The Baby Monitor I Turned Face-Down at 3 A.M. RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 8, 2026 I did not unplug it. I want to be honest about that, because unplugging it would have meant admitting what I was actually doing. I just reached over in the dark and turned the little screen face-down on the nightstand, so the light would stop filling the room and I would not have to watch my granddaughter's crib on the camera while she worked herself up for round four. My daughter is recovering from surgery two doors down the hall, and I am the one covering nights this month. By three in the morning I had nothing left in me, not patience, not softness, not even the energy to get up right away. I lay there listening to the muffled cry through a screen I could not see, and some small, ugly part of me thought, let her cry a little longer. I am so tired. I have been sober eleven years, and I used to think exhaustion was the one struggle that did not need a spiritual explanation. A ...

# The Seed Packet I Dug Up Three Times to Check for Roots I planted a row of bean seeds on Saturday morning, the kind my granddaughter picked out at the hardware store because the packet had a picture of a rabbit on it. By Monday afternoon I had already pushed my finger into the dirt twice to see if anything was happening down there, and by Tuesday I did it a third time, right where I'd planted the third seed, pulling up a thin white thread of a root and probably killing it in the process. My wife caught me kneeling in the garden with dirt under my nails and said what she always says when she catches me like this. You're doing it again. She wasn't talking about the beans. She was talking about the thing underneath the beans, the part of me that has never once in my life been able to leave a planted thing alone and just let it grow. I have done this with job applications, checking my email every twenty minutes the day after an interview. I have done it with amends I...

The Verse I Highlighted Three Different Years and Still Don't Believe RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 7, 2026 I was digging through a box in the garage this week, looking for old tax paperwork, when I found my first Bible instead, the cheap one the hospital chaplain gave me the week I got sober. I flipped it open at random and landed on Hebrews 11, and there it was, the same verse marked three separate times in three separate years. Blue pen the first year, shaky handwriting, the ink pressed so hard it nearly tore the page. Yellow highlighter a few years after that, smoother strokes, like I had calmed down some. A pencil circle around the same words just last year, faint, almost apologetic. Same verse, ten years apart, and I realized I was not underlining it because I believed it. I kept underlining it because I kept needing to believe it again. I used to think doubt was a one-time crisis, a single dark night you fight through and then y...