As you change, so does the world around you. Not because the world moved. Because you did.
What stopped first
I wish I could tell you I woke up one morning under conviction and put the bottle down. That is not how it went. God convicted me through my body, which had been telling me the truth for a long time before I listened.
The hangovers stopped lasting a day and started lasting a week, sometimes two. My stomach was a mess. Heartburn. Exhausted all the time. Nights I have no recollection of, and getting told the next day what I did. Friends turning my head on a couch so I would not choke on my own vomit.
So I stopped drinking to get drunk. I did not quit drinking. A glass of bourbon with a cigar once in a great while, and that is it.
None of that happened fast. It took a long time to get to where I am now, and it still takes work. It always takes work.
Let me say the next part carefully, because it matters. I can have one. A lot of men cannot, and I am not going to pretend my line is anybody else’s. Everybody has a thing they cannot have just one of.
Mine is not alcohol anymore. Mine is peanut butter and chocolate in perfect harmony, and that slightly addictive red powder on a crunchy Flaming Hot Cheeto. I said what I said. That one is still a fight, and I lose it some weeks.
And my body tells me about that one too. Not just the weight. There are days I feel sick from it, especially when I have had too much, and I sit there knowing exactly why. Same voice, different subject. I am just as slow to listen now as I was then.
I am not proud of any of that and I am not telling it like it was a good time. I am telling it because God got me through it, and He is not finished with me.
What I did not expect was what happened next. The crowd that was built around drinking faded out. Not all at once, and nobody had a falling out. There was just nothing left to do together.
The same hours
I spend hours a day in this truck. That has not changed in years.
What changed is what fills them. There was a time those hours were worldly talk, the radio, whatever was going on with whoever. Now those same hours are worship music, sermons, devotionals, and the Bible. Same truck. Same phone. Same hours.
That is what I mean about the world changing. Nothing about my day is different. Everything about it is different.
“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”
Romans 12:2
Things I used to not notice
I started noticing things I never used to notice.
Long strings of cussing for no reason. Understand me, a word slips out of my mouth once in a while and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I am talking about the kind where every third word is one, where it is not even anger anymore, it is just how a man talks.
And men talking about women. Not admiring a woman. Talking about them like they are a story you tell to get a laugh out of other men.
I used to be in those conversations. I did not flinch at them. Now they make my skin crawl, and the ones having them have no idea anything changed, because nothing changed for them.
The one that got me was the men who claim it. Guys who call themselves Christians. Who quote scripture. Who will tell you what the Bible says about somebody else’s life. And in the same conversation they will tell you plainly what they are doing, with no shame in it at all, and sometimes proud of it. Not a man struggling with something and knowing he is struggling. A man celebrating the very thing he just quoted a verse about.
It was not one guy. There was one, and then there was another, and then I started seeing it in more than a few.
“Walk with the wise and become wise; associate with fools and get in trouble.”
Proverbs 13:20
One question
A man I had known most of my adult life told me something that was going on in his life.
I asked him one question about it. One. And I asked it the way I would have wanted somebody to ask me.
He never answered. We have not spoken since.
I would ask it again.
What it cost
I want to be honest about the other side of this, because I do not think you grow out of people for free.
I miss some of those guys. There were real conversations in there. Funny times. Men who would have shown up for me if I called. All of that was mixed in with everything else, and when the everything else went away, the good parts went with it.
Everything is both a blessing and a curse, and it is up to us to find the good in the bad.
And none of this means you go cut people out of your life. I am not saying walk away from anybody who is not where you are. I am saying that when you change, some of those relationships stop working on their own, and you do not always get a say in it.
The snake already grew
A snake does not shed because it decided to become something new. It sheds because it already grew. The skin comes off after the fact.
That is how this went for me. I did not decide to leave anybody. I grew, and the old skin did not fit, and it came off.
Including the serpent.
God takes people out of your life without your permission and without asking. Sometimes you find out later why. Sometimes you do not. What I know is that every man who is gone was gone for a reason, and I am not the one who decides what the reason was.
If you are walking closer to God right now and you have noticed your circle getting smaller, you are not doing it wrong.
You are just growing. And that's okay.