They don’t come home after work, buy you gifts, give you a kiss, or cuddle at night. They don’t tell you nice things, take you exotic places, to dinner, or hold your hand in the movie. They don’t say they love you, hug you, help when you need it or stand by your side in a crowd. They’re not much of a lover, poet, looker or dreamer and it’s been years since you were visible, though content to be alone and on your own. Then just when you’ve become accustomed to being without all these years, one day you may just find yourself glancing up at a stranger for the first time who mustered the courage to say hello when you could not. And at that moment, your imagination of how it’s been safer, better to be alone and unhurt suggests you just might have been mistaken too long. So you fumble a returned hello, an awkward smile, and feel the strange awakening of an ancient hope from where you left it so many years back when it first said hello and last said a cruel goodbye. Maybe, just maybe, you’ve been wrong about love all these years, because love always begins with a hello and never says never, because you’ll never ever know without finding the courage to try again.

Of all life experiences one remains entirely unknown. After millions of attempts across the ages to describe it from every conceivable perspective, unhinged fantasy and unlimited speculation in exquisite detail, unchallenged since the beginning of time, we know nothing more of it except for the promise that for as long as we live we never will.Sleep is a wonderful thing until it’s your last. And I still miss my friend, jealous of her fully enlightened state until mine arrives and we meet again to pick up where we left off. She always was and still is a memorable woman gone much too soon.

Jacquelyn Rae Malott 1951-2018

The young man was seated in the sun on the curb outside when he asked “Could I wash your windows for 50 cents?” In a hurry to get my iced tea I said “No, thanks” and walked past him into the store. The length of the line was consuming my valuable lunch hour until I noticed the disabled woman at the front of the line was 35 cents short. The cashier asked “Well, do you have the 35 cents lady?” Six handfuls of coins reached out to her in sync—everyone in line wanted to help, not only to move the line along faster, but to genuinely help. Humbled but embarrassed by our corporate act of kindness she declined our offers, took the loss and he closed the register, asking the woman in the scooter to get along. “Next?”We each waited for our turn at transacting and eventually, my four iced teas came to precisely $4. Change from my $5 bill, I kept the dollar in hand as I exited the store thinking how just minutes before, I’d turned down a 50 cent window wash from a man who wanted to work for it, yet gladly forked over four dimes for someone who couldn’t. It was one of those serendipity moments of humanity that cost me nothing but a cold iced tea and a buck for a guy who needed it a lot more than me. We all learned a lesson or two that day.

I grew up in a family that tidied up the table before leaving the restaurant, pushed the shopping cart back to its place at the grocery store, returned the change when overpaid, and washed the dish in the sink even when it wasn’t ours. We never knew there were other options and never considered them lessons. Lessons were for learning deliberate choices of conscience between right and wrong, not simple and obvious courtesies of humankindness. Family’s not an important thing, it’s everything. The things that made America great have never changed. The human constitution has.

When you die what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured? What will matter is not what you bought but what you built. Not what you got but what you gave. What will matter is not what you learned but what you taught others. What will matter is your integrity and compassion, your courage to sacrifice, enrich and empower others by your example. What will matter is not your confidence but your character. Not how many people you knew, but how many will feel the deep loss of your departure. What will matter is not your memories but those of you that live on in the ones who loved you. What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom, and for what. A life lived with significance is not by chance or circumstance but by the gift of choices you made while you were here.-adapted from Rick Mann.

Five years ago I wrote a letter to my dad who’d recently passed about the current state of this country he’d departed. I warned that a second civil war was brewing again about slavery but this time not due to the color of one’s skin but over beliefs and virtues dear to the human heart some now consider slavery to a nonexistent God whose tenets interfere with agendas and narratives that twist His words and deny the evidence of His very existence. With both camps feeling increasingly oppressed and furious at the mounting divide over which each claims truth on their side, the impasse is ramping up to war with only one to prevail at the death of the other. When my departed father read my letter, he assured me this has been the condition of man’s heart for all time and to not be afraid for the future. For to win is Christ, to die is great gain, and to endure this war reveals both whose you are and what is to follow.Let us hope history will continue to show that people are moved more by temperate letters and words than any act of war.

Give honest advice when it’s solicited. The asking of it places you among their most trusted friends, consideration of it among their most influential, and the taking of it among their most sincere. Honesty is friendship’s truest indicator.

[If there’s one thing addicts do well, it’s telling stories. But after 9 years clean, they’re usually not lies anymore.]

Someone asked me recently how I did it. How I got off drugs, meth of all things. Undoubtedly tonight at my meeting I’ll be asked once again as is the tradition for anyone getting another annual chip. My ninth.

I’ve given a lot of thought to the question. Less to the mechanics of my leap into sobriety, but more about which of my words might just trigger another addict in attendance to turn on that light upstairs, illuminating them to the possibility that they, too, despite their past, deserve a future.

You see, it’s not so much the quitting of drugs that’s important. Equally necessary is the installation of hope and belief that you are worth far more in this world than the lonely company of any drug or its cohorts. It’s about having been utterly blinded by the stupor of a drug and its false promise of contentment that blocks out hope or vision there’s really anything more to life. To that end, we are all addicts. We all have something we’ve allowed to remain which blocks our hope and blurs our vision. Something to which we remain bound.

“Clean and sober.” It’s almost cliché these days.
The distinction between the two, however, is perhaps the most important thing I learned in my years of recovery so far. I got clean once, but I get more sober with each passing day.

The truly recovered are not recovered at all. They are recovering. And the truly recovering can instinctively tell the difference. A recovering person hasn’t simply stopped using, they have started living. It’s evident that a clarity of mind, purpose and a place for God was birthed at some moment, and rarely is that moment a single epiphany, but the commencement of lifelong epiphanies which, strung together, create the continuity of recovering.

It’s the high I get from my ongoing little epiphanies of life these days. They continue to escort me down a much more beautiful path. And when you find yourself in a much prettier place, hope is much easier to find. In fact, it seems to find you.
And isn’t that really the definition of God?

So for the addicts in all of us, I say to you, we are here in this world for one reason only: Be that hope for someone today. Be clean. Be sober. And most of all, live like you deserve to.

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
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