One of the most profound things I’ve ever heard was in jail.

I don’t refer to incarcerated people as inmates. They are my friends. They wear orange, they come from different backgrounds, speak different languages, and they are often genuinely deep, insightful people. And I love spending time with them. I teach a couple of times a week as a volunteer at the local facility, and my team of volunteers offer religion classes and one on one visits to people who have no one else to visit them.

One dismal Wednesday, my co teacher mentioned something about turning away from temptation, and a friend in orange rose his hand and offered a comment I will never forget, and which I cherish because of its raw nature and powerful sincerity. “What if temptation is all you’ve got? When you’re out there as a convicted felon and homeless, at night, with nothing, and all the fine people who have houses and families keep turning you away and shooing you from everywhere you try to go, you have nothing but temptation. It’s dark. You’re scared and cold and hungry and you have nowhere to rest and no one to turn to. So you turn to the only people who will accept you, and they welcome you and care about you and give you the only thing they have to give. And the drugs warm you up so you’re not cold, and it takes the hunger pain away, and you’re not scared anymore and you’re around people who are looking out for you in the only way they know how. So how do you turn away from temptation when it’s all you’ve got?”

Silence fell. I could feel my co teacher searching for words. And an answer flashed across my mind.

“Hey, can I interject?”

My co teacher graciously allowed me to take the floor.

“First off, thank you so much for sharing that. It is so real and it means so much to hear your experiences and know what you go through and I honor you for that.

One of my best friends was taken away from his parents when he was eight by CPS. His heroin addicted parents used to beat and starve him until his siblings would eat paint chips off the walls to stave off the hunger. He was taken to foster care and went from one family to another without any sense of permanence and often in places that clearly were only taking him in for the money. He needed a place to belong so he joined a gang and tried every drug he could get his hands on to try to understand why his parents had done what they had. Then, when he was 17 and his girlfriend gave birth to his daughter, the baby died at two days old from medical malpractice.

He drank. He drank to deaden the pain, and find some kind of comfort and push away all his memories, which had been almost entirely negative from beginning to end.

And then one day he looked down at his tired, unhealthy, bloated, overweight body and something snapped. He decided in that moment that this was not going to be his story. And it didn’t matter what he had to do or what changes he had to make, he wasn’t going to end up like this. When I meet him, he was a force to be reckoned with in the fitness industry and he became my five in the morning gym partner for years, constantly pushing me to become better and continually looking for ways to better himself in every respect and better provide for his lady and their children.

So ask yourself if this is going to be your story. Because when we make the decision to write a different chapter, we can bear things we otherwise couldn’t and we accomplish things we never imagined we could do.”

My friends, if there are improvements we want to make in our lives that we just feel are impossible, ask yourself if this is going to be your story. It doesn’t have to be. It may not be as earth shattering as going from a homeless drug addict to a billionaire, but whatever is holding us back from being our best selves doesn’t have to determine the rest of our lives. If you don’t like where you are, move. You are not a tree.