We place our faith in tattered parachutes. All of us.

Imagine, if you will, a stranger inviting you parasailing. "I'll be your instructor," he assures you with a confidence that seems almost convincing. There's just one problem—he's never been parasailing in his life.

But let's say you show up anyway.

(This is where the story usually goes wrong.)

What you find isn't just an inexperienced guide, but equipment so damaged it practically whispers promises of your imminent demise. A parachute with half its fabric missing. Frayed cords dangling like the last threads of hope.

This scenario sounds absurd. No sane person would entrust their life to such obvious peril.

Yet every day, millions of us do exactly that.

THE COLLECTOR

In New York City, 1970s, a man named Leo built an empire of beauty shops. His father, a Merchant Marine, had given him two things: a thirst for adventure and an obsession with acquisition.

After the Air Force, Leo dove into sales. First year: $100,000. An astronomical sum then.

Money came. Then more money. Then possessions—properties stacked like playing cards across the city. Sports cars. Luxurious homes. A fortress of wealth that should have made him untouchable.

The same year his fortune crested, his father died violently in a twisted mass of metal on some forgotten highway. His mother collapsed inward, retreating into a pharmaceutical haze in mental institutions.

Leo kept climbing. By thirty-three, he had everything society told him to want.

And it was worth nothing.

The emptiness came for him like a debt collector. So Leo paid it with drugs. With artificial escapes. With anything to numb the hollowness that echoed through his cavernous houses.

Then in 1983, the tattered parachute finally failed. His business empire—that thing he'd sacrificed everything to build—began to crumble. Like sandcastles against a rising tide, his possessions were washed away. The condominiums. The cars. Even the plush apartment where his pill-dependent mother lived.

She took her own life shortly after.

Leo's health collapsed alongside his finances. He retreated to his heavily mortgaged boat—the last remnant of his former glory.

That's where the man with the cane found him.

Leo chased him away, repeatedly. A desperate animal protecting the last scraps of his territory. But curiosity—or perhaps desperation—eventually led him to the man's Bible study.

There, surrounded by people who had nothing by the world's standards, Leo confronted the terrible truth: He had spent his life accumulating treasure that rust corrupts and moths destroy. His priorities weren't just wrong—they were cosmically inverted.

He needed Jesus. Not as an accessory to his collection, but as his salvation.

So he prayed. And for the first time, Leo found something parasailing couldn't give him, drugs couldn't numb him from, and money couldn't buy:

Peace. Purpose. A burden lifted.

THE TRUTH ABOUT TRUSTING

King David—a man who knew wealth intimately—once wrote of troubles that would crush most men. Yet in Psalm 55:22, he offers this lifeline:

"Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved."

The things of this world are parasails with missing cords and tattered fabric. They were never designed to carry the weight of our deepest hopes. Not finances, which evaporate overnight. Not friends, who—despite their best intentions—are as broken as we are. Not possessions, which rust and decay with maddening persistence.

Not even family, those precious souls we love more than ourselves, who nonetheless cannot bear the crushing weight of our existential needs.

These are gifts—beautiful, temporary gifts—but they make terrible saviors.

Only God can carry that weight. Only God has shoulders broad enough for our desperation.

The question isn't whether you're placing your trust in something. You are. We all are.

The question is: Will it hold when the winds come?

(The answer, for anything but God, is no.)

What would change if you trusted Him today?

Unshackled is the longest-running radio drama in history, airing on over 3,000 stations worldwide with true stories of lives transformed through faith in Christ. This devotional is based on one of those stories.

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Let me tell you about the men who count pills instead of blessings on Christmas Eve.

December in Chicago, 1929. The kind of cold that doesn't just bite – it devours. Wind howling between buildings like a hungry beast, searching for stragglers who've lost their way home. Because some don't have homes to lose.

A boarding house clerk fumbles with his keys – room inspections, standard procedure. The routine mechanical until room 14. Pills scattered across the floor like confetti from some grotesque celebration. Old Joe, they called him. Nobody knew his last name. Nobody asked.

"What a way to celebrate your last Christmas," the officer mutters, jotting notes in his pad. "Makes you wonder why we look forward to them, right?"

But there was another man – Frank Holm, a Czechoslovakian with watery eyes and a thick accent – who understood exactly why Joe had chosen Christmas for his exit. Because Christmas, with its forced joy and family gatherings, is the cruelest season for the forgotten.

Twenty years earlier, Frank stood on a platform in his homeland, steam from a locomotive shrouding him as his mother clutched his hand, begging: "Promise me, son, you will never go where you cannot take the Lord Jesus with you."

The promise was easy to make. Impossible to keep.

Frank arrived in Chicago with determination and skill, a mechanic ready to build his fortune. Instead, he met Hank – a man who taught him that America wasn't about working hard but about "easing off" and "unwinding." First it was drinks after work. Then during work. Then instead of work.

One Thanksgiving, Frank visits his cousins – hardworking immigrants who'd built a life while he'd dismantled his. They owned their home. A piece of the American dream. Frank owned nothing but the stink of failure and the weight of a broken promise.

He leaves abruptly, the smell of their roasted turkey and clean linens following him like an accusation.

