I grew up in a home where faith wasn't a language we spoke. My parents were atheists, and I took that seriously. I wasn't hostile to God — I just wasn't looking. I had other things to build.

By the time I was in my thirties, I had built them. The career, the credentials, the version of myself that looked — from a distance — like someone who had it together. I was good at performing that version. I had been practicing for a long time.

But I knew the gap was there. I had always known.

In 1993, I was paralyzed from the head down. Guillain-Barré syndrome. I was thirty-six, off work for two months, and for the first time in my life I couldn't keep moving. The paralysis forced the first real stillness I had ever experienced.

And in the stillness, something was there. Something that had been there the whole time, waiting. I didn't know what it was. But I knew it was real.

It took sixteen more years to find out.

Sixteen years of a slow tug-of-war. Feet in two boats. Building the career with one hand and carrying an awareness I couldn't explain with the other. Knowing there was something else, and being genuinely afraid of what it might cost me.

In 2009 — at fifty-two — I finally stopped running from it.

Not to a church. Not to a theology. To a person. Jesus Christ, the one who had been standing behind every question while I looked everywhere else.

What I found was not a demand to perform a new version of myself. It was, for the first time, permission to stop performing altogether.

I've been writing about that ever since — not to convince anyone of anything, but because I know what it's like to carry the question quietly for decades. And I know there are a lot of people still carrying it.

In 2020, I was diagnosed with cancer. In February 2026, I was declared cancer-free.

I have twelve grandchildren. I travel frequently. I am still, most days, genuinely astonished that any of this is real.