The Rock That Held Me

Four Words in the Water

It began in a shower.

Danielle and I were living in a townhouse at the time. The master bathroom had one of the best showers I had ever seen: tile on one side, stone accents on the other, several jets and showerheads, and a waterfall feature that poured from above.

That waterfall reminded me of home.

I grew up in Wyoming, where a hike into the mountains could lead to a fishing hole that looked as though it belonged in a movie. Cold water dropped over rock into a deep pool. There were places hidden in the Rocky Mountains that some people may never experience outside a photograph, and I had been fortunate enough to grow up within a few miles of them.

By then, I had lived near Chicago for a few years. Illinois did not offer many places that felt like the mountains I missed, but if I closed my eyes beneath that waterfall shower, I could imagine I was back home.

For a few minutes, the sound of the water and the feel of the stone gave me peace.

One morning, a few minutes into the shower, I heard four words:

THE TIME IS NOW.

They did not feel like one more thought competing with the rest of my thoughts.

I heard them as loud, direct, and outside the ordinary stream of my mind. The intensity of the moment still gives me chills.

Then there was silence.

No explanation. No second sentence. No diagram. No three-year plan. Just four words that could have meant something, everything, or if I was being completely honest possibly that I was losing my mind.

I words came from God.

I also immediately assumed I knew what He meant.

Those were not the same thing.

I Translated God Into Business

God said, “The Time Is Now,” and the entrepreneur in me heard, “Build faster.”

I thought about businesses, websites, recruiting, execution, scale, offense, momentum, and every unfinished vision within reach. The time was now to stop playing defense. The time was now to grow. The time was now to make the calls, build the systems, add the people, increase the revenue, and force open whatever doors had not moved quickly enough.

One word produced ten plans. Then those ten plans produced a hundred obligations.

I was awake, but I was aiming at the wrong target.

I was trying to play basketball with a football. I had heard the opening whistle and sprinted into the wrong game. The more resistance I encountered, the more I rationalized it. Bigger breakthroughs create bigger resistance, I told myself. Therefore, more resistance must mean I was getting closer.

That belief gave my stubbornness a spiritual vocabulary.

For months, I pushed harder. More work. More recruiting. More building. More stress. More of everything I already knew how to do.

Things did not get better. They got worse.

Looking back, the warning is obvious: hearing a true word does not guarantee a true interpretation. Sometimes God speaks clearly and we translate Him through ambition, fear, pain, appetite, urgency, or the part of us that already knows what it wants to do.

My mistake was not taking action. My mistake was assuming that my preferred action was the meaning of the word.

The Drive That Changed the Meaning of “Now”

Later that year, Danielle and I loaded our two daughters into the vehicle and traveled to the East Coast for Friendsgiving. On the final day of that trip, I received news that rearranged the meaning of the four words.

I was told that I had an incurable disease affecting my pancreas.

I was almost thirty years old. I was a husband. I was a father of two little girls. On the drive home, I cried for hours.

Every time I looked into the rearview mirror, I imagined Madison and Charlotte growing up without me. Looking at them hurt. Looking at Danielle hurt even more, so I avoided her eyes. I could not carry the picture of her becoming a widow while I was trying to keep the vehicle on the road.

I cried out to God.

Why me? Why would You do this? Why give me a wife, daughters, dreams, responsibilities, and a future just to take me away from them?

Inside that grief, the four words returned.

The Time Is Now.

What if “now” was not about building a bigger company?

What if it was time to focus on my health? Time to become present with my family? Time to seek God instead of treating Him like the spiritual sponsor of my ambition? Time to stop assuming that the most important assignment must be the one with the biggest visible result?

The words made more sense and less sense at the same time.

I had heard an alarm clock months earlier. I had awakened and gone straight to the office.

Now I began to understand that God had been calling me home.

When the Body Becomes the Emergency

We returned home and began making radical changes. We removed as much stress as we could. I restructured my days. We closed businesses and shut down obligations we believed were contributing to the pressure.

