My Desert is a spiritual memoir — recently completed, coming this summer. What follows is the introduction to the book, published here for the first time. It is the foundation beneath the purpose that drives everything I’m striving to do.
You will seek me and find me
when you seek me with all your heart.
I’ve knelt before God many times in my life — at times out of reverence, more often in sheer desperation: my nephew’s broken body after a tragic 4-wheeler accident, my wife’s cancer diagnosis on the eve of our wedding and her long fight for life, and my father’s 15-year battle with a different cancer. Those moments burned into me like fire on stone — prayers not born of habit but of the primal realization that I was powerless.
And yet, strangely, it wasn’t tragedy that finally undid me.
It was math.
In May 2025, I did the arithmetic that changed everything. 2025 minus 1985. Forty years. Forty years since I’d graduated high school and “set out free” as we said then, confusing a diploma with wisdom and swagger with direction. Forty years of wandering in a wilderness largely of my own design.
For decades, I had wondered why a loving God let His people wander forty years in the desert. It always seemed unnecessarily cruel — like a cosmic timeout that dragged on long after the lesson should have been learned. But there I sat, tallying my own years of wandering, and the irony landed with the subtlety of a brick: God hadn’t abandoned me in the wilderness. I’d volunteered — choosing my own path over His, time and time again. The Israelites, at least, had the excuse of being dragged out of Egypt against their better judgment.
I signed up for the tour.
And once I named it — forty years, wandering, lost — I couldn’t un-name it. The fog that had allowed me to keep moving without direction suddenly thinned. I could see the desert I was standing in.
This is a book about naming.
God has been teaching us this from the beginning. In the first verses of Scripture, He doesn’t just create — He names. Light and dark. Day and night. Creation wasn’t merely making; it was ordering, declaring what things are so they can become what they’re for. The formless void became a world with shape and purpose. Naming was how God brought order out of chaos.
And then He did something remarkable — something that tells us more about His character than a thousand sermons. He shared the work. He brought the animals to Adam “to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” The point was the walking together, the shared work, the side-by-side ordering of a world still young enough to smell like morning. God, it seems, has always preferred company to efficiency.
This is the pattern that runs through the whole story. He named Jacob “Israel” — he who wrestles with God — while the hip was still out of socket and the dawn was just breaking. He named Simon “rock” before steadiness was anywhere in evidence. He named Israel “my people,” long before they had done anything to earn it. In each case, the naming was not a label applied from a distance. It was an approach. A closing of the gap. A God who keeps stepping closer when any sensible deity would keep His distance.
This is why the unnamed holds such power over us. What we cannot name remains chaos — formless, resistant to purpose. The vague unease, the exhaustion without explanation, the sense that something is wrong but we cannot say what — these flourish in the unnamed. But what we can name, we can begin to address. Naming is how we participate in God’s work — and it is, I have come to believe, how He participates in ours.
I was thirteen the first time I walked through a concentration camp. What broke me at Dachau was not any single image but the accumulation — the photographs, the records, the ovens, the sheer organizational competence of it all. Evil that clocked in and clocked out. By the time I walked back through those gates, something had fractured that has never fully healed — a grief for souls I could not help, and a question I would carry for decades: What kind of world is this, and what am I supposed to do about it?
That question gathered weight as I grew. Living in Germany as a teenager, I saw the Iron Curtain up close — the barbed wire, the guard towers, the faces of people caged by their own government. In a park in East Berlin, I watched a mother yank her son away from us with fear so sharp it looked rehearsed, because, I would learn, mere curiosity about Westerners could be construed as espionage. I stood at the border near my home in Bad Kissingen and peered through binoculars at young guards whose job was to shoot their own neighbors for wanting to leave.
These experiences didn’t fade the way they seemed to for others. They lodged in me — became the lens through which I saw everything. And because I could not change what I had witnessed, because the moral weight was too heavy for a boy to carry, I found ways to set it down. Not by resolving it. By burying it.
What followed was a long education in the architecture of avoidance. I built a life designed to outrun the weight — a life of achievement, indulgence, and carefully constructed distance from the questions that wouldn’t stop asking themselves. For years, friends, colleagues — even family — saw a version of me that was carefully assembled: the confident handshake, the easy laugh, the career trajectory that impressed in the right circles. Beneath the surface lived fears that had haunted me since childhood — fear of failure, of loneliness, of not doing enough for those who suffer in this world.
I built a career. I married an extraordinary woman. I am raising two incredible children. I accumulated many of the markers that the world calls success. And yet, the more blessed my life became, the more fraudulent I felt. The guilt whispered through the gratitude like static through a radio signal: Why should you enjoy comfort while so many others suffer? What gives you the right?
I could not answer that question. So I kept moving. I kept acquiring. I kept drowning the static in more noise.
