Contents

• Plans Set Aside
• The Manuscript Under Counsel
• Affliction At Home
• Encouragement In The Midst Of It
• Requests For Prayer
• The Lord Establishes His Steps

Sometimes the Lord takes a thing you thought was already in motion and sets it down for a while. That is what happened with the chapters of A Heart Curved Inward I had been posting here. “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). I had a way in mind. He has had another.

I shared an unedited first draft with brothers and sisters at Cornerstone. I should have said something before I took those posts down. I am sorry I did not. The manuscript is now in book form and in the hands of a few trusted brothers for counsel, correction, and encouragement. I pulled the public chapters for two reasons: I want this work to be something the elders and congregation would be glad to see go forward, and I need to keep the draft from being copied while it is still being shaped.

I still plan to self-publish through Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). I will not do that before I have sought the wisdom of a multitude of counselors—brothers and elders who can tell me plainly whether this is something to pursue. “Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed” (Proverbs 15:22). 

The book is not the only thing the Lord has set at a different pace. Life at home has not waited.

Dad had his first heart attack on February 19th. The paramedics placed a stent in him and took him to the hospital. He was told he had multiple blockages, and that smoking had done it. He stayed some days while they weighed more stents against open-heart surgery. He was leaning toward the surgery. Then the operation the doctor had recommended never came, and he left with a prescription.

The second attack came only six months later, at the beginning of August—on his and my mother’s anniversary. He refused the hospital. He said the paramedics were the only ones who had actually helped him, because they were the ones who put the stent in.

Ma has also been carrying her own weight. She recently learned she has renal failure, accompanied by anemia. The pain is at times so bad she cannot do ordinary things, let alone make it to church. The health department in Greeneville has been slow, and more occupied with secondary matters than with the answers she needs. She and Dad have no insurance and no means to cover medical bills on their own.

My younger brother Nick has been living there with them for over a year. That has been a help. He works at the local Wendy’s and pitches in on bills, and sometimes covers what they cannot when the tile work dries up for Dad. 

Recently David, my oldest half-brother, moved in with his girlfriend and their two children. I can only imagine what that adds to a house already carrying so much.

Through all of this, I have been more deeply encouraged than I expected to be.

I thank God for my mother’s church. They have not let her vanish. They call. They ask. They remember her and encourage her. “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Corinthians 12:26). My wife and I have been calling as well. We seek to bring some encouragement and instead I come away deeply encouraged by her. She gives thanks without theater. She will say that it hurts, and she will not let the hurt become the whole sentence. She has not complained. She keeps her eyes on Christ our Lord—“looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2)—and she holds to Him and to whatever He assigns. I live too far away to be useful in the ways a son wants to be useful. I thank God I have been allowed to watch her hold fast. That has been His kindness to me.

My wife has been a kindness of another kind. She has been naming, quietly and without flattery, the work she has seen the Lord doing in me and through me. “Encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thessalonians 5:11). Some of the women in our church reached out to her about the book while it was still posted here. She told me. She did not make it about me. She made it about the Lord being kind. I needed that more than I needed another paragraph on the page.

If you would pray, I would be grateful.

Pray for my father’s salvation. That weighs heavily on me. “Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved” (Romans 10:1). By God’s grace he has softened some since 2021. When we mention the Lord now, we are not quieted, ridiculed, or made to feel ashamed for speaking of Him. Pray that the Lord would continue to open a door for the word, that I may declare the mystery of Christ to him (Colossians 4:3).

Pray for my mother’s comfort, for healing, and for growing faith—if the Lord wills those things. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction” (2 Corinthians 1:3–4).

Pray for me as I try to love them from a distance, and for the book still under counsel—that I would not run ahead of the brothers, and that I would not shrink back from whatever the Lord actually assigns. “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:15).

The heart of a man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps. That has been true here.

Soli Deo Gloria.