The Seatbelt I Still Buckle Across the Empty Passenger Seat RedeemedExistence daily devotional, November 5, 2026 For twelve years I drove the same stretch of county road every Tuesday night to pick up Earl for our meeting, and for twelve years I reached across the cab and buckled his seatbelt for him before I ever put the truck in gear, because his hands shook too badly by the end to manage the buckle himself. Earl died in the spring. It is November now, and I still catch my right hand drifting across that empty seat on Tuesday nights, fingers closing on nothing, the belt clicking into a buckle that has no one in it. My wife asked me once why I still take that road at all since there is nobody left to pick up. I did not have a good answer. I think some part of me is still driving toward a man who is not there, because the habit of not being alone on that drive outlasted the man who used to keep me from being alone on it. I spent years of my life surrounded by people an...

The Message Request I Haven't Opened From a Woman I Used to Love RedeemedExistence daily devotional, November 4, 2026 It has been sitting in my message requests for six days now, a little red number I can see without even unlocking my phone. A name I have not spoken out loud in almost thirty years. We were together before I was anybody's husband or father, back when I was still drinking myself toward the bottom I eventually hit, and whatever we were to each other then ended badly and far too young to have ended any other way. I do not know what is inside that message. I only know that some nights, lying awake next to my wife of twenty-two years, I catch myself imagining what it might say, and I notice how much of my imagination I have spent on a woman I have not seen since before my children were born. I want to be honest about what this is, because dressing it up as mere curiosity would be a lie I am too old and too sober to keep telling myself. This is tempta...

The Blank Line on My Grandson's Confirmation Card Where I Was Supposed to Write What I Believe RedeemedExistence daily devotional — November 4, 2026 My grandson's confirmation is in ten days, and the sponsor card the church handed me has one line near the bottom that asks me, in my own handwriting, to tell him what I believe. Not what the catechism says. What I believe. I have carried that card in my jacket pocket for six days now, and every time I pull it out at the kitchen table with a pen in hand, I freeze on that line the same way I used to freeze outside a meeting room door, not sure I belonged on either side of it. I have been sober nineteen years. I have read my Bible every morning for most of them. And still, sitting there with a twelve-year-old's trust riding on my answer, some old voice in the back of my head asks whether I actually believe any of it the way a man is supposed to, or whether I have just gotten good at saying the words. That is doub...