The Jacket

Every man has one item of clothing his wife has begged him to throw out for years.

Mine was a light-blue jean jacket with a fake white cotton collar. Erin hated that jacket with the kind of passion most people save for politics or pineapple on pizza.

I’d had it for years. Presidents had come and gone. My career had risen, collapsed, and tried to rise again. Our kids had grown taller than Erin — which isn’t saying much, but still. And through it all, that jacket kept hanging by the door like a stubborn dog that refused to die.

It was hideous. I can admit that now. The collar looked like dirty clouds glued on by a kindergartner’s craft project gone wrong. The denim was the exact shade of regret you get when you bleach jeans one cycle too many. And still - I wore it everywhere. School events. Grocery runs. Parent-teacher conferences. Probably even funerals. It wasn’t clothing. It was my emotional support jacket.

Erin tried everything: gentle hints, sarcastic digs, quiet donation runs that somehow never included the jacket. Once she threw out my old work boots behind my back, but the jacket survived the purge.

Until the night of the accident.

That’s what I was wearing when arrested, when they paraded me through the ER like a cautionary tale. Sweatpants and the world’s ugliest jean jacket. Not exactly the legacy look I’d been hoping for. The headlines didn’t just capture my name …they captured that jacket. Burned forever into my shame reel.

Afterward, Erin begged me to stop wearing it. But I couldn’t. To me, it wasn’t just a jacket. It was armor. Ugly, cheap armor. Only later did I realize it wasn’t protecting me at all, it was branding me.

Every time we went out, people recognized the jacket before they recognized me.
“Hey…aren’t you that guy in the jean jacket?”

Yes. Yes, I was.

A month later, I finally tossed it. Not because Erin won, but because the jacket did. It had turned into my walking press release.

Some clothes carry memories. That jacket carried headlines.

And here’s what I learned: sometimes healing begins when you throw away the thing you thought was protecting you, but was really just chaining you to the past. Once you let that go, you can start tossing the rest too-  the masks, the shame, the scarlet letters you’ve been wearing for years.

That’s what faith feels like to me now. God doesn’t wait until you’ve bought a new suit. He loves you in your ugly jean jacket-  and still whispers: It’s time to lay that down.

So I did.

R.I.P., Jean Jacket. May you rot in landfill peace.

And if you’re holding on to something that feels like armor but looks more like baggage - it’s okay to let it go. The healing might just start there.

“You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”

Ephesians 4:22–24