Eric L. Walker

We broke up in July. I had told Lady I wanted to wait until my sixteen-year-old graduated before blending our families. Two years. I kept telling myself that timing mattered, that I needed the house first, that I needed everything solved before I let my life change. Twelve years of single fatherhood had built a kind of pride in me. I didn’t see how much it kept my heart guarded.

Lady saw it clearly.

“I just can’t, Eric,” she said.

Her leaving was not only about my hesitation. She was ready to move forward and she trusted the path more than I did. She needed to know she could stand on her own feet. And I needed to feel the shape of life without her, to see what the absence revealed that companionship had been covering.

The joke in all of it is simple. I had to feel how not-okay I was without her. She had to feel how entirely okay she was without me.

Two months of silence passed. Then we chose to meet again.

We walked in the woods where we used to walk. On a small hill we paused. The sun was level with our eyes and the light reached across the trees and into the tall grass below. Everything was familiar, yet something between us had shifted. I liked the view. I liked us. And I could feel myself changing. It was a change proven through follow-through and alignment. It was a change steady enough to give her space. She needed the room to choose me or not. I stood there simply being myself, openhearted and whole in a way I had not been before.

A week later she invited me and my kids to dinner with her kids.

A week after that, a picnic date.

Two weeks later, lunch with her pastor.

Three weeks later, baptism.

A week after that, we closed on a home in the country, and I asked her to marry me.

She said yes.

The deeper truth is that love grows through the small decisions we keep making. It grows when fear loosens and trust finds room to take root. It grows when two people meet one another in the open and choose again. That choosing is the quiet thread that carries us forward.

We keep saying yes.

The following is what I wanted to say. Maybe not exactly what I said, but close. Now that I have a chance to write it out, this is what I was feeling. I will remember Sunday, November 2, 2025, for the rest of my life. Here’s my baptism testimony.

I used to credit “luck” when something good happened to me. I’d say, I’m lucky. Now I say, I’m blessed, and that has made all the difference.

When I say I’m lucky, I give credit to myself. When I say I’m blessed, I give credit to God. I can’t do what God can do. It is His way, not my way. His will, not mine.

God has taken my crooked lines, like scribbles on a page, and straightened them. He has taken my brokenness and mended it until I am whole. He has taken all of my story and put it to good use.

And as proof of that, all you have to do is see that Dorie, the woman I love, and Lucan, my son, are standing up here with me at Freshwater Church in Paw Paw, Michigan. I could have never thought-up this scenario in a million years.

I decided I wanted to walk with God in the spring-ish of 2021. At that time, I was going down a lot of rabbit holes searching for truth, and I kept coming back to the ultimate truth, the goodness of God revealed in the Bible.

But it wasn’t some big transformation or celebrated conversion. I simply started meeting God, little by little. It began with questions. My best friend is a believer, and I would pepper him with questions that he answered as best he could. Then he would leave me with resources, prayers his family was praying, or different Bible translations to explore.

I met God when I started nibbling on Scripture, little passages here and there like John 3:16. I met God when I found myself attending church. I met God when I had lunch with the pastor. I met God when I joined a Bible study group. I met God when I read the Bible cover to cover. I met God when I began praying on my own every morning.

Little by little, I kept meeting God.

Dave Ramsey has a quote I love. He says, “We meet God on the way up, we need God on the way down.” That has been true for me. When something really hard happened, I needed God, and He was there.

God is always there when I need Him.

Thank you all for being witnesses that my heart is tender toward God in Jesus’ name.

Amen.

It’s 6 p.m. and I’m not doing anything. No practices, no appointments, no one asking for anything. I’ve been up since five this morning getting ready for the day and kids off to school, and work, and, and, and… but now the house is still. I might holler for my youngest just to hold her close. It’s been weeks since I’ve let myself slow down. Lately, resting is the work, and I haven’t gotten much of it in.

I spent the morning with my mom at an assessment for in-home care. She’s 72 and struggling in every way – body, mind, and spirit.

I love her deeply, but she’s hard to help. Pride and repressed pain make her resist the support she needs.

Still, a seed was planted today. I’ll take that as a win. At least now she knows another option exists. Maybe this is the slow jog at the start of something better.

I’ve reached the part of life where I’m helping care for the one who once cared for me. That’s wild to me. That’s new to me.

I’m learning that fatherhood – which isn’t new to me – and being a son at 49 with a parent who needs care and occasional intervention aren’t so different. Both ask for my continued patience. Both ask for my continued humility. Both ask that my love endure.

And quitting will never be an option.

A few years ago, I made a promise to myself.

The next woman I dated would have to be marriage material or I wouldn’t date at all.

