July 28, 2016

Five years ago, I rented a cabin on Whidbey Island for a week to finish my second book. I went, and I finished, and I promptly had a nervous breakdown. Tomorrow, I’m returning for the first time since, to round out my fourth book—a book I only began writing as a result of that nervous breakdown, though I didn’t know it at the time. It’s strange to think I last set foot in this place before, well, everything: before the job loss and the injuries, the bad jobs and the recoveries, before the big loves and the even bigger heartbreaks, before I had the slightest clue who God was or what He intended to make of me. “Only I know what I need to get to where I’m going,” I wrote my first day there, five years ago. But I knew nothing at all. My world hinges on circularity, and I am going to this cabin the exact same week I was there before—not so much to finish what I started, but to close the loop everything that’s shaped me these past years. This is where God first grabbed hold of me, and it was at once the worst moment of my life until that point and the best thing that could’ve possibly happened.