When life throws challenges at us many rely on faith to guide us, and Dennis Quaid is no different.

“I’m grateful to still be here, I’m grateful to be alive really every day,” Quaid told People. “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.”

Quaid’s challenges are not unique.

His struggles with addiction after a successful start to his career eventually led him to check himself into rehab or as he called it, “cocaine school.”

“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.”

The 69-year-old actor and musician explained how people who suffer with addiction are looking “to fill a hole inside us,” but once they break the cycle something needs to fill that hole, and it needs to be just as satisfying.

For Quaid, it was his faith.

He wrote a song for his mother “to let her know I was okay, because I wasn’t okay before then,” and he began reading various religious texts including the Bible and Quran.

“That’s when I started developing a personal relationship,” he recalled. “Before that, I didn’t have one, even though I grew up as a Christian.”

Quaid’s relationship with his faith continues today.

The actor has plans to release a new album, Fallen: A Gospel Record For Sinners, which he says are “self-reflective and self-examining, not churchy.”

“All of us have a relationship with God, whether you’re a Christian or not.”

“We’re all looking for the joy of life, and drugs give that to you and alcohol and whatever it is for anybody give that to you really quick. Then they’re fun and then they’re fun with problems, and then they’re just problems after a while. That’s really what we’re looking for, the joy of life, which is our gift, actually, the relationship with God that we all have. It’s at the bottom of it, the joy of being alive.”