After You Read

Years pass in this chapter.

Darrell and I build a family. We make friends, raise children, work together, fight, laugh, travel, take risks, and discover things about ourselves and each other that we could not have known when we married. We also nearly lose ourselves.

When I look back now, I know what comes after this chapter. You may know too. But I don't want that knowledge to hurry us past the life that was happening here.

There is something important about letting a life be true before we know how the story ends.

The Life We Were Living

The early years of our marriage in Hawaii were full. Darrell adopted Jeffrey. Sarah was born. We made lifelong friends. We played practical jokes on each other and learned how to fight without having to defend every fault. We became more vulnerable. Our family felt solid. I wrote that I was “irreversibly and wholly me,” no longer the imposter I had once felt myself to be.

Then came more than twenty years of ministry together. Darrell and I shared work that mattered deeply to us. We moved to Pennsylvania, became curious about the history of the place, discovered William Penn, wrote and spoke, formed friendships, and found purpose in work we believed could make some small difference.

It was a life. That matters because it would be easy, knowing what eventually happened to Darrell, to read these years only as the years before he died. They weren't. They were the years we lived.

When What Matters Begins to Cost Too Much

Somewhere along the way, purpose and sacrifice became tangled with something else.

We absorbed too much. We gave away financial security. Darrell became increasingly tired and distant. Our marriage developed stress cracks. We sought counseling. A counselor told us we needed a three-month sabbatical, but there was no mechanism for one. We hoped a move would solve what rest had not been allowed to address.

For a little while, Hawaii seemed to give us back to each other. I remember holding Darrell's hand and realizing that I liked him again. I felt tremendous relief. But a change of place was not the same thing as rest.

Eventually Darrell collapsed emotionally and physically. The work we had believed in was no longer merely costing us something. It was consuming us. We left ministry and lost much of what had once made our lives feel secure: our home, career, reputation, finances, and even, for a time, Darrell's memory.

I could tell this part of the story as though we should have known better. There were warnings. Some of them we saw. Some we misunderstood. Some we believed we could overcome. But I don't think the most important question now is whether we should have gotten everything right.

Perhaps it is simply worth noticing how difficult it can be to recognize when something meaningful has begun asking for more than we can safely give.

Have you ever looked back and seen something differently than you could while you were living it?

Looking back does not require you to put yourself on trial.

Completely Absent from Everything We Were

Friends arranged for us to spend time at a retreat center. At first, Darrell resisted. He had lived in overdrive for so long that he could hardly imagine another way of being. Eventually he slept for days.

And then, slowly, we began to experience something neither of us had expected.

One day we toured a vineyard in the Shenandoah Mountains. We sat beside a creek with a bottle of wine and something to eat. We had lost so much of the life by which we had known ourselves, and yet there we were, content.

I remember wondering how we could be so completely absent from everything we had been and still be so completely present to that moment. We dared not analyze it.

Maybe that matters too. Not every beautiful thing needs to tell us what it means before we are allowed to inhabit it.

Have there been moments—even very small ones—that you were able simply to be inside?

You don't have to make anything of them.

What Remained

When we left the retreat, we were starting over in critical ways. We had fewer securities and very little money. For Darrell's birthday, I couldn't give him the kind of gift I might once have bought, so I wrote him a story.

I called it The Couple That Dared. It was an allegory of our marriage: two people who had loved and fought side by side, become separated in battle, found one another again, and discovered that what each had needed was somehow carried by the other.

When Darrell read it, he knew every battle hidden inside the story. So did I.

The story ended with the couple entering what I called the Depths of Love. At the time, that was exactly how I understood what had happened to us. And it was true.

Our marriage had survived something. More than survived, really. We had found each other again. We were living with less and somehow experiencing more. Darrell was engaged with me, with our family, with his faith, and with the work that still mattered to him. He touched me when he walked by. He left love songs waiting in my car. Sometimes he looked at me as though we had been separated for years when I had only been in the next room.

These became some of the best years of our marriage.

Fully There

Near the end of this chapter, I wrote that we felt tested, proven, and equipped for what was next. I meant it.

I don't want to stand over the woman I was then and correct her because I now know things she could not possibly have known. She was telling the truth about the life she was living.

Darrell and I had been broken open. We had lost things we thought we needed. We had learned things about ourselves, each other, love, purpose, disappointment, and rest that we had not known before.

What came later cannot reach backward and make those things untrue.

Sometimes tragedy makes us look backward and wonder whether the happiness was somehow less real because it didn't last, whether confidence was foolish because we couldn't see what was coming, or whether we should have protected ourselves by holding something back.

But holding something back would not have changed what eventually happened. It would only have changed how fully we were there while we had it.

What Was True?

You may have parts of your own story that are difficult to look at now because you know what happened afterward.

A trip. A conversation. A plan you made together. A photograph in which everyone looks happy. A season when life felt settled. Something you believed about your future.

You don't have to look at any of it differently today. But if the ending has begun to swallow what came before it, you might ask:

What was true before I knew what would happen next?

Let whatever was true be true.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

What was true before I knew what would happen next?