Dear You, Looking for A Way Through

I confess: I’ve lost my way.

I only wish I meant that only metaphorically, rhetorically, instead of in the realest, most heartbreaking ways.

If I were sitting across the table from you right now, having a steaming cup of hot coffee with you, I would look you in the eye, and I would see it there in your soul, if I really lingered with your eyes:

You are fighting hard for a way through on so many fronts, a way through to what you’ve dreamed for your one and only life.

You are trying not to lose your way, trying to find your way, trying to make a way through.

I see you.

And I see how tired you are, in ways no one even knows. I see how you keep running into “no ways”, and it hurts and you are being so brave to keep putting one step in front of the other and to keep hoping, believing, fiercely moving forward.

And if you peered straight into my eyes, you’d see me holding your story with the deepest understanding. You would see the barest honesty in my eyes, the last traces of nervous fear in mine, and I would just slide it across the table to you, my next book, right there.  

The most vulnerable story I’ve ever told.

A vulnerable love story – the story of how I lost my way, the story of how I just about lost my marriage, the story of our daughter who I almost didn’t find — and how to find the way forward exactly where there seems to be absolutely no way.

The honest story is, in the midst of breaking my husband’s heart in all kinds of ways, and facing the open heart surgery of our youngest daughter,  I found myself hospitalized for my own literal heart failure. 

And lying there in a hospital bed, I finally found the way to the very heart of everything: a sacred way of life — a rule of life — that turns the whole of a life around.

Life keeps coming at you, and will just keep coming at you, crashing over you like waves — your dreams, your loves, your heartaches, your hopes — all ebbing and flowing, rising and falling. 

Life keeps coming in waves and there is no controlling life’s storms – there is only actually learning an actual way of life that can walk through waves.

This is my story. 

This is our deeply personal, vulnerable story — of heartbreak and therapy and U-turns and open heart surgeries and being very lost and being actually found and getting to really begin again. 

This is one real, honest-to-God love story. 

This is the most passionate story I know how to tell.

In a disorienting world, with obstacle after obstacle, with the landscape of our lives shifting under us in ways we never expected, this is the charting our own tender, and brutally hard, journey out of deep, churning waters — to discover an actual compass. 

What we all need more than anything, especially at the beginning of a new year, with new hopes, is to really find our way to the actual life we always dreamed of. 

To discover a new way of thinking, a new way of being, a powerfully transformative way to a meaningful life, a SACRED way of life — an effective, daily way of life that drowns out an army of fears, reshapes and redirects our days, and offers a fresh revelation of real, practical hope. 

And if I poured you another cup of coffee, handed it to you across the table as we’re talking about how to find a way through when you realize your relationships, your work, your hopes, your marriage, maybe don’t look quite the way you imagined, or when you thought your dreams, your kids, your life trajectory, would be headed a different way — or you thought you would be a different way — we’d both nod:  

What we all need more than anything, especially at the beginning of a new year, with new hopes, is to really find our way to the actual life we always dreamed of. 

Because every day is about finding our way from Point A to Point B — and not missing the point of our lives. 

But just as you might open the first page of the most soul-vulnerable story I’ve ever put down on paper, I would (Nervously! Awkwardly!) grab your hand just to look you in the eye and tell you:  

DO NOT READ THIS BOOK UNLESS: 

You want to turn your life around. You want to think a new way, you want to be a new way, you want to have a new way of being. You’ve been looking for a sign. You want to hand a very real compass to your own soul.  You wish someone would hand you a life map. You’re tired of your heart hurting. You’re looking for a way through.

And then I’d quietly mention to you how I talked to a woman last week who had just finished reading this WayMaker love story of ours, who said: 

“I read your One Thousand Gifts , and then The Broken Way  — and WayMaker is truly exquisite and I can see how this was your next step, your real journey, I can see how this is the whole story.”

And I’d nodded. 

Because it’s true: One Thousand Gifts and The Broken Way ( are lived corners of the same map, but it’s WayMaker that sketches out the road in between the corners. 

Waymaker connects the dots between the grateful thanksgiving of One Thousand Gifts, and the given cruciformity of The Broken Way, and WayMaker hands the soul a sacred compass to know the whole Way through.

And I would tell you this, you, Brave Heart, looking for the way through. 

How I’d read it once, and how I have never have forgot it, and returned to it time and again, what that race car driver Mario Andretti said:

“Don’t look at the Wall.  Your car goes where your eyes go.”  

Your life goes where you keep looking.   

Which is to say: 

Don’t look at what’s in the way — because your life goes the way your eyes go. 

Don’t look at the walls in the way — your way goes where your heart goes. 

Don’t look at the wall in the way — unless you want to crash into the wall on the way.  

Your heart goes where your eyes go. 

Your life goes where you keep looking.  

Gaze long at the Way Himself — and you’ll find the Way to the life you’ve always dreamed of.

Gaze the way you want to go. 

And then I’d squeeze your hand — and hand you the WayMaker.

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