The Only Way Out is Through

I am so grateful for the way people showed up to help my family. We exceeded the fundraising goal within 24 hours. Just incredible. Asking for help like this is so uncomfortable for me, especially because I’ve had to do it before. But when your daughter comes to you, afraid about what’s happening and asks you to do what you can, letting shame and embarrassment win is not an option.

So if you’re reading this and you contributed, a huge thank you for helping me help them in the way I couldn’t right now. I don’t even know what to say.

And I was told to let you know that the family is praying for all of you.

As regular readers here know, I hate this situation. It’s not what I wanted, I can’t fix it, and it would be complicated even if I could go home, because the underlying problems still exist and they are not insignificant. The crushing reality of it tortures me daily. I can’t find a solution that works, and I can’t figure out how to live without one.

But none of that is the fault of my children, and until I can get out from under this avalanche of grief and loss of hope and direction and start building something with real economic value again, I just can’t bail them out on my own. I live about as simply as I possibly can, and I’m barely scraping by. I truly hope it won’t be this way for much longer, because the perpetual grind is really wearing me down.

(In fact, I’m supposed to be out starting my delivery runs right now. This post is part reflection, part procrastination. I just don’t want to move. I want to sit here and do nothing for a change. In the immortal words of Roger Murtaugh, “I’m getting too old for this shit.”)

It’s expensive to have a big family in 2026. Rent is high everywhere there’s economic opportunity. Gas and groceries aren’t cheap. Decent schools want tuition and supplies. My wife is one of the hardest workers I’ve ever met, she’s very good at what she does, and when it works, selling real estate pays well. But despite her best efforts she’s just not been able to make enough headway. We both kind of hit the wall of what we can do.

Which is, in a funny way, how we’ve both independently found ourselves turning to a God we’ve been having a hard time trusting these past few years, letting him know we’re maxed out and we need help. We talked about this a little, the night before last, each discovering that the other is in kind of the same place.

Which brings me to what prompted this little reflection.

A reader said to me this morning:

I chipped in. Kids matter.

You said, "The desperation of this situation has turned me more and more towards prayer. ... I am coming to a growing realization that I just can't do all this on my own.... I am so tired of trying to do this without Him."

That is so similar to what happened to me just prior to my conversion, after 12 years searching for God but not finding Him. Whole life finally fell apart, I was left penniless, homeless, fresh out of major surgery so unable to help myself, and reliant on the kindness of strangers. Really hit rock bottom. Total humiliation.

It was exactly that utter brokenness and helplessness that opened me up to Christ. I'd always been a very independent, self-sufficient person, but I had to be broken of that before I could encounter Him.

In a way I'd been searching for Him on my own terms, and I had to get broken of all that before He could approach me on His.

And He did, after I cried out to Him in desperation from that broken place. And the strangers who helped me get back on my feet, that was the first time I felt the love of Christ coming to me through other people.

I replied:

It's interesting to read this, because I really was not that guy. In fact, I felt that losing my faith made me, for the first time, more reliant on myself. I felt that I had spent too much time waiting for God to fix things that never got fixed, which led to distrust, etc.

So when I first moved away from faith, my thought was, "I have to do it all myself anyway, so I'm responsible for making my life into what I want it to be."

And there was some good in that, I think, because I started taking a lot more agency and responsibility. I learned I had more power than I thought.

But in the end, it hasn't been enough. I know some people seem to get through life without faith just fine. They make stuff happen. They are forces of nature.

But I have hard limits, and I've reached them. I can't fix my own life, let alone take care of all them [my family] from afar. And I'm buried under the grief of loss while trying to do work I don't like just to stay alive, and I feel like I'm sinking in quicksand. The more I fight to get my head above the surface, the deeper I sink.

So I've just started gravitating once again towards letting go. And I don't know what that means, because it's not like my issues with God or with faith have evaporated. But if I need help, and there's a chance I can get it, I need to re-frame it somehow.

I'm still trying to figure out why I've had everything that ever mattered to me stripped away in the past five years. What good could come of this? Where does it end?

The only thing I can possibly see is that I'm being forced to find out who I really am independently of all the things that gave me a sense of identity, but even that feels bizarre. To what end? Why is this important enough for all this destruction?

And the worst thing is, I don't know if I'll ever find out.

How do you make sense of a deconstructed life? How do you get to the answers you sense must be out there but you can’t find?

This is the thing that has been informing the way my writing has changed over the course of this year. More and more, the kind of narrative nonfiction experiential writing I’ve been doing with Postcards from Exile and Notes from the Road feels like where I belong, and what I’m meant to be doing. It’s taking me deeper into something I don’t fully understand yet. It’s making work I don’t like into something with utility beyond the meager paycheck it provides.

This is what I was getting at in my most recent podcast with Kale Zelden, when I said that “art is the dojo of the soul”:

When you can’t find the answers, sometimes you just have to keep working the problem from different angles. At least, you do if you’re like me and your brain just won’t let things go, even when you want to bludgeon it to death sometimes to get it to stop.

So no, I don’t know where any of this is going. And I don’t know what to believe.

I was tormented in my sleep on Thursday morning, visions of The Odyssey coming to me in half-waking dreams, finding myself searching for the right prayer to pray to alleviate the anxiety that was tormenting me awake after too little sleep. I begged God to “take care of my family, because I can’t.”

And then, I had a weird day. I was so exhausted I could barely function. It wouldn’t stop raining, which makes deliveries hard. Nothing good was coming in on the order side. I was thinking about this idea of letting go, of letting the currents of the sea take me where I needed to go, like Odysseus surrendering himself to the wrath of Poseidon. I decided to break my routine, stop in some random little town where I’d just dropped off some groceries, and get myself a coffee so I could stay awake. The coffee I got there was so good, I texted my daughter Sophie to tell her she had to try it (we are both on the hunt for the best coffee shops in town.)

And when she texted me back, she followed up with a plea for help. I could feel the worry in it. She never touches on these delicate subjects. And as a dad, that kind of thing gets to you in a way that nothing else does.

So I went home and created the fundraiser instead of spending the rest of the evening doing my regular deliveries.

And the help came.

The prayer was answered the same day I made it.

There’s skeptic that lives in the back of my brain who says, “You don’t know that God answered that prayer; that was people who did that. That was the goodness of other human beings.”

And there’s a wannabe believer that says, “I may not know it with metaphysical certainty, but read the freaking signs, dude.”

Those two like to fight. The skeptic has had the upper hand for years. The believer is making a comeback. I don’t know where this all shakes out, but I’ve been feeling for a couple of weeks now like something is on the move. There’s an electricity in the air. A feeling of change. The dragonflies keep whispering to me, like messengers from heaven.

I don’t want to live in a disenchanted world. I want to believe in wonder and magic and a God who loves us. I just can’t force it. I have to ride the waves. I have to get to the other side of this storm. Whatever is happening to me, it has to be earned. It can’t just be rushed.

Like I said last month: not a furnace, but a forge.

This all sounds great on paper, but living it feels like hiding in the basement while a tornado is re-arranging your house. There are days when I think I can handle it, and there are days that just bury me.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this bizarre life of mine, it’s this little axiom I’ve been repeating for many years: the only way out is through.

And right now, through is hustling groceries, taking little notes from my experiences out on the road, writing and podcasting and doing meaning-making work in the spaces between, trying to scrape together enough to break even, until the next step on the path appears.

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