Breathless Haste

In 2020, I was visiting my ninety-seven-year-old mother. Because of her limited eyesight, she enjoyed having family read to her. On one particular day, she indicated interest in hearing some of the initial chapters I had written for this book. So I climbed into the bed with her and began to read aloud. She listened for a while and then asked if Jay was writing down his stories. When I told her he wasn’t, she strongly suggested he should.

Jay was taken aback by this idea. He was hesitant to begin writing again, as he had recently finished writing his doctoral dissertation. After much back-and-forth discussion over the course of a few weeks, Jay decided to join the effort.

For more than twenty years, Jay and I have written in personal journals, documenting our daily lives in the form of scribbled notes with all the questions, affirmations, concerns, struggles, joys, and heartaches we have experienced. Our history and the details written on those pages, along with the words written from our hearts as we reflected on our journey, have provided the content for this spiritual memoir. As we wrote the chapters you are about to read, we shed many tears, awestruck by all the specific ways we found God at work in and through our ordinary lives.

 The stories you will encounter in these pages are the highlights and lowlights of how Jay and I experienced God’s presence, movement, and direction in our lives. It all began with the tragic loss of our firstborn son and the miraculous healing of our daughter. We have journeyed through unusual circumstances and met people whom God clearly placed on our path.   We have been impacted and guided by God through the relationships we have formed, books we read, Scripture that jumped off the pages of our Bibles, revelations we received in nature, prayers unanswered and answered, and His still, small voice.