Just recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed on the well-known podcast, Jesus Calling. I’d been doing a number of media interviews, mostly in connection with the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and what it was like to be in the city that day.
The Jesus Calling interview was a surprise. Instead, it took me back to a period of my life that I haven’t talked about much of late, and which I explored in my first book for Guideposts, The Promise of Hope: How True Stories of Hope and Inspiration Saved My Life and How They Can Transform Yours (available here at Guideposts in digital format).
The fact that I landed at Guideposts is nothing short of a miracle at a time in my life where it seemed that all was lost. I’d battled alcoholism and other demons from my early teens, had finally gotten sober through the grace of God, then several years later thinking I was cured, drank again with predictably disastrous results. People sometimes call it a slip but this was more like a collapse. I was jobless, broke and barely clinging to a place to live. I was convinced I was going to end up back on the streets again. I held little to no hope for myself.
Along came Guideposts, a magazine I had never heard of and vaguely assumed was a travel publication (substitute the word journey, and it would be more accurate). How they ever got a hold of my resume is a mystery…or a miracle. I’ll never quite understand why Guideposts even hired me. I wouldn’t have hired me. Yet they did and it saved my life.
If you’d like to hear more about that story, please check out my Jesus Calling interview. Those folks are good. They got me talking about things I thought I’d moved on from. But our lives are a continuum, and there is a permanence to our past. You never completely leave your past behind even as time moves on. My past is part of who I am today, and it is only through grace that I have come to be at peace with it. In fact, to be grateful for it, warts and all.
