Stop Wearing the Worst Thing That Ever Happened to You

I have seen the shirts. NORMALIZE SOBRIETY. Survivor, in block letters, across a man's chest.

Let me be careful here, because the man wearing that shirt is not my enemy and he is not a joke. He earned it. Some of you know exactly what it costs to be able to put that word on, and it is more than anyone who has not done it will ever understand.

But look at where it points.

Sober is a thing you are not doing. Survivor is a thing that happened to you. Both of those words face backward, and both do the same job: they take the worst season of a man's life, set it in block letters across his chest, and ask the world to be alright with what is left of him.

That is a small ask, brother. You were not saved to be tolerated.

Most of us do not need a shirt

We do it out loud without one.

"I'm an addict." "I'm an alcoholic." "I've just got a temper, always have." Said flat, like a weather report. Said like a name.

Here is the problem with a name. You answer to it.

Say a word over yourself long enough and you will start living down to it, because a man does not usually climb higher than what he already believes he is. If angry is simply what you are, then the next time you take your wife's head off in the kitchen you have not failed at anything, you were only being consistent. That is what the label bought you. It stopped describing the man and started giving him permission.

That is the trap. Not the honesty. The naming.

Paul wrote a list

It is a hard list, the kind that makes people close the Bible and decide they will come back to it later. He is naming who will not inherit the kingdom of God, and drunkards are sitting right there in the middle of it, in between the thieves and the men who cannot stop wanting what belongs to somebody else.

Then he turns to the church and says this:

"Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God" (1 Corinthians 6:11).

Were.

Go back and read it again if your eye slid past it. He does not say such are some of you, and God loves you anyway. He puts the whole list in the past tense, then tells them what happened instead. Washed. Sanctified. Justified. Three things done to them. Not one of them done by them.

And John says it from the other end, same shape, opposite tense: "See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are" (1 John 3:1).

Such were some of you. And such we are.

That is the whole trade. One word for another. You did not earn either one, and that is the part that should let you breathe.

Now hear me, because this is where a post like this can hurt somebody

I am not telling you to stop telling the truth about your fight.

If you are nine weeks in and you say "I am an alcoholic" out loud in a room full of men every Tuesday night, then keep going on Tuesday. That sentence is a crowbar against denial and it is doing real work. Do not set down a tool that is keeping you alive because some blog used the word identity.

If you are wearing survivor because you buried somebody, that is not what this is about either. Carry their name as long as you want to. Nobody gets to tell you when to put that down.

And if today is the heavy one, if you are reading this at two in the morning and you are not sure you want tomorrow, call or text 988. Do it before you finish this page. It is free, it is any hour, and you do not need a plan or a good enough reason to call.

Here is the line I would draw instead.

A testimony is something you tell. A label is something you answer to.

Say every true word about where you have been. Say it often, and say it out loud to the men who need to hear that somebody walked out of that same hole. What you do not do is print it on the front of your chest and then answer to it for the next thirty years. Your story is a bridge you walk out on to reach a man who is still down there. It was never meant to be your name.

So let us normalize something else

If we are going to put words on a shirt, let them face forward.

Normalize a man who prays. Not a man who used to drink and now does not. A man who prays.

Normalize hitting your knees in the truck for two minutes before you walk through the door and turn back into somebody's father. Normalize saying grace out loud at your own table when your kid has friends over and it would be easier to skip it. Normalize a man who stands firm when standing is going to cost him the room, and who manages to stay gentle with people the whole time he is doing it.

None of those are the absence of something. They are the presence of Someone.

One thing, today

Pick the word you have been calling yourself. You know the one. It is what you would say if a stranger asked what is wrong with you.

Say the other one instead. Out loud, in the truck, where nobody hears it but God.

Child of God.

Now go be that. You already are.