Week 5: End It Like You Started

For this last week, we go back to where we began.

Seven days, cold turkey, no exceptions, exactly like week one. You might have slipped up throughout this journey, but either way, you're a different person walking into this now, than you were five weeks ago, and it's worth proving that to yourself. Whatever happened in the weeks between, the falls, the messy days, none of it disqualifies this. End this the way you started it. Finish hard.

Well, not that kind of hard. And definitely not that kind of finish. Gosh. Get your head out of the gutter. Didn’t this course teach you anything?

This sidequest ends, but the rest of your life doesn't. So we should be straight about what you actually carry out of here.

You probably won't go to confession every single week forever, and you don't need to. But you needed to across these five weeks. It taught you that you go whether the week was clean or not, that the sacrament was never a vending machine you only visit when you fell to that specific sin. Confession isn't simply a washing machine you throw your guilt into so it comes out spotless and the cycle can start again. Whether you can get to a priest the same hour you fall or it takes you a few days, that detail decides nothing. What decides it is that the fall ends there. You go, the chapter closes, and you don't reopen it twelve more times that night just because “you’re not in a state of grace anymore anyway”.

So make a rule now, while your head is clear, because your head won't be clear in the moment that you fall. Decide in advance what happens next. Yours might not sound like anyone else's, but it might sound something like this. I fall. I don't spiral, I don't write off the whole day and binge, I don't vanish from the sacraments out of shame. I get up, I get to confession when I can, and I keep moving. One fall is one fall. It’s never a licence to make it five.

It comes down to one difference, and it's worth being honest with yourself about which side of it you're on. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you know exactly how you carry this struggle. You can be the person who says, honestly, yeah, I fall to lust sometimes, but when I do I get back up and move on. Or you can be the person who says, I struggle with lust like everyone does, but when I fall I come apart, I spiral, I do it five times in a day and hate myself for a week.

Both of them still struggle. Don't miss that. Neither is perfect, because a saint isn’t just simply someone who doesn’t sin. Those two people are not the same person, and they are not living the same life, and the gap between them was never the sin. It's what they do after it. A saint is a sinner who never gives up.

That was always the point of this. Not to turn you into someone who never falls. To turn you into someone who is no longer a slave to the falling. You may carry some version of this struggle for the rest of your life. A lot of people do. But there is a world of difference between struggling with a sin and being owned by it, and if all this sidequest did was move you from the second to the first, then you are not the person who started week one, and you are far freer than you think.

**Commitments**
- Cold turkey again. Abstain completely, all seven days, and end it the way you began it.
- Continue your prayer devotion
- Go to confession this week.
- Continue working on your goal
- Continue serving others
- Write your rule. Decide now, in plain words, what you do the next time you fall. Read it every morning.

**Reflection**
Write your rule. In plain words, what happens the next time you fall? Commit it to it now, so that future you, in the worst possible moment, already has the answer waiting.

Optional: five weeks ago you wrote down how bad you thought this was. Go back and read it. What's different now?