based regeneration program that has helped men overcome addiction and heal their lives and families.
Blair first realized he had a problem with addiction following an alcohol-related incident in Destin, Texas, during a family vacation. While redirecting traffic in the rain, he noticed how similarly he acted to his father, who was also a struggling alcoholic.
As a young boy, he remembered vividly vacationing with his family at Treasure Island in Tampa, where his father often became drunk and was arrested. At dinner, if his father had a beer, it was a “good” night, but if he had a martini, it was a “bad” night.
Following that incident in Texas, Blair’s life quickly went downhill in the span of three weeks. He was suspended from his job, his mother was “done”, his wife and children were “done”, as well as his best friend. “That was a big wake-up call,” he said. “I thought so big of myself at that time that I was running a small 20-million-dollar business unit of this company, and I thought I was untouchable…I literally had nowhere else to turn.”
Blair went to rehab in Tampa, not too far away from the hotel he and his family once frequented. Not only that, he learned that one of the young men he was staying with was the grandson of the person who gave his father his job.
Once recovered, Blair later moved to Lake Wales with his family and became the Family Life Pastor at HighPoint Church. As someone who once battled addiction, he felt a calling to help others seek their own recovery, a calling that led him to start Refuge on the Ridge. While he initially had his doubts, he trusted God to help him pull off his plan the same way he trusted Him to aid him through his recovery.
“I actually sat down to write a business plan, and a few minutes into writing it, I thought, this is the absolute dumbest idea for a business,” he said. “Two of my favorite words in the Bible are ‘But God.’ And I tell people that I felt God almost split the Red Sea…and that’s what happened: deals got done with the property here, people stepped up, High Point paid my salary for quite a
while, they were very generous with that, and all that I do is stay out of God’s way. We started on this property one room at a time.”
Recently, Blair and his recovery program were covered in a minisode of the Chattin on the Ridge podcast. Listen to the full podcast on Spotify and Acast: https://shows.acast.com/chattin-on-the-ridge/episodes/minisode-29-refuge-on-the-ridge-5th-anniversary.
Full Interview here: https://youtu.be/LMH1mF_9NpE?si=qAYKkm_N91xO4SEI
