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The Mugshot That Still Comes Up When My Grandson Googles My Name

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The Mugshot That Still Comes Up When My Grandson Googles My Name RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 15, 2026 My grandson is eleven, old enough now to type things into a search bar without asking permission first, and last week he typed in my full name for a school project about family history. He did not tell me what he found. His mother did, carefully, the way you tell someone a wound has reopened. There it still is, sixteen years later, a booking photo from the worst night of my life, indexed and cached and sitting there waiting for anyone with a keyboard to find it. I have been sober fourteen years. I have rebuilt a marriage, walked two daughters down the aisle, held every one of my grandchildren within an hour of their birth. None of that shows up on the first page. The mugshot does. I used to think shame was something you worked through and came out the other side of, the way you come out the other side of a fever. What that search result taught me is that shame d...
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The Porch Light I Still Flip On at Nine Every Night for No One Coming Home

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The Porch Light I Still Flip On at Nine Every Night for No One Coming Home RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 15, 2026 My wife has been gone three years now, and I still reach for the porch light switch every night around nine, the same time I used to flip it on so she could see the steps coming up from her shift at the hospital. There is no one coming up those steps anymore. My son lives two states away and calls on Sundays if he remembers, which is most Sundays, and I am grateful for that, but Sunday is not every night, and nine o'clock is not Sunday. I flip the switch anyway. I have told myself it is for safety, in case a neighbor needs to see the house number, but I know better. I am still lighting a porch for somebody who is not walking up to it, because some old habit in me has not caught up yet to how empty the house actually is. I am twelve years sober, and for most of those years I measured loneliness the way I measured everything else, by whether anyone w...
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The Laundry Basket I Set Down Halfway Up the Stairs and Didn't Pick Back Up for an Hour

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The Laundry Basket I Set Down Halfway Up the Stairs and Didn't Pick Back Up for an Hour RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 15, 2026 I was carrying the third load up from the basement Tuesday night, the one with the towels that always weighs more wet than it should, and somewhere around the seventh stair I just stopped. Set the basket down on the landing, sat next to it, and did not get back up for almost an hour. Nothing was wrong with my legs. I have carried heavier things up worse stairs plenty of times. What gave out was something further back than muscle, the part of me that keeps deciding to take the next step and the next one after that, all day, at work and at home and in my own head, and on Tuesday it simply quit deciding. I sat on a laundry basket in a stairwell at nine at night and could not have told you why that particular load, out of a thousand identical loads, was the one that finally asked too much. I am thirteen years sober, and for a long time I m...
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The Roofing Estimate I've Reread Nine Times and Still Haven't Signed

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Three contractors came out after the hailstorm in August, and I have had all three estimates sitting in a folder on my kitchen counter for eleven days now. One is cheapest and uses a crew I have never heard of. One is the company my neighbor used and liked, but it is the most expensive by almost two thousand dollars. One is somewhere in the middle, run by a man who went to my church for a few years before his family moved away, and I keep wanting that to be the deciding factor even though I know it should not be. I have read all three line by line more times than I can count, made a spreadsheet comparing warranty terms, called my insurance adjuster twice with questions I already knew the answers to, and I am no closer to signing anything than I was on day one. Meanwhile there is a blue tarp stapled over part of my roof, and every time it rains I lie awake listening for the sound of water finding a new way in. I am six years sober, and for most of those six years I believed my old p...
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The Job Application Tab I've Had Open for Six Weeks and Still Haven't Submitted

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The Job Application Tab I've Had Open for Six Weeks and Still Haven't Submitted I found the posting on a Tuesday night in September, a warehouse supervisor job twenty minutes from my house, paying more than what I make now, and I filled out the first three pages without much trouble. Name, address, work history, the easy parts. Then I got to the question I always get to, the one asking me to explain any gaps in employment, and I have sat on that same page for six weeks now, the cursor blinking in a text box I cannot make myself finish. I have opened that tab probably forty times since. I read over what little I had typed, delete a sentence, retype a shorter one, and close the laptop again without hitting submit. Three other applications from that same week got finished and sent and came back with the kind of polite rejection that stops stinging after the second one. This one I have not even let them see enough of me to reject. I am three years sober, and I used to think d...
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The Slow Cooker Lid I Lifted at Noon Even Though the Recipe Said Six Hours

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The Slow Cooker Lid I Lifted at Noon Even Though the Recipe Said Six Hours I put the roast in at seven that morning, read the recipe card twice, set the dial to low, and told myself I would not touch that lid until at least three in the afternoon. By eleven thirty I was standing in the kitchen in my socks, telling myself I only wanted to check the liquid level, which was a lie I believed for about four seconds before I lifted the lid anyway and let out a cloud of steam that cost the whole pot twenty extra minutes of cooking time I did not have to spare. I did this twice more before noon. Each time I knew exactly what I was doing to the roast and did it anyway, because some part of me could not stand the not knowing, could not stand trusting a process I could not see happening with my own eyes. I am eight years sober, and I used to think impatience was a minor character flaw, the kind of thing that only cost you a chewier cut of meat or a few extra minutes in a grocery line. What ...
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The Fence Post My Neighbor Moved Six Inches onto My Side

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The Fence Post My Neighbor Moved Six Inches onto My Side RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 13, 2026 I noticed it on a Saturday morning while I was dragging the trash cans back from the curb, the new fence post standing a good six inches past the old survey stake, a stake I know is accurate because I paid a surveyor two hundred dollars to confirm it when we bought the place. Six inches. Not a foot, not a property line war worth a lawyer, just six inches of grass that technically belongs to me now sitting on his side of a brand new post he installed without ever knocking on my door. I stood there with an empty trash can in each hand and felt something rise in my chest that had nothing to do with grass and everything to do with being treated like I do not matter enough to ask. I am seven years sober, and I used to settle disagreements like that one with my fists or my silence, whichever felt more satisfying in the moment. What surprised me standing at that fence line was...
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