Lust Will Rain On Us All.

The rain came without warning and turned the world into a watercolor smear. Joseph stood in the front yard, barefoot on the grass, feeling the cold water soak his shirt and plaster hair to forehead. The streetlights, amber through the downpour, painted halos in the dark. He couldn't remember walking outside. One moment he'd been in the living room, Elizabeth's voice echoing in his ears, and next he was here, trembling.

Run from lust. Pastor Greene's words, spoken twenty years ago to a room full of teenage boys. Run like Joseph fled Potiphar's wife. Don't look back. Don't negotiate. Just run.

Joseph had been running his whole life. But tonight, he found himself crippled.

Inside the house, through the rain-streaked window, he could see Elizabeth moving in the kitchen. She wasn't crying. That was somehow worse. She'd found the browser history he'd forgotten to clear, the evidence of his latest relapse laid bare in a neat column of timestamps and URLs. When she'd confronted him, her voice had been quiet and gentle—the tone you'd use with a stranger, not a husband of twelve years.

"Is strength running away?" he whispered to the rain. "Or standing still?"

The water gave no answer. It just kept falling.

Joseph was eight years old the first time Pastor Greene told the story. Sunday school, autumn light through stained glass, the smell of carpet and coffee from the fellowship hall. The pastor held up a picture from a flannel board: Joseph the patriarch, young and handsome, fleeing the Egyptian woman's grasp, his cloak left behind in her hands.

"This is what righteousness looks like, boys," Pastor Greene had said, his voice booming. "When temptation comes, you don't reason with it. You're not strong enough, and never will be, to handle it. You flee. You run."

Young Joseph had absorbed the lesson like gospel. Be like his namesake. Run fast, run far. Never stop to fight what you can't see.

But no one had taught him the difference between fleeing and hiding.

He grew into adolescence with the lesson embedded in his bones. When curiosity about girls became something darker, more consuming, he ran into shame, into secrecy, into the quiet corners of the internet where no one could see him fall. He'd pray afterward, always pray, promising God and himself that this was the last time. That tomorrow he'd be stronger.

He met Elizabeth at a church young adult group when he was twenty-four. She had a laugh that sounded like sunlight and a way of listening that made him feel, for the first time, like someone worth hearing. When he confessed his struggles to her—carefully, vaguely, calling it "a battle with purity"—she'd taken his hand and told him she believed in second chances. That everyone had a past. That grace was bigger than shame.

They married a year later in the same church where he'd learned to run.

The addiction came with him to the marriage bed, an uninvited guest that poisoned the intimacy they tried to build. Elizabeth would reach for him in the dark, and he would feel the weight of his earlier failures, the images that had colonized his mind. He'd turn away, make excuses, and she'd retreat to her side of the bed, the space between them growing wider.

The cycle became ritual: relapse, confession, tears, promises, a few weeks of white-knuckled sobriety, then relapse again. Each time, Joseph mistook his remorse for repentance. He thought feeling bad was the same as being changed.

Elizabeth tried to believe him. She tried for years. But belief, like trust, is a finite resource.

"You always pray for strength," Elizabeth had said tonight, standing in the kitchen with her arms crossed, not in anger but in self-protection. "But you never lift what's heavy."

Joseph had stood there, caught, his mouth opening and closing. "I'm trying," he'd said, and even to his own ears it sounded hollow. "I'm broken, Elizabeth. I don't know how to fix this."

"I know you're broken," she'd replied, and her voice had been so quiet, so exhausted. "I've known that for a long time. But, Joseph..I can't keep being the only one who believes you're worth fixing."

"I am trying."

"No. You're avoiding." She'd walked to the window, looking out at the gathering storm. "You avoid the hard conversations. You avoid accountability. You avoid me. And when you slip, you come to me with your apologies like I'm a priest taking confession instead of a wife who needs a husband. Do you not think I'm sick of living in the shadow of your guilt?"

He'd tried to speak, but she'd held up a hand.

"I don't want to hear you're sorry again. I don't want promises. I just—" Her voice had cracked then, just slightly. "I'm tired of being married to a ghost. To someone who's always running from himself."

"What do you want me to do?" The question had come out as a plea.

"I want you to stand—" She took a breath, the words dragging themselves out. "I want you to finally, just finally, stand for something."

She'd then gone upstairs, packed a small bag, and left for her mother's house. The door had closed with barely a sound.

Hours later, Joseph sat on the couch in the empty house. His laptop sat on the coffee table, closed but present, like a loaded gun. His phone was face down beside it. He knew what came next. He'd lived this scene a hundred times: the loneliness, the rationalization, the slow erosion of resolve until he was clicking, scrolling, surrendering.