The symptoms still became worse.

There were days when I lost control of my bladder on the kitchen floor. At times, my insides felt like broken glass being spun through a blender. There was blood. There was vomiting. There were tears. Some days, the pain folded me into a ball and reduced the entire world to the next breath.

There were also moments when I did not want to continue living that way.

I do not write that sentence to make despair sound spiritual, dramatic, or brave.

It was a dangerous place. Pain can shrink a person’s vision until death begins to look like the only remaining door. It is not.

Every day became a search for another word. I read what Scripture said about healing. I collected testimonies. I looked for promises I could hold when my body gave me reasons to believe the worst.

We also changed the way I ate. For roughly one hundred days, I ate an entirely raw diet... water, fruits, vegetables, juices, and salads. Some days it seemed to help. Some days it felt like punishment for every unhealthy or addicted season that had come before it. I pushed harder because pushing was still the language I trusted most.

Diet, rest, and reducing stress can matter, I am telling what we tried while we were desperate for life.

By January, we took another step. We loaded two cribs and a few necessities and moved our small family to the middle of nowhere in Kansas.

We knew one family. We had no clients there. Reliable internet was barely part of the arrangement. We wanted less noise, less stress, and more room to hear God.

Were we running toward something or away from something?

Probably both.

Surrender Arrived Before the Answer

After approximately one hundred days of raw food, relentless effort, pain, prayer, and trying to win each day, something began changing inside me.

I did not yet have the outcome I wanted. The pain remained. Some days I could hide it more effectively than others, but it was still there.

What changed was my grip.

I began disconnecting faith from my demand for a specific result. I had spent months trying to present God with the outcome I needed and the process I was willing to follow. Gradually, surrender began replacing negotiation.

I was spending real time with the girls. Danielle and I were "inching" closer. The businesses were no longer permitted to consume every conversation and every usable part of me. Life looked smaller from the outside, but something essential inside our home was becoming larger.

By March or April, about five months after the diagnosis, I reached another breaking point.

“If this is life, I do not want it,” I told God. “Why would You walk me through so much just to leave me here?”

That was not the first time I had asked why.

It would not be the last.

Word, Promise, Grace

Years later, I can see a pattern that was impossible to recognize while living inside it.

God’s Word wakes me. God’s promise anchors me. God’s grace carries me.

The Word is the light. In Genesis, darkness did not negotiate with God. He spoke, and light appeared. Scripture still exposes what darkness conceals. It shows me God’s character, my condition, and the direction of the next faithful step.

A personal impression is not identical to Scripture. The Bible is the authority by which every impression must be tested. But I believe God used the words “The Time Is Now” as an alarm that morning. The words woke me before I understood what I was waking up to.

The promise is the anchor. It does not always tell me how the storm will end. It tells me who remains faithful inside it. Numbers says God does not lie like a human being. Joshua records that not one of His good promises failed. Isaiah says His word does not return empty. Second Timothy says that even when we are faithless, He remains faithful because He cannot deny Himself.

Grace is what carries me when I cannot perform my way to the promise.

Grace is not God pretending my wrong choices were right. It is not a spiritual loophole that turns recklessness into obedience. Grace confronts, forgives, restores, corrects, and gives me another day to walk differently. Grace does not merely rescue me from consequences. It rescues me from the belief that consequences are the final authority over my identity.

The three movements do not always arrive together. Sometimes the Word awakens me long before I recognize the promise. Sometimes I cling to the promise while grace works invisibly.

Sometimes I can only recognize the pattern years after I have lived it.

I Did Not Want to Go

Danielle asked for help.

At the time, she was building a nutrition company. A group of people we knew were planning a trip to Israel that spring, and she began asking for the money, provision, childcare, and arrangements required for us to go.

I made every objection available.

We did not have extra money. We had two young children. The travel would be exhausting. My health was unpredictable. Some days, I could barely cross the room without vomiting, losing control of my body, or crawling to get water. How was I supposed to travel from Kansas to Chicago, then fly thousands of miles to Tel Aviv?