And the pattern was set — circular and self-defeating, a path that always led me back to the same parched ground. A man trying to dig his way out of a hole, mystified by the fact that the deeper he dug, the further he seemed from the surface.
I had buried it all so thoroughly that I no longer knew where the graves were. Naming is what gave me a shovel. When I finally named my desert — called it what it was, out loud, without flinching — the dirt began to move. Not all at once. But enough to see what I had put in the ground and why.
This book tells the story of that excavation. How I learned to name the desert I was standing in. And how naming it — finally, after forty years — made it possible to take the first step toward something other than more wandering.
I’ve been a Christian all my life — baptized, confirmed, raised in the church. But sitting with that forty-year arithmetic, I realized with uncomfortable clarity: I didn’t have a “God story.” There was no single moment when belief struck like lightning, no dramatic conversion, no clear before and after.
I had simply grown up in faith the way some people grow up speaking two languages — it was just part of the environment.
For years, I thought faith required a moment — some dramatic turn that would make everything click into place. What I’ve learned is that my story was never about finding God. It was about learning what to do with Him once found. Belief is easy. Walking changes everything.
Walking, I have come to understand, is precisely what He is after. Not admiration from a distance. Not theological agreement. Not even obedience, at least not as the first thing. What He seems to want — what the whole arc of Scripture keeps insisting on, from Eden to Emmaus — is company. A God who walked with Adam in the cool of the day. Who traveled with Israel as cloud and fire. Who, when the fullness of time arrived, did not send a message or a manual but came Himself, in dust and skin, to walk the same roads we walk.
My forty years weren’t spent searching for God — they were spent learning what to do with the fact that He was already there, already keeping pace with a man who refused to slow down long enough to notice. This book is my God story. Not of how I first believed, but of how I am learning to walk with Him still, stumbling and getting back up, making wrong turns and being gently redirected.
But naming my desert changed something. Once I could see where I was, I stopped needing to see everything else. The fog had lifted enough to reveal not the entire path, but the ground directly beneath my feet. And on that ground, one step had become visible.
I did not know where it would lead. But I knew what the next step was: I could write it down. I could tell the truth about where I had been. That was enough to begin.
The writing itself became part of crossing my Jordan. Each chapter was a step into the water. Each confession, each attempt to find words for what had been wordless, moved me further from the shore I had stood on for too long. I did not write this book and then cross. The writing was the crossing.
And here is what I discovered: naming is how purpose reveals itself. Not as a destination, but as a direction. For years I had searched for purpose the way you search for lost keys — frantically, in all the wrong places, growing increasingly convinced that someone must have moved them. But the keys weren’t missing. I was just looking for purpose like a prize instead of receiving it like a step.
I’m writing this from a posture I’m still practicing — open hands, honest eyes, and a steady decision to love even when my feelings resist. I’m not writing from the far side of anything — I’m writing in the middle of it, still learning, still failing, still being carried. My faith is part of this story, and I won’t hide it. But I also won’t weaponize it. If you don’t share my beliefs, you’re not an outsider here.
What I offer is language for the wilderness, a companion written from the middle of my journey.
Not everyone who picks up this book is in a desert. Some of you are in a good season — perhaps the best season you have known. Your work has meaning. Your faith is not a crisis but a practice. If that is you, this book is not here to tell you something is wrong. It is here because even a life that is working can be working at a fraction of what it was designed for. You may not need rescue. But you may find, as I did, that there are gears you have not yet discovered, a harmony available to you that competence alone will never produce. The wilderness is any place where you have not yet heard the voice that is trying to reach you.
Each chapter names a place in the journey: the bonds that hold us, the freedom that isn’t, the image of God we’ve carried, the hope beneath our doubt, the love that is posture rather than feeling, the river where stillness becomes necessary, the puzzle that reveals itself only in pieces, the harmony we glimpse but cannot sustain. As you read, you may recognize the terrain. You may find yourself saying, That’s where I am.
If so, name it. Say it aloud if you need to. Write it down.
The naming is not a verdict. It is the first step toward movement. What will you call this season? What will you name this struggle? Not because naming is magic, but because it is the beginning of honesty — and honesty, it turns out, is the door through which God has been waiting to walk.
This book is my first step, a turning — not because I have all the answers, but because I finally stopped pretending I ever did. A story of coming home — not to a place, but to a Person who has been walking beside me far longer than I can imagine.
The journey begins with naming. It ends with being named.
This “Introduction” sets the table for what My Desert explores: the journey from striving to alignment, from performing to being present. The full book traces forty years of wandering through what I call the spiritual desert—learning to distinguish between the God we construct and the God who actually shows up. My Desert will be available this summer.
To see my other work, visit Extracted. Most recent: Stand The Post — Nacha’s response to seven questions — what it says, what it omits, and what it confirms about who is standing watch over an $86 trillion network.