He reached for the laptop, then stopped. His hand hovered above it, trembling.

Having done all, stand.

The words came from somewhere deep in memory, a verse from Ephesians he'd memorized as a child. He'd always focused on the first part—take up the whole armor of God, resist in the evil day—but never the ending. After all the fighting and struggling, the command wasn't to keep running. It was to stand.

Joseph opened the laptop, but not to click. The screen was black, powered down, and in its dark mirror he saw his own reflection: hollow-eyed, unshaven, wearing the face of a man he barely recognized.

"Who are you?" he whispered to himself.

The reflection didn't answer. But in its silence, Joseph finally heard the truth he'd been running from all these years: his addiction wasn't a demon attacking him from outside. It was his own untrained will, his own refusal to stay where things were difficult. Every time he felt the impulse, he'd either surrender to it or run from it, but he'd never simply stand his ground and let it break against him like a wave.

Pastor Greene had been wrong. Or maybe Joseph had misunderstood. Flight wasn't a strength. Flight was fear given permission.

Joseph stood and walked to the front door. The rain was heavier now, drumming on the roof like a heartbeat. He stepped outside.

The cold hit him immediately, shocking and clean. He walked to the middle of the yard, where there was no shelter, no escape from the downpour. He stood there, arms at his sides, face turned up to the sky.

Each drop felt like a small violence against his skin. The water was cold enough to hurt. His body screamed at him to go inside, to seek shelter, to run.

He stood.

The temptation was still there, and he could feel it coiled in his chest, familiar and insistent. Go inside. Open the laptop. You've already lost her anyway. What difference does one more time make? The voice was reasonable, persuasive. It knew exactly which buttons to push.

But Joseph understood something now: the impulse would always be there. The struggle wouldn't end with him being free of desire; it would end with him being strong enough to stand in its presence without moving.

"The body must respond to where its boundaries lie," he said aloud, the words snatched away by wind and rain. It was something his father had told him once, about training dogs—you set the boundary, and you hold it, no matter how much the animal tests it. Joseph had never trained his own body. He'd only ever fled from it or indulged it.

He closed his eyes and prayed, not the desperate bargaining he'd done a thousand times before, not the please-take-this-away prayers that had never worked. This time, he prayed for something different.

"I don't know how to do this," he said into the storm. "I don't know how to be strong. But I'm here. I'm not moving. I'm not running anymore. Show me how to stand."

The rain answered with thunder.

Joseph stood through it. He stood as his clothes became heavy with water, as his muscles began to shake, as the cold worked its way into his bones. He stood as the impulse rose and fell, rose and fell, like breathing. He didn't fight it. He didn't run from it. He simply refused to let it move him from his post.

Minutes passed. Maybe an hour. He could not have known as time became fluid in the rain.

Dawn came gray and quiet, the world holding still, the rain thinning to a nervous drizzle before stopping for good, and Joseph stood in the yard, small and trembling against the pale morning, when he heard tires whisper on wet gravel, the slow breath of a car easing into the drive, the day beginning again as if nothing had changed but him.

He turned. Elizabeth got out slowly, uncertainly. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her hair pulled back. She looked at him: soaked, shivering, still standing where he'd been when she left, and something in her expression shifted.

"Joseph?"

He didn't move toward her.

"I'm here," he said. It was all he could say. All he knew to be true.

She walked across the yard, her shoes getting wet in the grass. When she reached him, she didn't touch him. Not yet.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "But I'm here. I'm not running."

A long moment passed. The sky was lightening in the east, pink and gold breaking through the gray. Elizabeth reached out and took his hand. It was cold, waterlogged, but she held it.

"Come inside," she said quietly.

"In a minute." He squeezed her hand.

She nodded, understanding something he couldn't quite articulate. She went into the house, leaving the door open, a silent invitation when he was ready.

Joseph stood for a few more minutes. Not because he had to, but because he chose to. Because standing was the thing he'd never learned to do, and he was learning it now, one moment at a time.

When he finally walked inside, Elizabeth had coffee brewing and a towel waiting. The house was still quiet, still broken in all the ways it had been the night before. His addiction wasn't cured. The work ahead was immeasurable. There would be more battles, more moments of weakness, more rain to stand in.

But for the first time in his life, Joseph wasn't running from them. He was standing still, preparing to endure. And in that stillness, in that small act of remaining, he found the first real strength he'd ever known.

The rain would come again. It always did. But now he knew: strength wasn't in the fleeing. And he'll always be there, standing in that rain.

Because in that rain, it carries a truth:

We often pray for strength, but often refuse the battles that create it.