I cried over a plate of scrambled eggs once. Standing in my kitchen on a Saturday morning, barefoot, completely sober, and I just lost it. Not because the eggs were bad — they were actually pretty good, I'd finally figured out the low-heat thing — but because I was there. Present. Awake. Not hungover, not sick, not wondering what I'd done the night before. Just making eggs.
If you've never had your life fall apart, that probably sounds ridiculous. But if you've spent years waking up on someone's couch with no memory of how you got there, or in a hospital bed, or on the floor of your own bathroom because you couldn't make it to the bed — then you understand. A clear Saturday morning with a hot breakfast isn't ordinary. It's a miracle you didn't earn.
The Gift of a Boring Tuesday
When you're in active addiction, there's no such thing as a normal day. Every day is a crisis. You're either using, recovering from using, figuring out how to use again, or lying to someone about all of the above. The concept of "routine" doesn't exist. Your whole life is a fire alarm that never stops ringing.
Recovery gave me something I didn't even know I was missing: a boring Tuesday. Like, a genuinely uneventful day. I went to work. I ate lunch at my desk (leftover pasta, nothing special). I drove home. I watched something dumb on TV. I went to bed at a reasonable hour.
Nobody called the cops. I didn't end up in the ER. I didn't have to lie to anyone about where I was. Just a regular, unremarkable, absolutely wonderful day.
I think we underestimate how sacred that is. We're always chasing the mountaintop — the worship conference high, the dramatic testimony, the breakthrough moment. And those things are real. But most of life isn't the mountaintop. Most of life is Tuesday. And God is just as present at your kitchen table as He is at the altar.
Learning to Be Present
One of the things addiction takes from you — and nobody really warns you about this part — is your ability to just be somewhere. You're never fully present. You're either high and floating above the moment, or you're sober and mentally calculating when you can get high again. There's no middle. There's no "now."
Getting sober meant relearning how to exist in the present tense. How to taste food instead of just eating it. How to sit through a conversation without my mind drifting to the next fix. How to be bored without panicking.
That last one took a long time. Boredom used to terrify me because boredom was the on-ramp to cravings. Empty time was dangerous time. I had to fill every gap with noise, activity, anything. Learning to sit on my porch with a cup of coffee and just... sit there? That took months. But when I finally could, I started noticing things I'd been blind to for years.
The way the light hits the street at about 6:30 in the morning. The neighbor's kid riding her bike in circles in the driveway, same loop every time. The sound of nothing in particular happening.
God was in all of it. He'd been in all of it the whole time. I was just too loud and too gone to notice.
Where I Find Him Now
I find God in the weirdest places now. Not "weird" like miraculous. Weird like mundane.
Washing dishes. Something about the warm water and the repetition — it's almost meditative. I've had more honest conversations with God over a sink full of dishes than I've had in any prayer closet.
The drive to work. There's this stretch of highway right before the exit where the trees open up and you can see the whole sky. Most mornings I don't even notice it. But every now and then I catch it and something in me goes, Oh. Right. You made that.
Grocery shopping, of all things. I used to steal from grocery stores. Now I'm in there with a cart, buying actual food, using money I earned honestly, and sometimes I have to stop in the cereal aisle and just breathe because the normalcy of it still catches me off guard.
I don't know if that makes sense. Maybe it sounds dramatic. But when you've lived on the other side of normal, every ordinary moment feels like borrowed time. And borrowed time feels like grace.
If you're in recovery, or if you're just in a season where life feels mundane and you're waiting for God to show up in some spectacular way — look down. Look at your hands. Look at what's right in front of you. The eggs. The Tuesday. The cereal aisle. He's already there. He's been there the whole time.