The Photo My Old Drinking Buddy Tagged Me In RedeemedExistence daily devotional — September 26, 2026 A notification popped up on my phone Tuesday night, a tag in a photo from twelve years ago, some bar I do not even remember the name of, my arm slung around a man I used to run with back when running meant something closer to ruin than exercise. He must have been digging through an old album, feeling nostalgic about a version of himself he has apparently decided to keep. In the picture I am twenty six pounds heavier, glassy eyed, laughing at something that was probably not funny, and thirty one people had already liked it by the time I saw it. I did not comment or untag myself, though I thought about it. I just sat on the edge of my bed feeling twelve years fall away like they had never happened at all. I have been sober long enough now that most days I do not think about who I used to be. I go to work, I coach my son's baseball team, people at church know me as the guy who ...

The Boat My Old Sponsee Just Bought RedeemedExistence daily devotional, September 25, 2026 I saw the photo before I meant to. I was only checking the weather app for tomorrow's forecast when the notification banner slid across the top of my screen, a picture of Danny standing on the deck of a boat he apparently just bought outright, grinning with his arm around his wife, the caption something about God's faithfulness and hard work paying off. I sponsored that man through his first year sober. I sat across from him at a diner table more times than I can count while he cried about a marriage he thought he had already lost. And now he owns a boat, and I am still driving a car with a check engine light I have been ignoring for three months because I cannot afford to find out what it means. I am happy for Danny. I want to say that first, because it is true. But underneath the happiness, in a part of me I do not love admitting exists, something else showed up uninvited the mo...

The Question My Daughter Asked at Bedtime RedeemedExistence daily devotional, September 25, 2026 My daughter is seven, and last Tuesday night she looked up from her pillow while I was mid-prayer and asked me how I actually know God is real. Not smart-mouthed, not testing me. She wanted a real answer, the kind a seven-year-old asks when the lights are off and the day is done and there is nothing left to perform for. I opened my mouth and nothing useful came out. I gave her something about the Bible and about feeling Him in church, and she nodded the way kids nod when the answer did not really land, and I lay awake long after she fell asleep turning her question over like a stone I could not put down. I have been sober eleven years now, and most days my faith feels as settled as anything in my life. But that night reopened a door I thought I had shut for good, back to the years when I could not have answered my daughter's question either, because I did not believe it myself. ...

The Thermostat War in My Own House RedeemedExistence daily devotional, September 25, 2026 My wife and I have been fighting about the thermostat for three years, and I want to be honest enough to say it was never actually about the thermostat. She likes the house at sixty-eight with a blanket on the couch. I run hot and want it at sixty-two, and that four-degree gap has turned into a nightly ritual where one of us sneaks over to the wall panel and the other notices within the hour and says something short about it. Last night I caught myself in the hallway at eleven o'clock, thumb on the dial, actually rehearsing what I would say if she woke up and asked why I moved it again. I have gotten good at rehearsing. I did not used to be a man who thought that far ahead before a fight. In my drinking years, conflict meant something louder and far more dangerous than a thermostat. I broke things that could not be glued back together, said words I still hear in my own voice some night...

I still set two mugs on the counter every morning before I remember I only need one. My hand does it before my mind catches up, reaching for the chipped blue one that was never actually mine to begin with, filling it alongside my own out of a habit built over eleven years of a marriage that ended two years ago. Some mornings I catch myself before the coffee pot finishes pouring. Most mornings I do not, and I stand there with two full mugs steaming on the counter and only one person in the kitchen to drink them, and I pour the second one down the sink like I am performing some small private funeral I never agreed to attend. I used to think loneliness was something that happened to other people, quieter men than the one I used to be. My old life was loud on purpose, packed with people who called themselves friends and mostly wanted a bar tab covered or a ride somewhere they should not have been going. I mistook noise for connection for a long time, and it took losing all of it, the m...

The Recliner Beside My Mother's Hospital Bed RedeemedExistence daily devotional — September 24, 2026 I have slept in that recliner for eleven nights now, the kind with a lever that never quite locks and a cushion that has gone flat in exactly the wrong place. My mother is on the mend, the doctors keep telling me, but mending is slow and hospitals do not turn the lights all the way off, and somewhere around three in the morning I stop pretending I am resting and just lie there listening to the machines do their quiet work. I go to my actual job most days on maybe four broken hours, running on coffee and whatever is left of the man who used to think he could push through anything on sheer will alone. I am learning, eleven nights in, that I cannot. There was a season of my life when I mistook exhaustion for a badge, back when staying up all night meant something very different and far more destructive than sitting beside a hospital bed. I told myself then that I could outrun m...

# 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...