Knot Alone

Twenty years, one Yahoo message, and the God who found me in the wilderness.

People often approach my wife and I to tell us that we have a beautiful family and that they want what we have. We are told that we are blessed. We are told that we have beautiful children, a beautiful home, and a beautiful life.

From the outside, it may appear that life has been good to us—that all of this came easily.

But Whitney and I look at each other, deep into each other’s souls, and we know the truth: It came neither easily nor cheaply.

Our story began in the late spring of 2005. I was in the middle of hell, which happened to be located just south of Baghdad. Whitney was in Virginia, navigating nursing school, a full-time job, and life with a one-year-old little girl named Emma.

We met on Yahoo Personals. I sent her a message, and then we talked. And talked. And talked—for months.

The timing was impeccable.

I had just suffered loss at a rate I couldn’t fathom. My platoon had experienced a mass-casualty event caused by a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, or VBIED—a fancy way of saying that a wicked man loaded his car with several hundred pounds of explosives and tried to drive it into a police station.

My friend Jacob blocked his path.

As Jake emptied his magazine into the windshield of that car, the bomber detonated the explosives. The blast killed two of my friends, wounded several others, and forever changed my life and the lives of everyone who was there.

Fresh into divorce and the death of my friends, I had never felt more alone or afraid.

The illusion of my own immortality collapsed like a house of cards. If Jake could die—and Jake was an absolute stud—then so could I.

Life got dark.

One of the hardest things to do after something like that is to get back up and go back out. You have to will yourself into the fire again. You have to travel back down that dreadful, weary road. You have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death over and over, never knowing whether this will be the time you don’t make it out.

But God…

God sent me an angel.

His daughter, named Whitney.

We talked every free moment I had. Talking to her gave me an escape from that place. She comforted me and ministered to me in ways she probably never realized and in ways I will never be able to repay.

I thank God every single day for Whitney—the light in my darkness and the angel who comforted me in the wilderness. A few years later, she helped lead me to the foot of the cross. For the last twenty years of marriage, she has been the clearest example of Christ’s love in my life.

She is my ride or die. She knows where all the bodies are buried. She is my helper, my comforter, and my everything.

I tell my children that I would die for them, but I remind them that I would kill for her. I have never told that woman no, and I never will.

The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of the Lord endures forever. As will my unending love, gratitude, devotion, adoration, appreciation, and fondness for my angel wife, Whitney.

This week, God showed me that I was not the only man to experience loneliness, nor was I the only one upon whom He had compassion.

Adam knew what it was to be alone.

Before there was sin, death, war, or grief, there was a man standing in paradise who still felt the ache of something missing.

Adam was surrounded by everything God had made. He lived in a garden untouched by suffering. He had meaningful work, abundant provision, and fellowship with God Himself.

Yet God looked at Adam and said, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18).

Those words strike me differently now.

Adam’s loneliness was not a weakness that God condemned. It was a need that God acknowledged. God did not tell him to toughen up, work harder, or learn to be more independent. God had compassion on him and made a helper suitable for him.

Eve was not an afterthought. She was God’s answer to something He Himself had declared was not good.

When Adam saw her, he said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23).

At last.

Here was someone who could know him, stand beside him, and walk with him through whatever came next.

Jacob [Genesis] also knew what it was to be alone.

He was running from the mess he had made and from a brother he believed wanted him dead. He found himself in the wilderness with nothing but the ground beneath him and a stone for a pillow.

He had no home, no family beside him, no sense of safety, and no idea what the future held.

That night, Jacob dreamed of a stairway reaching from earth to heaven, with the angels of God ascending and descending upon it. Then God spoke to him:

“I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go” (Genesis 28:15).

When Jacob awoke, he said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it” (Genesis 28:16).

Jacob believed he was alone. He thought he was sleeping in the middle of nowhere, far from everything familiar and safe.

But heaven was closer than he realized.

God had found him on that weary road.

Years later, Jacob would once again find himself alone, this time beside the Jabbok River. He wrestled with God through the night and refused to let go without a blessing.

Jacob walked away from that encounter with a blessing, a new name, and a limp.

Sometimes an encounter with God does not leave us unscarred. Sometimes we walk away both blessed and wounded. We may never move through life the way we did before, but we leave knowing more clearly who God is—and who we are.

Jesus also knew the wilderness.

Immediately after His baptism, He was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. For forty days, He fasted and faced temptation from the devil. He was hungry, exhausted, and physically alone.

But He was not abandoned.

When the temptation ended, Scripture says that angels came and ministered to Him.

Even the Son of God received comfort in the wilderness.

Needing someone to minister to us does not make us weak. Accepting the help God sends does not make us less of a man. Sometimes God’s provision is supernatural. Sometimes it is a promise spoken in the night. Sometimes it is an angel.

And sometimes that angel is a young mother in Virginia answering a message on Yahoo Personals.

The wilderness was not the last lonely place Jesus would enter.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, He asked His closest friends to remain awake with Him, but they fell asleep. On the cross, He cried out, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?”

Jesus entered the deepest loneliness imaginable. He carried our sin, our sorrow, and our separation so that those who belong to Him would never have to wonder whether they had been abandoned.

Whitney did not save me. Jesus did that.

But God used her to lead me toward the One who could. He used her voice to reach me in the wilderness. She became living proof that I had not been forgotten and that there was still goodness beyond the place where I stood.

Twenty years later, people look at our family and tell us we are blessed.

They are right.

But blessing does not mean we were spared the wilderness.

It does not mean that our marriage, our family, or our life came without sacrifice. It means that God met us there. It means that when the road was dark, He gave us enough light to take one more step.

It means He took two imperfect people—one in Iraq and one in Virginia—and began writing a story neither of us could have written alone.

People see our seven beautiful children and our beautiful home. They do not always see the tears, the fear, the prayers, the forgiveness, the sacrifice, or the countless times we have chosen one another.

They see what was built, but they do not see what it cost.

That is all right.

We see it.

When Whitney and I look into each other’s eyes, we remember. We know where we started. We know the valleys we have walked through, the fires we have survived, and the grace that carried us when we could not carry ourselves.

So, on the eve of our twentieth anniversary, this is what I want my wife to know:

You were never merely my escape from Iraq.

You became my home.

You did not simply help me survive that season. You showed me that there was still a life worth living on the other side of it. You stood beside me as God rebuilt what war, grief, and fear had torn apart.

You have loved me in the garden, on the weary road, beside the river, and in the wilderness.

If I could return to the spring of 2005 and send that first message again, knowing everything the next twenty years would hold—the joy and the sorrow, the victories and the wounds, the laughter and the tears—I would still choose you.

Every single time.

God saw Adam alone and gave him Eve.

He found Jacob sleeping on a stone and promised to remain with him.

He ministered to Jesus in the wilderness—and through Jesus, He made a way for none of us ever to be truly alone again.

And God saw a frightened, grieving soldier somewhere south of Baghdad and sent him comfort through a woman in Virginia.

At the time, I thought I was simply talking to someone on Yahoo Personals.

Looking back, I can say what Jacob said:

“Surely the Lord was in this place, and I was not aware of it.”

Twenty years later, I know.

And I will spend the rest of my life thanking God—and thanking you.