No more chasing lust. No more relationships built on temporary desire.

Back in 2017, I wrote a list of the qualities I wanted in a woman.

A few months before I met my soon to be bride, I updated the list, and added this caveat:
If I ever marry, I want to be baptized first.

For me, baptism isn’t just symbolic, or a public declaration of my internal faith, it’s also a reset. It washes away the past, specifically with other women, the mistakes, the selfishness, the patterns that kept me stuck.

This Sunday, I’ll make that public declaration.

A fresh start in love, and life.

I’m in a season of change. I’m humbled and grateful.

This Sunday, I’ll be baptized. Soon, I’ll propose. A new house is closing in a few weeks. The church is booked for January.

Everything is being rebuilt from the ground up. Faith, family, purpose. Yet, in reflection, all of this has been in the works for years.

Over the next few months, I’ll be using this space to document the process of starting anew. My goal is to stay grounded while I grow.

We don’t often think about how love gets tested. Not with neat questions and answers, but in harder ways.

A sister’s doubt. A friend’s warning. A memory of being let down before.

Each one presses into the present like a sharp mirror we didn’t ask to hold.

These are the not-so-neat tests of love I’m talking about.

They can feel heavy. But this is the real work of love. That being not to run from suspicion, not to close down, but to stand steady in the middle of it. To keep showing up in a way that lets actions line up with words.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to our trust in God. I have prayed so many times over the last couple of months,
“God, I give this to You. I hand it over to You. You’re in charge. Your will, not mine.”

For years, I thought the safe way was to harden. Build walls. I didn’t name it that way at the time, but in hindsight, that’s exactly what I was doing.

I was compartmentalizing my life so I could stay in control. It kept me safe. It kept me loving my children in a way that no one could touch. I wasn’t going to let the world bruise me twice.

Then I fell in love. I lost that love. And now I am regaining it.

Somewhere in that circle, I realized that a soft heart is stronger than a hard one. It listens. It bends without breaking. It stays open when retreat would be easier.

Except, in my breaking open and becoming whole, in my great softening, retreating wasn’t easier.

Did I ever lose that love? Yes and no.

I see now that love doesn’t move in a straight line.

It circles back. It pulls old stories into the present. It tests our patience and asks if we mean what we say.

And through it all, it keeps moving as one continuous current.

For me and Lady, that current has been an undertow, carrying us to where we were always meant to be.

We don’t always get to draw the map. Yet we do choose how we travel.

I now choose to be soft, open, willing to let trust take root. Time is on my side.

Now that some time has passed, I can see what was true all along. That every turn, every test, every warning was leading us here. Exactly as we had always planned it, even when we didn’t know how the plan would unfold.

Love’s not a straight line we draw. It’s a current we learn to trust. And for me and Lady, every turn has only been a way of leading us home.

I have stopped setting goals to achieve something. I set goals to become someone. I want the change that comes with the goal more than the reward of accomplishment. The burning desire lives in the transformation itself. The process of becoming is the reward. And that transformation reaches deeper than the savings goal, the new income streams or any material milestone ever could.

I went to prayer and worship at the downtown church today, as I have most Wednesdays these past few weeks.

In the middle of the week it feels like an antidote, a way to steady myself in God.

There is something powerful in lifting a song of praise and gratitude, in offering my voice as thanks for the life I’ve been given.

When we sang Solid Ground, I felt security rise in me. Confidence followed, along with a joy that lets me rest from the weight I carry as a human being, as a father, as a provider, and as someone meeting challenges that demand patience and consistency.

For a moment, I can relax. Like actual mind-is-on-nothing-but-God deep rest.

In this hour, the ground beneath me feels affirmed.

I think, whatever comes, I will be okay, because I have this place, this presence, and I have already been accepted into it.

That moves me. My eyes water as I sit in that presence.

I sang to the heavens, offered praise and gratitude for everything I have. I prayed. I spoke to God. I thanked Jesus in all of my imperfection.

I felt heard.

And I felt it build something inside me that I am only beginning to understand.

The more I lean in, the more I feel God’s restorative hand and the steady ground He provides.

It’s a real thing.

It’s as if He is showing me how to give myself over.

It doesn’t arrive in a single surge. Today it felt like breath filling my lungs, slow and steady, enough to sustain me.

Just as exercise strengthens me in its own way – resistance training, sprints, pushups and chinups in the living room. That builds my body.

But today I found that singing, raising my voice toward heaven and feeling it, builds something else. It is strength with depth.

Solid ground. Strength that steadies beneath me.

Strength that reminds me I am not alone.

Thank you Jesus, thank you Lord.

Amen.

