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Showing posts from September 23, 2026

The RSVP I Haven't Sent for My Twenty-Year Reunion

The RSVP I Haven't Sent for My Twenty-Year Reunion RedeemedExistence daily devotional — September 23, 2026 The invitation has been sitting on the counter for two weeks now, next to the mail I actually open. Twenty years since my high school class walked across that gym floor, and somewhere in the planning committee's spreadsheet is a list of names with little notes beside them, who became a doctor, who runs the family dealership now, who moved to Nashville and got a song on the radio once. I know because a classmate posted the highlight reel in our group chat, unprompted, proud of all of it, and I sat there scrolling with my thumb doing the same quiet math it always does when I let it. Ten of those twenty years, I was not building anything. I was surviving a version of myself I do not like remembering, and there is no clever way to make that stretch of time sound like it produced anything worth putting next to a dealership or a record deal. Regret has a particular kind ...

The Blood Pressure Cuff on My Nightstand

The Blood Pressure Cuff on My Nightstand RedeemedExistence daily devotional — September 23, 2026 I bought the cuff two years ago after a doctor's visit that should have been routine, and it has not left my nightstand since. Most nights I wrap it around my arm before I turn off the lamp, watch the numbers climb and settle, and tell myself I am only being responsible. Some nights I take it three or four times in a row because the first reading felt too high and the second one did not match the first, and I lie there running the math on what a decade of hard living probably did to a body I spent so many years treating like it was disposable. The cuff never lies to me exactly. What it does is give my mind a number to grab onto and turn into a verdict, and my mind has gotten very good at turning numbers into verdicts. I used to think this kind of worry was simply what responsible people did once they got sober and started caring about their health. Some of it...