I told God I had surrendered and wanted His will.... provided His will happened where I already was. That is how surrender can sound before it becomes real.

I have joked many times that when Danielle wants one thing and I want another, we compromise and do what she wants.

Somehow, the arrangements came together. Childcare became available. We returned to Chicago. We had plane tickets. The trip included most of what we needed once we arrived.

I still had to say yes.

I surrendered the possibility that I might look foolish, become violently ill on the flight, endure the worst pain of my life at thirty-seven thousand feet, or spend the entire trip regretting the decision.

Then another possibility entered the conversation: what if this was the last trip I would ever take with Danielle?

Fear had been giving me reasons to stay. Love gave me a reason to go.

When the Bible Became Geography

For two weeks, we traveled through Israel.

We stayed in tents in the desert. We rode camels. We walked through landscapes, ruins, streets, hills, and places associated with stories I had read for years.

The trip did not make Scripture true. It made the physical setting of Scripture visible to me.

Names on a page became geography. Distances became steps. Heat became something felt against skin. Stone became something touched. Stories I had sometimes held at a distance suddenly existed under my own feet.

The experience did not answer every historical, theological, or medical question. It did make it harder for me to keep treating faith as an abstract idea.

Three days before the trip ended, I received a video message from Madison.

She was in the bath, a tiny chatterbox talking directly into the camera.

“Dadda, where are you? I love you. Come home.”

My heart collapsed.

I had spent months imagining my daughters growing up without me. Now one of them was asking me to come home, and I did not know whether my body was going to allow me to keep doing that.

The question returned with greater force.

Why?

Why make me a husband and father if I was going to die at thirty? Why let me love them this much if I would have to leave them? Why allow me to see a future I might never enter?

In that pain, my thoughts became dramatic, absolute, and theologically untidy. Despair rarely speaks in careful doctrine. I said things to God that revealed the size of my fear, not the accuracy of my understanding.

He was not intimidated by the questions.

The Holding Place

The next day, our group walked through places associated with Jesus’ final hours before the crucifixion. All morning, one word followed me through the streets:

Why?

I was fighting on three levels at once. My body was in pain. My mind was imagining death. My spirit was trying to connect the suffering of Christ with the suffering I could not understand.

Eventually, we entered a stone chamber presented as the place where Jesus may have been held before His crucifixion. Tradition has long connected a deep pit and surrounding caves on that hill with detention near the house of Caiaphas.

I called it the cave. In my mind, it was a jail cell.

Steps led into a large rock chamber. Stone surrounded us.

A substantial pillar stood near the center. The room felt cold, dark, quiet, and heavy. Our group crowded inside until the chamber was full.

The pastor leading the trip remained near the entrance and began to pray. A close friend with decades of special-operations experience stood nearby. He was tall, calm, and carried a presence that allowed me to lower my guard. I did not have to monitor the room. For once, I could simply be present inside it.

I moved toward the back of the chamber and leaned against the central rock.

When I leaned away, I could hear the pastor speaking and praying clearly. When I pressed closer, the voice seemed to disappear and another voice took its place.

My body began to feel numb. I felt surrender. Relief. A permission to stop holding everything together.

So I let go.

The Rock That Held Me

I do not know how long I stood there.

My eyes were closed. I felt as though I was being pulled into the rock... not painfully, but like someone was holding me in an impossibly tight embrace. I stopped straining to hear the human voices at the doorway and pressed into the voice I believed I was hearing.

Then everything seemed to go black.

There was no room.

No group.

No diagnosis.

No business.

No future to control. T

here was only an infinite darkness and the same voice I had heard in the shower.

This time, the four words did not leave me with endless possibilities. What followed felt like a promise and a commission:

“You are completely healed and restored in My name. Follow Me and My word. Go fulfill every dream and vision I have given you.”

The words repeated.

