10/11/2026
I sat down recently intending to write about some of the harder seasons of my life.
This should not have been particularly difficult. I have had a few. I distinctly remember that they were not easy while I was going through them, and I have written about many of them already, particularly in What Remains. Others remain unwritten because there are relationships I would rather preserve than explain.
But as I began working through the stories, something unexpected happened. They kept turning out more hopeful than I intended.
Apparently, I am not particularly cooperative even with my own writing plans.
I would begin with something that had hurt, something that had gone wrong, or something I certainly would not have chosen. I remembered the difficulty. I could tell you why it was difficult. But somewhere in the remembering, I would find something else there, too. Peace. Laughter. Something I had learned. Something good that had happened afterward.
I remembered that it had been hard. I just couldn’t seem to tell the story as though the hard part was all that had happened.
For a little while, I wondered whether I was avoiding something. Perhaps I had already gotten the darker material out of my system. Writing What Remains had been fairly therapeutic, and I didn’t particularly want to spend the rest of my life revisiting the same painful seasons.
Or perhaps I had writer’s block. That seemed like a respectable explanation. Writers are apparently allowed to have that.
Then I remembered a conversation with Mom.
One of our family had been going through a disappointment. It mattered to them, and I don’t mean to suggest that it shouldn’t have. But Mom and I were talking about how they were doing, and I asked, “Mom, how many things in your life went perfectly as you had planned? Is your life exactly as you dreamed it would be?”
“That’s exactly what I told them,” Mom said.
Well. Apparently, I came by at least some of my worldview honestly.
Neither of us meant that disappointment doesn’t hurt. Mom has lived enough life to know better, and so have I. But neither of us seems particularly surprised that life occasionally refuses to follow the plan. There have been quite a few occasions when I would have preferred for it to follow mine.
I have made mistakes. I have never claimed otherwise. I have spoken when I should have stayed quiet and argued when I should have walked away. I have been complacent in relationships because I was busy, as though the people I loved would somehow understand indefinitely that I would get around to them when things settled down. I have watched people struggle whom I could have helped because I was in a hurry climbing the ladder.
Those aren’t things that happened to me. Those are things I did, or things I failed to do. I don’t get to make every difficult story one in which somebody else was wrong.
Other things were outside my control.
I have watched my parents go through health crises. I have said goodbye to people I loved. I have watched relationships I thought were rock solid fracture and, in some cases, evaporate.
I said goodbye to a corporate career through no fault of my own. My privacy was breached so effectively that even ordinary pictures I sent and ordinary conversations I had on my phone were commented on by someone outside those exchanges. Discovering that what you believed was private apparently wasn’t changes how safe you feel in your own life.
And I went through a season when the only light I could imagine at the end of the tunnel was a train heading my way.
I can laugh at that description now. At the time, I wasn’t laughing.
I don’t want to rewrite those seasons simply because I am no longer standing in them. Some were frightening. Some were exhausting. Some left me angry for a good while. There were things I shouldn’t have done and things I should never have had to endure.
But many years ago, at a Bible conference, I heard someone sing a song I hadn’t heard before: “When God Ran.”
Afterward, I downloaded it as an MP3 and loaded it onto my old first-generation iPod. That probably tells you how long ago this was.
The technology has changed considerably since then. The song has stayed.
It has followed me through my adult years, through places and jobs and relationships, through seasons I enjoyed and others I would have given quite a lot to skip. Somewhere along the way, it became less a song I liked and more the soundtrack running beneath the rest of my life.
The chorus gets me every time.
It draws from the story of the prodigal son, but what stays with me is the picture of the father coming toward him. Running. Embracing him. Lifting his face and wiping away his tears. Then asking the question that I have heard all these years.
“Son, do you know I still love you?”
I think that word still may be what gets me.
The son had made real mistakes. He hadn’t simply experienced a series of unfortunate circumstances. He had made choices, and those choices had brought him somewhere he didn’t want to be. By the time he turned toward home, he had a speech prepared about what he had done and what he no longer deserved.
Luke tells us that while he was still a great way off, his father saw him, had compassion, and ran to him. The father knew whom he was running toward. There wasn’t a version of the story in which the son had to make himself presentable enough to be loved before he could come home.
I have needed to remember that.
There have been times when I needed to admit that I was wrong. No explanation about how busy I was or what I had intended changed what I had done. I needed to apologize, make something right where I could, and do differently afterward.
And there have been times when I hadn’t caused the thing that hurt me at all. I was simply standing in the aftermath, trying to figure out what life was supposed to look like now.
In both places, that question has stayed with me. Do I know He still loves me?
Yes.
I haven’t always known what He was doing. I haven’t always understood why something happened or what I was supposed to do next. I have had questions, anger, grief, and days when I would have appreciated considerably more information than I was given.
But through every up and down, I have known His love. Sometimes that was the thing I knew when I didn’t know much else.
I think that’s part of what I discovered when I sat down to write those harder stories. I could still remember the hurt, but I could also see the life that had continued beyond it. There had been work worth doing, people to love, ordinary days, and reasons to laugh again. There was peace in places where I still didn’t have an explanation.
I hadn’t arrived at the other side of every difficulty with everything restored to the way it had been. Some things were gone. Some relationships were different. Some questions remained unanswered.
And yet there was hope.
Mom’s life hasn’t followed every plan she made. Mine certainly hasn’t either. I don’t imagine the years ahead will suddenly become more cooperative. There will be more challenges, and I will probably make more mistakes, although I would appreciate making a few new ones rather than continuing to revisit the old material.
But I find that I want to see what comes next.
I have things I want to make, stories I want to write, people I want to spend time with, and plans that may or may not work out. After everything that has happened, I still expect there to be good in a life I cannot entirely predict.
Some of that perspective came from Mom. Some began with Scripture I learned before I had much experience to hold beside it. And some has grown through the years as the love I first learned about became the love I depended on.
Perhaps that is part of becoming hopeful.
I sat down intending to write about the darkness, and I remembered it. But I also remembered what had met me there and what had stayed with me afterward. An old song. A father running toward his child. A question I have carried through more seasons than I could have imagined when I first loaded it onto that iPod.
Do I know He still loves me?
After all these years, I do.
And He loves you, too.