Listening to Dave Ramsey yesterday, he said,

“I met God on the way up, but I got to know Him on the way down.”

He was talking about making millions and then losing it all, and when I heard those words, they stayed with me.

I nodded and thought, Yes. I know that path.

I remember when I first met God.

By then I already believed the Bible was truth and that a relationship with Jesus was the way I wanted to walk.

But belief and knowing are not the same.

One Saturday night, a friend who had been unfaithful to his wife stayed at my house to talk. He was covered in a darkness I could not name, and the next morning I fled. My phone was dead. My gas tank was empty.

Still, I found myself driving, past reason, until I pulled into a church I had only heard about from another believer. I had never been there before. Somehow I made it, running on fumes and without directions, and God met me in that place.

Life felt like an ascent after that.

Soon after, I met and fell in love with Lady.

We read the Bible together. We went to church often. God was at the center of our life. I even sat with the pastor a few times. Step by step, I kept meeting God.

Yet it wasn’t until Lady and I broke apart that I began to know Him.

Heartbreak has a way of undoing you.

I was emptied out, unable to hold myself together. Every attempt to gather my pieces left me with nothing but fragments slipping through my hands.

In that collapse, I discovered a deeper truth. God wasn’t simply someone I wanted in my life. He was the One I could not live without.

I always knew that I liked to write, and I’ve been doing it for a long time in a kind of public journal – writing in the spirit of myself, trying to capture things I almost know but can’t quite explain.

But after this season of life, I find I can’t stop writing about God.

He is always with me, shaping every reflection that rises to the surface. What I write now comes out of lived experience, and I know these words might serve men who, like me, are navigating difficult seasons of their own.

Maybe this is my current prompting. A nudge from God to keep going in this direction.

Since then, I have learned to lean into Him not only in strength but in the ache of weakness. I see now that His promise is the one ground that does not shift beneath me. To trust Him is to walk with a steadiness nothing else can give.

Life still cuts. Disappointment arrives without warning. Plans unravel just when you hope they will hold.

Yet when I entrust those moments to God, I find a different rhythm. My days open with a quiet harmony, one that does not depend on whether life feels fair or unfair, easy or hard. Full of regret or high on gratitude.

I think this is what Ramsey meant. On the way up, we recognize God. On the way down, we learn who He is. And in that knowing, we find a life that no longer needs to look back.

Replace the word “fail” with the word “live.”

When I fear failure, when regret pulls at me, when I close off because I don’t want to be hurt, when I play it safe instead of stepping forward…

I am really naming something deeper.

When I look at the surface explanation, what’s truly being named is the fear of life itself. Because life inevitably includes risk, uncertainty, disappointment, and pain.

Scripture bears witness to this. It is the story of mankind.

So I’ve been taking out the word fail and replacing it with the word live.

“I’m afraid to fail” becomes “I’m afraid to live.”

I don’t ever want to be afraid to live. No way.

That shift is enough to stop me in my tracks. It tells me what I already know. Life is never lived from the safety of avoidance.

To live is to be touched by failure. To live is to be stretched, to stumble, to rise again.

Failure has never been the end of my story. More often, it is the beginning.

Failure is a texture of being alive.

Failure is the shape of a path I can only see once I’ve walked it.

So the question is never how to avoid failure. The question is how deeply am I willing to live.

This doesn’t mean I’m not afraid. I have fears and many insecurities, especially in the unknown. But in the name of Jesus, to live is to die to myself, so that I may rise to new life in Him.

I’m trying! In all the things I do.

Some mornings it feels like my heart still has its own agenda.

I make the coffee anyway.

My chest tightens when I fear life and love is moving forward without me.

For a while there, that feeling ran the show. Which isn’t abnormal, but now…

Now I’m learning to step outside it. I feel it, but it doesn’t define me. When it hits, I do simple things.

Grind the beans.

Heat the water.

Watch the steam rise.

This is a metaphor, of course.

I don’t own the morning or the ritual, but I can show up to what’s in front of me.

That rhythm steadies me.

Life and forgiveness are gifts. They aren’t earned. They’re given.

The small daily work of praying, showing up, and doing all the things we call “living” isn’t about proving anything.

It’s my way of answering love that’s already here.

Thank you Jesus

Grace doesn’t push or demand. It just reminds me I’m already accepted.

Already loved.

From there, I want to grow. It’s a natural byproduct.

Paul said everything else is loss compared to knowing Christ.

The treasure isn’t outcomes or blessings. It’s Him.

So it’s in these heart squeeze mornings that I simply make the coffee.

Not to fix the past.

Not to chase love.

But because love is already here.

Even when the ache lingers, this simple idea brings me back to what matters.

And that is being known by Christ