They became louder and more insistent until, as suddenly as the experience began, I became aware of the cave again.

I looked down. Danielle was praying near my feet. Most of the group had already left. My body was tingling.

Then I saw her eyes.

Danielle has large, beautiful brown eyes that have always had the ability to break through whatever version of strength I am attempting to maintain. That day, they were wider than I had ever seen them.

She told me she had looked up and seen me pressed against the rock as though I was hugging it. That matched what I had felt, except I was not the one creating the embrace.

When I stepped toward the light at the entrance, we saw impressions from the rock across my exposed skin... my face, head, arms, and legs. The pressure had left the texture of the stone on me.

I immediately grabbed Danielle’s notebook and wrote down the words as I remembered them. She wept. I wept. We told close friends at dinner that night, and they wept with us.

I entered that chamber asking why God would allow my life to end.

I walked out carrying words about what my life was for.

The Last Day

The following day was our final day in Israel.

I spent it in solitude with God.

After two weeks of movement, history, people, questions, pain, prayer, and the experience in the cave, I needed silence. I did not want to rush into another interpretation the way I had after the shower. I did not want to turn a promise into a business plan before I had learned how to receive it.

I spent the day with Him and did my best to let the words settle.

For years, I called what happened a new covenant between God and me.

I understand the language more carefully now. The New Covenant is not a private contract I created in a cave. It is the covenant Jesus established through His life, death, and resurrection... the covenant of grace into which every believer is invited.

What I received that day was personal, but it was not a replacement for Scripture or a new gospel. I received it as a promise, a commission, and an anchor inside the covenant Christ had already made possible.

That distinction matters.

The promise did not make me spiritually exceptional. It made me responsible.

I Came Home

I came home.

Madison had asked me to, and I did.

Today, I am healthy. I have lived many more lives since that trip. I believe God healed me and made me new in that season, and the life I have been allowed to live afterward is part of my testimony.

I cannot ask every reader to interpret my experience exactly as I do.

I cannot make the cave, the pressure of the rock, the voice, or the timing into a formula.

I cannot promise that another person’s healing will arrive in the same way, at the same place, or on the same timeline.

I should not turn my testimony into medical advice or imply that faith eliminates the need for physicians, treatment, records, or wise care.

I can tell the truth about what happened to me.

I was told I had an incurable condition. I lived for months in severe pain and fear. I went to Israel believing it might be my final trip with my wife. In a dark stone chamber, I heard words of healing, restoration, obedience, and assignment. I returned home. Today, I am healthy.

The rock did not heal me.

Israel did not heal me.

My raw diet did not become a gospel.

I believe God met me in that place and carried me into a life I did not know I would get to live.

Following the Voice Does Not Mean Abandoning Discernment

Since that trip, I have tried to carry out the direction I believe God gives me... even when it is uncomfortable, costly, unexpected, or impossible to justify by visible results alone.

But my life has also taught me that certainty is not the same thing as discernment.

There have been times when I moved fast, convinced myself that a good intention sanctified a bad method, or treated resistance as proof that I must be obeying God. Some of those decisions hurt people. Some violated policies or laws. Some brought consequences I still have to face honestly.

God’s grace does not allow me to rename those choices obedience.

If an impression asks me to lie, deceive, conceal, exploit, harm, violate Scripture, or knowingly break a lawful obligation, I should not follow it and claim that faith required me to ignore the facts. God does not contradict His character. The Holy Spirit is not threatened by examination. Scripture tells believers to test what they hear, hold on to what is good, reject evil, seek wise counsel, and judge wisdom by fruit that is pure, peaceable, gentle, sincere, and open to reason.

Walking by faith does not mean closing my eyes. It means refusing to make sight my god.

Facts matter. Laws matter. Counsel matters. Consequences matter. The people affected by my decisions matter. None of those things replaces God, but they can be part of how He corrects my interpretation.

The words I recorded in the cave included, “Follow Me and My Word.” The first word is essential: Me.

