13 years ago: It was not the best of times. It was the worst of times....

It was not the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was an hour of reckoning. The sun outside burned like any other May 5, but inside, I was unravelling and rewinding all at once. A man with a legal pad, a sandwich, and a history—sitting in a borrowed chair, still hoping to rewrite the story I nearly let end.

I had been counted out. Not once, not twice—but enough times to hear the bell tolling for me in the distance. Homelessness had not just stolen my nights; it had reshaped my body, ruptured my spirit to the point of desolation. From September 30, 2011 to January 2013, I was not merely houseless—I was untethered, wandering the margins of a society I once contributed to. My car became my cathedral, a vessel for prayers whispered through the windshield. My stomach growled, scripture; my eyes stringently searched for a glimmer of light in the dense concrete wilderness. “Late have I loved You,” Saint Augustine once cried. “Beauty so ancient and so new.”

And yet, even there—especially there—God sent me divine and beautiful breadcrumbs.

His name was Joe Maluff. He offered me a spot in the back of a barbecue kitchen, a hundred bucks a week, and a sliver of dignity. A mustard seed of grace, dropped into the soil of my ruin. His brother David, with a stern kindness, watched over the shop like a shepherd eyeing his flock. And Todd Gesiminger—he didn’t have shifts to spare, so he let me pressure-wash at dawn, scraping grease from pavement like I was trying to wash away the sins of a former life.

Still, the ghosts whispered. They came in the silence between bites of turkey on white bread, in the lulls between truck engine groans and drivers’ grumblings. 

The postal goons talked shop, talked survival, talked Budweiser Marines. I nodded, laughed when they laughed, but felt like a child locked outside his own birthday party. I was Eliot’s hollow man—stuffed with straw, hoping no one noticed how empty I’d become. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

I wrote down everything—how to back into a trailer, the calorie count of sandwiches and Lay’s chips, the zip codes of places I’d never return to. Maybe it was desperation for control. Maybe it was penance. Or maybe—just maybe—I was leaving notes for a man I hoped I could still become by God's grace.

And yet, I was not always like this. Highland Plaza in Birmingham—my old stomping ground—was where the unraveling began. Back then, I was young and foolish, full of dumb delusion that time was infinite and choices bore no weight. I squandered hours like pennies, flung friendships away like cigarette butts, loved like a tourist, not a pilgrim. The seeds of my downfall were sown not in one great sin, but a thousand little ones, each shrugged off in the moment. But as Augustine knew well: “Thus little by little I came to the depths.”

Now I live with the costly consequences—estrangement from my son and silence from my brother. A voice on the phone once said, “It’s hard to love you,” and I can’t stop hearing it. Not because it surprised me, but because I believed it. But I don't want to believe it.

And yet—somehow—I also believe this:

That I am still here.

That I am loved.

That God is writing a love letter with my life, even in the ashes.

God hasn't sent a mere postcard from paradise, but a fierce, wild, holy letter. The kind written in blood and water and days when you can’t look in the mirror without flinching. The kind that starts, “Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine.”

I cling to that when the night comes. When I feel like nothing but a footnote in a life that would have mattered. And maybe that’s the Dickens in me—the belief that no one is beyond redemption, that even Scrooge gets Christmas morning, that even a prodigal like me can be welcomed by his father, and I can come home to a feast of grace that I didn't deserve.

Because of that grace, I'm still fighting. Still listening for the still, small voice that whispered to Elijah, and whispers still. Because maybe the work I’m doing now—the pressure washing, the sandwich saving, the legal pad scribbling—is the raw clay of resurrection.

And maybe, just maybe, the God who made stars out of the darkest void can make something beautiful out of me.