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.