Back in his filthy rented room, Frank decides to follow Old Joe's path. Drink until the darkness takes him. No more struggling. No more disappointment.

But Christmas Eve brings an unexpected sound – carols floating through his window from mission workers on the street below.

"Who are those people?" Frank asks another derelict they call Norski.

"Christians. From the mission. They do programs."

Programs. Church. Warmth.

Inside the mission building, it's clean and filled with music that feels almost obscene against their desperate lives. The director announces "a gift that can give you a brand new start."

A new start. The words echo in Frank's hollowed-out soul as he returns to his boarding house. Could anyone really start over after wasting twenty years?

Christmas morning arrives with Frank postponing his suicide just long enough to hear about this gift. Just long enough for one more free meal.

"Because of Jesus," the mission director explains to the room of forgotten men, "we're offered freedom from sin and a chance to start over. No matter who you are or what you've done."

A woman approaches, inviting Christians to kneel and pray. Frank, desperate to belong, agrees. But as his knees hit the floor, twenty years of failure come crashing down. The weight of a forgotten promise. The knowledge that he's been running toward death when life had been offered all along.

Frank weeps. Confesses. Believes. Beside him, Norski does the same, though he protests: "It's too late for me."

"You don't know what I've done," Norski whispers.

"It doesn't matter," Frank tells him. "He said we all qualify for the free gift."

They walked out into the cold Chicago streets differently than they entered – still homeless, still poor, but carrying something no one could take away. Hope.

Years later, Frank would stand before crowds of men just like him – forgotten, broken, ready to follow Old Joe – and tell them: "If your heart is broken this Christmas, Jesus can change that tonight. I was a forgotten man with no hope until I found the greatest Christmas gift. And you can too."

Because Christmas, it turns out, is for everyone after all. Even – perhaps especially – for those who've given up on themselves. In the darkest corner of the coldest city on the loneliest night, hope arrives not wrapped in paper, but in flesh. Not placed under a tree, but nailed to one.

And that, my friend, is why the most desperate men count pills on Christmas Eve. Not because they can't be saved – but because they don't yet know they already are.

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There's a particular sound a pistol makes when fired into the air above an open grave. It doesn't echo like you might expect. It disappears, swallowed by grief and blue sky, as if even sound knows better than to linger at such moments.

David Spurgeon had heard this sound forty-one times.

Forty-one friends. Forty-one funerals. The motorcycle brotherhood's ritual remained unchanged each time: pistols raised skyward, voices raw with emotion declaring, "God forgives. We don't."

The irony wasn't lost on him, not really, but irony makes poor company when you're burying your third friend in as many months.

In the quiet moments between the roar of his Harley and the numbing embrace of cocaine, Spurgeon sometimes wondered about Ralph. It had been nearly a decade since the night an assassin's bullets tore through his friend instead of him. The quiet horror of realizing those rounds were meant for the club's vice president – for David himself.

Ralph had left behind a wife. Two little girls with eyes that would search crowds for a father who chose the brotherhood over bedtime stories. Eyes that would eventually stop searching.

Time doesn't heal all wounds. Sometimes it just teaches you to carry them better.

By 1990, Spurgeon had mastered the art of wounded living, his veins humming with chemical courage, his home an arsenal that would make militias envious. When police kicked in his door that October morning, they weren't even looking for him – just the landlord's son. But fate has its own warped sense of timing.

There's a particular light in prison cells that strips everything down to its essence. Not bright enough to illuminate, just enough to cast shadows that follow you into sleep. In solitary confinement, labeled a "menace to society," Spurgeon found himself surrounded by shadows of his own making.

The prison preacher appeared like an apparition amid the institutional gray, voice steady as he spoke of judgment, of fire, of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Words that should have bounced off the hardened biker instead sank like stones into still water.

November 30th dawned like any other day behind bars, until Spurgeon realized what day it was – exactly ten years since Ralph's murder. Ten years since death had mistaken its appointment.

The Bible they'd given him felt foreign in his calloused hands as he knelt on the concrete floor. No witnesses except whatever angels hover over the most unlikely of prayers. No soundtrack except the mechanical breath of the prison's ventilation system and the whispered confession of a man who had run out of road.

In that moment, something ancient and patient reached through time and touched the motorcycle club's vice president. Not with the vengeful backhand of justice, but with the inexplicable mercy that waits at the end of every prodigal journey home.

Seventy church members filled the federal courtroom when Spurgeon returned for sentencing. Not fellow bikers with leather vests and thousand-yard stares, but ordinary people with extraordinary hope. The judge, bewildered by the transformation before him, departed from mandatory sentencing guidelines with words that would change everything:

"Mr. Spurgeon, I believe you have a message that people need to hear. I sentence you to tell others how you got off liquor, drugs, and out of the gang lifestyle."

The federal court had effectively sentenced him to preach the gospel.

The pistols that once fired over graves now lay silent. The voice that once commanded respect through fear now speaks life into broken places. The man who counted forty-one dead friends now counts souls reconciled to their Creator.

There's a particular sound redemption makes when it enters a life. It doesn't arrive with trumpets and ceremony. It whispers like keys turning in rusty locks, like chains hitting the floor, like a cell door swinging open when you least expect it.

David Spurgeon knows this sound intimately.

And now, so do you.

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