Don’t ‘pour one out’ for Charlie Kirk — honor him by living boldly

If you’re like me, nearly every single social media post in your feed over the last week has been about the senseless assassination of Charlie Kirk. And emotions are running high.

From those who loved him. From those who hated him. From those who didn’t really follow him but are lamenting the state of discourse in our country.

The emotions you’re feeling as a result of this and any other type of atrocity are wasted if you drink them away.

I came across one post in particular in which an emotional person suggested a way to cope with everything that’s happened. And I found myself yelling out, “No! Don’t! That’s the last thing you should do. And I don’t think Charlie would want you to, either.”

What is it?

Have a drink. “Pour one out” for Charlie, the colloquial term for having a drink for a fallen friend.

Maybe you’ve seen those posts. We live in a culture that uses anything as an excuse to imbibe. To drink. To get drunk. But especially culture loves to capitalize on tragedy. It tells us that drinking alcohol is not just a way to handle difficult emotions, but the best way to handle difficult emotions, tragedy, and grief.

Your candidate loses an election? Drink.

Work sucks? Drink.

A family member passes away? Drink.

Your team loses? Drink.

The kids are a little feral? Mommy, drink a lot!

So when someone so respected, who spoke on behalf of a generation, is brutally murdered in broad daylight, culture wants you to drink that atrocity away instead of sitting with those painful, confusing, and whatever-else emotions.

In fact, even though drinking is at an all-time low, we’ve still been programmed to think that drinking to deal with our uncomfortable feelings is right, good, and necessary. At minimum it’s accepted.

Trust me, I know.

Hitting rock bottom

I’m the best-selling Christian author who became an alcoholic (not the other way around) after hitting the toughest stretch of my life a few years ago. I knew what I should do to best handle all the emotions in that season, but instead, I took the easy path: I drank all the uncomfortable feelings away.

It wasn’t until I found myself a year and a half into a bottle with no bottom and a “night in” that ended with me drunk, alone, and wading in my own excrement at 1 a.m. in Miami’s South Beach that I asked, “What has my life become?”

I’m not saying that having a drink in the wake of Charlie’s murder means you will become an alcoholic. But if I’m being honest, I never thought I’d get to the point I did either. “I don’t look like those people who drink their lives away,” I told myself. And I didn’t. But rock bottom still came.

And I wish someone had told me sooner that drinking away my challenging emotions can easily turn into something I thought it never would — because it can turn you into someone you thought you’d never be.

Charlie didn’t drink

I think Charlie understood that, too.

“The top-performing people I’ve ever been around, they are very against alcohol, against substances,” he said on his show in May in a video titled, “Why I Don’t Drink.”

“And they’ll tell you they perform better, they think clearer, they have better memory, better recall, more energy, more pace.”

“I also find that some of the people that drink the most, they’re hiding something, they’re masking something,” he concluded.

Let pain fuel your purpose

If Charlie Kirk’s murder has affected you, don’t mask this pain. I beg you, please don’t. Because it can end up doing things to you that are way worse in the long run.

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Photo by ZzzVuk via iStock/Getty Images

In the end, the emotions you’re feeling as a result of this and any other type of atrocity are wasted if you drink them away. They just are. Instead, I want to suggest that you use them to motivate you — to boldness, to action, to something better. Don’t numb them; name them. And then use them as fuel. Do good as a result of this evil.

In fact, Charlie knew there wasn’t just a better option but a best option when it comes to what to do with complex emotions, an option that has transformed my life: Bring those emotions to the great healer, Jesus. While I didn’t know Charlie personally, I think, from everything I’ve read and seen, that’s what he would have wanted.

But whatever you do, I know this: He wouldn’t have wanted you to “pour one out” for him.

Or maybe, I guess, that’s exactly what he would have wanted. Pour it out. Leave it alone. Put it down.

He did.