# The Shopping Cart I Never Check Out RedeemedExistence daily devotional — September 24, 2026 I have forty-one items sitting in an online cart right now that I have no plan to buy. A pressure washer I do not need for a driveway that is perfectly clean. A watch that costs more than my first car. A kayak, of all things, for a river I have never once paddled. I add things to that cart most nights after my wife has gone to bed, scrolling with the television muted, and I almost never actually purchase anything. What I am doing, if I am honest, is not shopping. I am chasing a feeling I get for about four seconds when I hit "add to cart," a small flicker of anticipation that something new is about to make today feel less flat than it did an hour ago. It never does. The flicker fades before I even close the tab, and most mornings I cannot remember what was in the cart the night before. I used to think this kind of restlessness only belonged to my drinking years, that particul...

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 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...