The Fence Post My Neighbor Moved Eight Inches Onto My Side of the Line The surveyor's stake is still sitting in my garage, orange flag curling at the edges, three weeks after I paid a man two hundred dollars to prove what I already suspected. My neighbor's new fence sits eight inches onto my property, the whole length of it, cedar posts set in concrete he is not going to want to dig back out. I have rehearsed the conversation I am going to have with him more times than I can count, standing at my own kitchen window watching him mow a strip of grass that is legally mine. Some version of that rehearsal ends with me being generous and reasonable. More of them end with me saying something I would regret, delivered in a tone I have not used on another human being in a long time. I used to settle disagreements with my fists, back before I knew the Lord, in parking lots and at kitchen tables that did not belong to me, and I told myself for years that getting sober had put ...

The Seatbelt I Still Buckle Across the Empty Passenger Seat RedeemedExistence daily devotional, November 5, 2026 For twelve years I drove the same stretch of county road every Tuesday night to pick up Earl for our meeting, and for twelve years I reached across the cab and buckled his seatbelt for him before I ever put the truck in gear, because his hands shook too badly by the end to manage the buckle himself. Earl died in the spring. It is November now, and I still catch my right hand drifting across that empty seat on Tuesday nights, fingers closing on nothing, the belt clicking into a buckle that has no one in it. My wife asked me once why I still take that road at all since there is nobody left to pick up. I did not have a good answer. I think some part of me is still driving toward a man who is not there, because the habit of not being alone on that drive outlasted the man who used to keep me from being alone on it. I spent years of my life surrounded by people an...

The Message Request I Haven't Opened From a Woman I Used to Love RedeemedExistence daily devotional, November 4, 2026 It has been sitting in my message requests for six days now, a little red number I can see without even unlocking my phone. A name I have not spoken out loud in almost thirty years. We were together before I was anybody's husband or father, back when I was still drinking myself toward the bottom I eventually hit, and whatever we were to each other then ended badly and far too young to have ended any other way. I do not know what is inside that message. I only know that some nights, lying awake next to my wife of twenty-two years, I catch myself imagining what it might say, and I notice how much of my imagination I have spent on a woman I have not seen since before my children were born. I want to be honest about what this is, because dressing it up as mere curiosity would be a lie I am too old and too sober to keep telling myself. This is tempta...

The Blank Line on My Grandson's Confirmation Card Where I Was Supposed to Write What I Believe RedeemedExistence daily devotional — November 4, 2026 My grandson's confirmation is in ten days, and the sponsor card the church handed me has one line near the bottom that asks me, in my own handwriting, to tell him what I believe. Not what the catechism says. What I believe. I have carried that card in my jacket pocket for six days now, and every time I pull it out at the kitchen table with a pen in hand, I freeze on that line the same way I used to freeze outside a meeting room door, not sure I belonged on either side of it. I have been sober nineteen years. I have read my Bible every morning for most of them. And still, sitting there with a twelve-year-old's trust riding on my answer, some old voice in the back of my head asks whether I actually believe any of it the way a man is supposed to, or whether I have just gotten good at saying the words. That is doub...

The Fishing Cooler I Packed the Night Before My Son Canceled RedeemedExistence daily devotional, November 4, 2026 I had the cooler packed by nine the night before, sandwiches already made and wrapped in the fridge, two new lures still in their plastic because I wanted my son to be the one to cut them free. We had talked about this trip for three weeks, a Saturday on the lake just the two of us, no wives, no phones, nothing but the boat and whatever we pulled up out of the water. At six the next morning my phone buzzed on the nightstand. His sitter had called out sick, his wife had an early shift, and there was no version of the day that still had room for me in it. I told him it was fine. I meant it, mostly. Then I stood in the kitchen looking at a cooler full of sandwiches nobody was going to eat on a lake nobody was going to see, and felt something sag in my chest that surprised me with how heavy it was for something so small. I am sixteen years sober, and I used to ...

My phone buzzed hard enough against the nightstand to wake me before I understood why, and when I squinted at the screen it was a breaking news alert, another flashpoint overseas, troops moving, markets already reacting in some other time zone where it was already daylight. I lay there in the dark reading the first few lines twice, and something old in my chest woke up faster than my mind did. Before I had prayed a single word about it, I was already doing the thing I have done my whole life when the world tilts even slightly, running the worst version forward. What does this mean for my son's deployment orders. What does this do to the accounts I just rolled into retirement. How many more alerts like this one before something actually touches the street I live on. I got four hours of broken sleep after that and woke up still carrying it, the particular heaviness of anxiety that has nothing specific in front of it yet and still manages to sit on your chest like something specif...