How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word.

Psalm‬ ‭119‬:‭9

A lot of people worry that they’ll be bored if they give up drinking. That life is duller without using some of the many vices we come to rely on in our addiction.

Others—and I was in this category—are worried more that to remove drinking or drugs will deflate the person we had become. It will force us to begin again, or worse, to have to restart as the person we were fleeing from in the beginning.

We’ve spent a lot of time medicating ourselves in the hopes of maintaining a sense of ease and comfort that was once genuine but is now a memory, an ideal, an ungraspable idea.

Of course, the first crowd has reason to fear the fullness of life if they define it by parties and debauchery and the usual staples of addiction.

But there is richness in life that is unimaginable until it’s experienced in full, unedited and without the haze of drinking to cloud the moment.

And those like me also had plenty of cause for concern too. Yes, sobriety brought about a massive overhaul to how I experienced life.

That’s the point, though, right?

It was doubly valuable for me when at 19 I had managed to stunt much of the maturing that could have happened in my late teens.

Now, I was faced with the prospect of accepting a reset and beginning the process of growing up or continuing to traverse what was very obviously (even to me) a pathway to hell with a lot of bad stops on the way.

I had a lot of fun drinking for a real short time. And in all the not great times afterwards, I was perpetually looking to achieve those first moments again. I was always looking backward.

And here’s the thing—once I’d conceded to walk in a new direction, the weight of looking backward lessened. It doesn’t necessarily go away all at once.

But I began to fuel on hopeful expectation rather than fearful resignation.

And (shocker) it feels a whole lot better.

God, help me always look ahead, where my feet are pointed. Toward you.