# The Seed Packet I Dug Up Three Times to Check for Roots I planted a row of bean seeds on Saturday morning, the kind my granddaughter picked out at the hardware store because the packet had a picture of a rabbit on it. By Monday afternoon I had already pushed my finger into the dirt twice to see if anything was happening down there, and by Tuesday I did it a third time, right where I'd planted the third seed, pulling up a thin white thread of a root and probably killing it in the process. My wife caught me kneeling in the garden with dirt under my nails and said what she always says when she catches me like this. You're doing it again. She wasn't talking about the beans. She was talking about the thing underneath the beans, the part of me that has never once in my life been able to leave a planted thing alone and just let it grow. I have done this with job applications, checking my email every twenty minutes the day after an interview. I have done it with amends I...

The Verse I Highlighted Three Different Years and Still Don't Believe RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 7, 2026 I was digging through a box in the garage this week, looking for old tax paperwork, when I found my first Bible instead, the cheap one the hospital chaplain gave me the week I got sober. I flipped it open at random and landed on Hebrews 11, and there it was, the same verse marked three separate times in three separate years. Blue pen the first year, shaky handwriting, the ink pressed so hard it nearly tore the page. Yellow highlighter a few years after that, smoother strokes, like I had calmed down some. A pencil circle around the same words just last year, faint, almost apologetic. Same verse, ten years apart, and I realized I was not underlining it because I believed it. I kept underlining it because I kept needing to believe it again. I used to think doubt was a one-time crisis, a single dark night you fight through and then y...

The Open Enrollment Spreadsheet I Built and Still Couldn't Use RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 7, 2026 Open enrollment at work closes at midnight tonight, and I built a spreadsheet eleven days ago to make the decision easier. Four plan columns, premium rows, deductible rows, HSA contribution rows, everything color coded so the obvious answer would just jump off the screen at me. I have opened that spreadsheet almost every night since, usually after my wife goes to sleep, and every single time I highlight the same two columns, stare at them for ten minutes, and close the laptop no closer to an answer than I was the night before. Tonight is the deadline. The computer will pick the default plan for me at midnight if I do not act, and some small, tired part of me has started to wonder if that might honestly be easier. I have been sober nine years, and I used to think the hardest decisions I would ever face were behind me, the kind with a bottle in them. What nine ye...

The Boarding Group That's Never Mine I stand at the same spot by the gate every time, close enough to the podium to hear the number called, far enough back that I am not technically crowding anyone. Group one goes. Group two goes. The young guy in front of me with the branded suitcase and the status he mentions twice gets called in group three, and I watch him roll away toward the jet bridge while I check my phone for a boarding pass that still says group seven. I fly maybe six times a year. I have never once been called before group five. I know the number before I even look anymore, and somehow knowing it ahead of time has never once made the twenty minutes of standing there easier. I used to think impatience was a minor flaw, the kind of thing you joke about at Thanksgiving. Eight years sober has taught me otherwise. The man I used to be could not sit still for anything, not a red light, not a waiting room, not a sentence someone else was still in the middle of finishing. ...

# The Empty Half of the Pew I Sit In Every Sunday Five minutes before the first song, my wife hands me her coat, picks up a tote bag full of snack cups and crayons, and disappears down the hallway to the three-year-old room, the same way she has every Sunday for two years now. I slide into our usual spot with both coats across my lap and a diaper bag nobody in our house has needed in over a decade, because old habits in a church building apparently outlive the reasons for them. The sanctuary fills in around me, families and greeters and the man two rows up who always waves, and somewhere in the second verse I notice I am more aware of being alone than I would be sitting in an empty house. A full room can be the loneliest room I know. I did not expect this particular ache twelve years into sobriety. I had always filed loneliness under my drinking years, the nights I sat at a bar on purpose so I would not have to feel what I was feeling at home. I assumed a good marriage and a full...

# The DoorDash Order I Placed Halfway Through My Fast RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 6, 2026 I told my wife on Sunday night that I was fasting for three days over a situation at work that has had my stomach in knots for a month. No food, just water and coffee, the way I used to do back when fasting felt like the one spiritual discipline I could still manage even on my worst years. By Tuesday afternoon I was standing in the kitchen with my phone in my hand, and before I had fully decided anything, I had already typed in my address and picked a restaurant. I told myself I would still pray just as hard with food in my stomach. I believed that sentence for about four minutes, right up until the delivery driver texted that he was outside. I used to think temptation showed up loud, the way it did in my drinking years, a craving with teeth. What that Tuesday taught me again is how often it shows up reasonable instead, dressed as a small adjustment nobody would even notice...