Any voice that leads me away from Christ’s character is not a voice I should follow, no matter how certain, urgent, or spiritual it feels.

Grace gives me the humility to admit when I heard what I wanted to hear.

Grace Did Not End in the Cave

I wish I could say that being healed and restored made every future decision correct.

It did not.

I still have free will. I still make mistakes. I still misunderstand. I still move too fast, choose badly, hurt people, fail, sin, and create consequences that a dramatic testimony does not erase.

The cave was not the moment I became incapable of failure. It was the moment I learned that failure did not have to become the final word.

That is where grace enters.

Grace is not my unlimited permission to complete a private contract with God however I choose. Grace is Christ’s completed work reaching a man who cannot save, heal, perfect, or justify himself. Grace forgives what I confess. Grace calls me to repent. Grace gives me strength to repair what can be repaired and courage to face consequences that cannot be avoided. Grace returns me to the path when my own decisions have pulled me away from it.

The sacrifice of Jesus does not make my impact unimportant because my intent felt good. It makes truthful repentance possible. It means condemnation does not get the last word, even when correction is necessary.

God remains faithful when I am faithless... not because faithlessness is harmless, but because His character is not dependent on my performance.

Every new morning does not reset responsibility to zero. It gives me another opportunity to live responsibly under grace.

A Lamp, Not a Floodlight

“Thy Word” has stayed connected to this story because it draws from Psalm 119:105: God’s Word is a lamp for the feet and a light for the path.

A lamp is enough light for the next step.

It is not always a floodlight over the next twenty years.

That was my mistake after the shower. God gave me enough light to wake up, and I tried to use four words to illuminate an entire empire. When the diagnosis came, the light moved closer: health, family, presence, surrender. In the cave, the light became a promise: healed, restored, follow, fulfill.

Even then, I was not given every page.

I was given enough light to come home.

Enough light to be a husband.

Enough light to be a father.

Enough light to keep listening.

Enough light to repent when my interpretation produced darkness instead of fruit.

Enough light to take the next faithful step.

God’s Word is not weak because I once misunderstood it. His promise is not broken because I later failed. His grace is not exhausted because I still need it.

The light keeps exposing. The promise keeps anchoring. Grace keeps carrying.

The Word, the Promise, and the Grace

I can now see the pattern that I could not see from inside the pain.

The Word came through the sound of falling water:

The Time Is Now.

I translated it through ambition and ran harder.

The diagnosis broke my first interpretation and turned “now” toward the things I could not afford to keep postponing: my health, my wife, my daughters, my relationship with God, and the man I was becoming.

The promise came in a dark holding place:

Healed. Restored. Follow. Fulfill.

The final day in solitude allowed the promise to become an anchor instead of another assignment I could conquer through force.

Grace brought me home.

Grace has met me in every life I have lived since. It has not shielded me from every bad decision or earthly consequence. It has refused to let either one become greater than Christ’s ability to redeem a surrendered life.

In Genesis, God did not wait for darkness to understand Him before He spoke light into it.

That is what I believe He did for me.

I thought the cave might be near the end of my story.

Instead, it became the place where I received an assignment to keep living it.

The rock was not my healer. It was the place where I stopped resisting the One I believe healed me.

Prayer

Father, thank You that Your Word brings light into places I cannot understand.

Forgive me for the times I have heard You through the filter of my ambition and called my preferred plan obedience. Teach me to test every impression against Scripture, the character of Christ, wise counsel, and good fruit.

Thank You for the promises that held me when my body, mind, and strength could not.

Thank You for Danielle, for Madison and Charlotte, for the people who helped us reach Israel, and for every day I have been allowed to come home since.

Keep me humble enough to admit when I am wrong, courageous enough to repair what I have damaged, and surrendered enough to follow the next faithful instruction without demanding the entire plan.

Let grace never become my excuse. Let it become the power by which I tell the truth, accept correction, and walk differently.

Your Word. Your promise. Your grace.

Let there be light in me again today.

Amen.