What You Reach For

I told you about the pour. Now I need to tell you why it worked.

That's the part nobody wants to say out loud about the thing they reach for. It works. If it didn't work, no man would ever get taken by it. The bourbon helped me sleep. It shut the voice in my head down, the one that started up the second the house went quiet, running the list of everything I was failing at and everyone I was failing. It calmed me down. Ask me back then and I'd have told you it was needed, the same way a man needs a jack to hold a truck up. I thought it was the only way to survive my own life.

So every night I traded. One more glass for a few hours of quiet. The trade always went through. That's the trap. It kept working right up until it had me, and I never felt the trade change hands.

You'd think a man would see rock bottom coming from a long way off, like a town on the horizon. I didn't. I never saw it coming at all. I was blind. The darkness had its hold on me by then, and part of how it holds a man is exactly that: it takes the eyes first. I could not see the truth about the drinking, about the anger, about myself. You cannot steer away from a cliff you've been convinced isn't there.

And while I was blind, my family was paying for my quiet with theirs.

I've done the accounting since, sober, in the daylight, and I want to read you the bill. The drinking cost them happiness. It cost them a peaceful house. It cost them a safe house. It cost my daughters a father who was present, and it cost my wife a husband who was what God intended a husband to be for a wife. Notice whose names are on that bill. I drank to shut my voice up, and the people who couldn't pour a glass paid for it every single night.

And somebody in that house always tells the truth about it. That is how these houses work. Somebody says the thing out loud, because they love you and because it needs saying, and then there is a fight, because the truth and the bourbon can't share a kitchen. And then the man drinks more, and now he has a reason: the fight.

Hear how that loop runs. The one person telling him the truth becomes, in his accounting, the reason he needs another glass. That's what the darkness does with a warning. It turns the smoke alarm into the fire.

Nobody in my house misunderstood me. I was the one who wasn't listening.

Now let me tell you what I was actually doing all those nights, because God described it a long time before I lived it. "For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, The fountain of living waters, To hew for themselves cisterns, Broken cisterns That can hold no water" (Jeremiah 2:13, NASB 1995).

A cistern is a tank you dig for yourself, to hold water you can control. That was the bourbon. Mine was carved out of oak barrels and denial, and I went to it every night with my thirst, and every morning it was empty again. That's the tell of a broken cistern: it never once holds. You always have to come back tomorrow. Sleep that doesn't rest you. Calm that doesn't outlast the glass. Quiet that has to be repurchased every single night at closing time. I wasn't drinking because I was thirsty for bourbon. I was thirsty for peace, for quiet, for somebody to tell me I was going to be okay, and I kept lowering my bucket into a tank I'd dug myself.

Two evils, God says. Not one. It wasn't just that I dug the cistern. It's that there was a fountain running the whole time, and I walked past it every night to go drink from my own hole in the ground. Jesus stood up in the middle of a crowd once and made the offer plain: "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink" (John 7:37, NASB 1995). That offer was open every night I poured. The fountain was never the problem. My feet were.

And here's the detail that wrecks me. John says Jesus stood up and shouted that on the last and greatest day of a feast where the priests poured out water at the altar, a whole ceremony built around thirst. He stood up in the middle of the water ritual and said, in effect, I'm the water. Then John explains what the water was: Jesus was talking about the Spirit, who could not be given until Jesus had been glorified (John 7:39). Read that slow. The fountain wasn't free because God was in a good mood. It was free because Jesus was on His way to a cross to pay for it. What I kept trying to pour for myself, He had already bought to hand me.

So what does your cistern look like? Maybe it pours. A lot of men's do. But I've met men whose cistern glows in their hand at midnight, or lives in a browser tab they'd die before showing anyone, or sits in the garage, or at the office, or inside a rage that feels better than the sadness under it. The shape doesn't matter. The tell is the same as mine: it works for a few hours, it's empty by morning, and the people you love are paying for your quiet with theirs.

Here's how mine ended, and I'll say it carefully, because your road may not look like my road.

Mine ended at the bottom. After the night I tried to take my own life, the night I'll walk you through in the next chapter, I felt God put His hand on me. That's the only way I know to say it. And I prayed for help, a real prayer, maybe the first one in years that wasn't a negotiation. And the desire left. It wasn't the quality of the prayer that did it. His hand was on me before I opened my mouth. I haven't had a drink since, and I don't want one. I don't have a five-step explanation for that. God lifted it, and I walked away from a cistern I'd have sworn I couldn't live without.

Brother, that's my testimony, not your prescription. God is not obligated to lift yours the way He lifted mine, on my timeline, in one night. Far more often He walks a man out in inches, through counselors and programs and brothers who check in, through hard Tuesdays and one white-knuckle evening at a time. That road is not lesser faith. The inches are Him too. The only version that isn't Him is the one where you stay at the cistern because you're too proud to let anybody see you thirsty. And I don't mean the man who slipped last night. I mean the man who won't tell a soul. Slipping is not what keeps a man at the cistern. Hiding is.

One more thing, and it matters. If your pour is daily and heavy, talk to a doctor before you stop. Coming off it alone can hurt you. That is not a smaller miracle. That is God using a professional.

So here's the work, and you can do all of it this week.

First, name your pour. Not to me. To God, out loud, with the door shut. He already knows, but you naming it is the sound of the blindness cracking, because the darkness needs the thing unnamed to keep it running. One sentence: "Lord, this is where I go instead of You." Then tell Him you're thirsty. That's the whole prayer. Thirst is the one qualification the fountain asks for.

Second, retrain the reach, one time. This week, when the moment comes, the walk through the door, the house noise, the voice starting up, and your hand starts moving toward the old cistern, point it somewhere else on purpose.

I still reach for something when I walk through that door. Every man does; the reach doesn't die, it just gets retrained. What I reach for now is standing in my kitchen and always was. Living water, running right through the house, free, and it was there the whole time.

Go find out what's been standing in yours.