My life after Jean’s death became a bleak and morbid existence. There’s no gentler way to describe it. Everything felt stripped of purpose and direction. I knew I needed time away to care for myself, yet I never took it. Instead, I kept pastoring our church and managing the daily operations of Adam2 Café and its programs, moving through each day on autopilot.

Mornings were the worst. I dreaded waking up and facing another day. Evenings offered a small measure of comfort, but sleep rarely came. My body felt as if it were connected to a trickle charger—always humming, vibrating, never truly at rest.

I continued traveling to Russia with my friends during the Christmas and New Year holidays to visit their ministry house south of Saint Petersburg. Being surrounded by former street kids brought a surprising sense of grounding and comfort to my fractured emotions. I also attended my first Time of Refreshing in Switzerland without my partner of forty years. It wasn’t the same, and in hindsight, it was something I probably should have skipped altogether.

This hollow existence stretched on for more than two years. I felt like a zombie.

Early in this new and unwanted chapter, I began to write. I needed to pour my thoughts onto paper and dig deeply into the scriptures, searching for something I sensed was missing. What I was missing was freedom. I remembered Jesus’ words to the Jews: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

But I was anything but free. I felt imprisoned, in trouble every hour of the day. It was as if I were constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop—or for the gun pressed against the back of my head to finally go off. Yet none of those imagined catastrophes ever came.

As I wrote each day, something profound began to happen. My writing brought comfort to my troubled mind. I started seeing things in scripture—and in life—that had been hidden from me before. It felt like developing film in a darkroom, watching faint shapes emerge into beautiful images. Those images became points of light, guiding me out of my terror.

I wrote like this for the next two and a half years. What I discovered was nothing short of extraordinary. Though I had been a Christian for decades, I realized how little I understood about the way life truly works. My writing revealed what I had been blind to. It showed me how hungry I was for truth—truth deeper and more real than anything I had known. And real hunger can only be satisfied with real truth.

The following quote became my compass:
“We routinely disqualify testimony that would plead for extenuation. That is, we are so persuaded of the rightness of our own judgment as to invalidate evidence that does not confirm us in it. Nothing that deserves to be called the truth could ever be arrived at by such means.” —Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam

This season revealed how naïve I had been throughout my life—how unaware I was of the suffering of others, how self‑absorbed and disengaged I had become. Strangely enough, this painful awakening was a gift, delivered to me in the dark.