The Open Enrollment Spreadsheet I Built and Still Couldn't Use RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 7, 2026 Open enrollment at work closes at midnight tonight, and I built a spreadsheet eleven days ago to make the decision easier. Four plan columns, premium rows, deductible rows, HSA contribution rows, everything color coded so the obvious answer would just jump off the screen at me. I have opened that spreadsheet almost every night since, usually after my wife goes to sleep, and every single time I highlight the same two columns, stare at them for ten minutes, and close the laptop no closer to an answer than I was the night before. Tonight is the deadline. The computer will pick the default plan for me at midnight if I do not act, and some small, tired part of me has started to wonder if that might honestly be easier. I have been sober nine years, and I used to think the hardest decisions I would ever face were behind me, the kind with a bottle in them. What nine ye...

The Boarding Group That's Never Mine I stand at the same spot by the gate every time, close enough to the podium to hear the number called, far enough back that I am not technically crowding anyone. Group one goes. Group two goes. The young guy in front of me with the branded suitcase and the status he mentions twice gets called in group three, and I watch him roll away toward the jet bridge while I check my phone for a boarding pass that still says group seven. I fly maybe six times a year. I have never once been called before group five. I know the number before I even look anymore, and somehow knowing it ahead of time has never once made the twenty minutes of standing there easier. I used to think impatience was a minor flaw, the kind of thing you joke about at Thanksgiving. Eight years sober has taught me otherwise. The man I used to be could not sit still for anything, not a red light, not a waiting room, not a sentence someone else was still in the middle of finishing. ...

# The Empty Half of the Pew I Sit In Every Sunday Five minutes before the first song, my wife hands me her coat, picks up a tote bag full of snack cups and crayons, and disappears down the hallway to the three-year-old room, the same way she has every Sunday for two years now. I slide into our usual spot with both coats across my lap and a diaper bag nobody in our house has needed in over a decade, because old habits in a church building apparently outlive the reasons for them. The sanctuary fills in around me, families and greeters and the man two rows up who always waves, and somewhere in the second verse I notice I am more aware of being alone than I would be sitting in an empty house. A full room can be the loneliest room I know. I did not expect this particular ache twelve years into sobriety. I had always filed loneliness under my drinking years, the nights I sat at a bar on purpose so I would not have to feel what I was feeling at home. I assumed a good marriage and a full...