# 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...

The Elevator Button I Keep Pressing Anyway RedeemedExistence daily devotional — September 23, 2026 I know the button does not work faster the third time I press it. I have watched the little light behind it flicker on with the very first touch, and I still stab it two more times every morning while I stand in the lobby of my office building, as if my thumb could argue the machine into moving quicker than the cables allow. It is such a small thing that I never thought to name it until my daughter, six years old and riding up with me one morning, asked why I kept doing that when the light was already on. I did not have a good answer for her. I still do not, except that some old habit in me has never learned to just stand still and let something take the time it takes. That habit did not start with elevators. It started years ago, in the stretch of my life I do not talk about at dinner parties, when waiting for anything felt like a kind of suffocation. I learned to treat every gap...

Two tabs have been sitting open in my browser for nine days now, one from the recovery nonprofit where I have run the intake desk for three years, and one from a logistics company across town offering almost double the salary with actual health insurance for my kids. I have read both letters so many times I could recite the paragraph breaks. I have made a pros and cons list on a legal pad, then a second list ranking the first list, then a spreadsheet nobody asked me to build, and every method of deciding has left me exactly as stuck as the morning I opened both emails within an hour of each other. My wife asked me last night which way I am leaning and I honestly could not answer her. I have never once in my life felt this paralyzed by two good options at the same time. I used to think decision fatigue only happened to people with harder decisions than mine, executives choosing between mergers, doctors weighing surgeries. I am learning it does not care how big the decision is. It ca...

The Custody Calendar I Still Check Every Sunday Night RedeemedExistence daily devotional, September 22, 2026 Every Sunday night around nine, after my kids have gone back to their mother's house for the week, I open an app on my phone that shows the custody calendar our lawyers built two years ago, the alternating weekends and the Wednesday dinners and the holiday rotation spelled out in a grid I have memorized down to the color coding. I do not open it to check what is next. I already know what is next. I open it hoping something has changed, some notification that the schedule has been revised, that the arrangement finally moved toward what I keep believing God is going to do, which is give me my kids back full time the way I had them before I ruined it. Nothing ever changes. The grid looks the same every week, and so does the ache of checking it. I have been praying for that grid to change since the ink dried on it, praying with everything I have ...

The Phone I Charge on the Kitchen Counter So I Never Miss the 3 A.M. Call I stopped charging my phone on my nightstand two years ago and moved the cord to the kitchen counter instead, plugged in low enough that the screen still lights up the room if it rings. That way if a man I sponsor calls at three in the morning because he is standing in a parking lot deciding whether tonight is the night he throws his sobriety away, I hear it from the hallway before it wakes my wife. I have answered that call more times than I can count. I have also lain awake plenty of nights that phone never rang, just waiting for it to, my whole body braced for a sound that never came, and woken up the next morning just as tired as if it had. I used to think this kind of tired was the cost of doing the work right. Nobody got sober by being unavailable to the people who needed them, and I built my whole recovery on being the exception to every sponsor who had once been too busy for me. What I did not accou...