We sat close in his tiny hospital room and he recounted for us the source of his self-destruction. It was wired into him, he explained, an illness passed down from father to son. He poisons himself because his father poisoned himself, like his father before him. He doesn’t blame anyone but himself; even though the sickness is in him against his will, he chooses to give in to it, to let it hold sway.

He has been here nearly a month, and soon they will let him go. If he stays sober a year, he can come back, like one of the steady stream of people he’s seen here during his sojourn. They return to celebrate a year of sobriety with the strangers now sleeping in the beds where once they sweated and cursed and prayed. They have cake and punch and perhaps smoke a cigarette with these strangers because they need to see how far they’ve come, and because they want to give the newly drying out some hope that life doesn’t have to end at the bottom of a bottle.

“What is your plan?” we ask him, because we want to know how he will live. We want to believe this time he will make it. He prays every day, he says. He is in the Word. He stays away from the poison. He tries to recognize what triggers his impulse for self-murder.

I am listening more intently than I first imagined I would, because though this is his story—his suffering, his striving, his hoped-for triumph—I hear in it my own. Surely I am shot through with sickness as well, much as were my fathers before me. My poison isn’t alcohol or pills, but it’s poison all the same. We come into the world sick and we injure ourselves further in hopes of respite. At least, I have.

I am listening closely because I am learning that I can no more dabble with some sins than he can have just one beer. There is something to this admission of sickness. I used to think it was a way of avoiding responsibility, but now I see it for a heartbreaking, practical wisdom. I am sick. I must put down the poison. I must cling to the only healing, which came by the wounds of a God-man. There is nothing in between, at least for weak men like me.

In the weeks and months and years to come, he will choose life or death. The choice is stark for him. There is no pretending, no seeming margin of harmless neutral options. If he does not cling to the life offered by Christ, he will die years before a man should die. Sometimes we kill our souls that way, I think, though our bodies continue on to ripe old age. We imagine our choices are less stark, but when I look into the darkened mirror on a sleepless night, I see my choice is no less clear. Choose life or choose death. Would that we all could see it as plainly as this man approaching what is likely his final chance.