The Argument My Wife and I Had in the Church Parking Lot We were still buckled into our seats, engine running, five minutes before the second service, when she said the sentence that lit the whole thing off. It was not even a cruel sentence, just a tired observation about how I always disappear into my phone the second we sit down anywhere, and something in me that had been simmering all week over something else entirely came up through that one small comment like steam through a cracked lid. Within ninety seconds we were both talking over each other in a church parking lot, windows up, voices low so the family parking next to us would not hear, saying things we had said a dozen times before in a dozen other parking lots. I remember looking at the cross on the sign above the entrance while I was mid-sentence and thinking, with a strange, detached clarity, that I was about to walk in there and sing about peace with my jaw still clenched. I have been sober eleven years now, and for...

It has sat there for seven nights now, the same brown leather Bible I have read from almost every night since my first year sober, closed, untouched, gathering the thin layer of dust that collects on anything left alone in a bedroom for a week. I still turn off the lamp at the same time. I still say goodnight to my wife the same way. I just stopped reaching for it, and if she noticed she has not said anything, which somehow makes the silence in that corner of the nightstand feel even louder than it would if someone had asked me about it. It started, if I am honest, after a phone call from a man I sponsored for four years, telling me he was back in a hospital bed after two years clean, and after that came a diagnosis in my own family that nobody has fully explained yet, and somewhere between those two conversations something in me went quiet toward God instead of loud. I did not stop believing He exists. I stopped being sure He is doing anything, and those are two very different kin...