Last chances pile up like stones in my hands – each one heavy with promise, sharp with failure. I’ve built monuments of them, these final attempts. Each morning whispers “today will be different,” and each night echoes with familiar defeat. My tongue knows the taste of these promises, bitter as gall, sweet as temporary relief.
The mathematics of temptation is brutally simple: so much effort, so little satisfaction. Hours of resistance crumble in seconds of surrender. And since the sin seems smaller than the storm inside my chest, while relief floods my veins like warm honey – well, do I need to spell out how this story always ends?
My Bible-companion this week carries no name in Scripture. I call him Asher – “blessed one, happy one” – and the irony of it scrapes against my teeth. His anonymity makes space for all of us who know what it means to be at war with our own skin, to scream into nights that never answer back.
He makes his home among tombs and swine, and the geography of his exile speaks volumes. Both pig and grave spell ‘unclean’ in the holy tongue. But he lives across the water, in pagan territory, where God’s laws are foreign as rain in desert. So he writes his own laws in blood and stone, performs his own rituals with chains and fetters. His screams become his liturgy, his pain his only prayer.
Until one night, Jesus silences a storm. Not with argument or effort, but with presence. All the noise – the fears coiled like serpents in the gut, disappointments sharp as broken glass, doubts heavy as grave stones – all fall quiet beneath that voice. Reality shifts without explaining itself, and everything changes.
Asher couldn’t know, beating himself against tomb walls, that salvation was crossing angry waters to find him. Couldn’t know that God hears even the prayers we scream while falling. That divine love navigates through storm and shadow to reach one lost soul.
And in the end, among all his self-imposed restrictions, all his desperate attempts at control, the only thing that saves him is surrender. Freedom comes not through tighter chains but through letting go.
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