During the summer of 2022, without fully recognizing what I was doing, I began tying up the loose ends of my life.

I closed accounts accumulated over forty years. Online accounts. Bank accounts. Credit cards. I reached out to people from my distant past.

One person reached back.

She was a woman I had dated in college, someone with whom I'd had no contact for forty years. We spoke briefly by telephone. She recognized the pain I was in, certainly more clearly than I recognized it myself, and offered to meet for lunch. Where she extended a hand and opened a door.

"I surrendered my life to Christ in 1995," she told me, "and this is what it has meant for me."

Over the next two weeks, as another September 11th anniversary approached, we talked. We prayed. We laughed, cried, argued and prayed some more.

On Friday, September 9, 2022, she asked me a question.

"If God was sitting here right now, what would you ask him?"

Without hesitation, I answered:

"A good night's sleep."

For nearly two years, I had been surviving on approximately two hours of sleep a night. A misdiagnosed condition, peripheral artery disease, had left me in nightly crippling pain.

That evening, I returned to my little teardrop trailer.

And I slept. . . . ten hours. . . . straight through.

At four o'clock the following morning, September 10, 2022, I awoke to a beautiful moonrise over the small pond where I was camped.

Looking out at that scene, I made a declaration:

"I'm in. I don't get it, but I can't do this on my own anymore. I need you God."

Days later, driving west across South Dakota on Interstate 90, I had no idea what awaited me.

After two days on the road, I stopped at a rest area near White Lake, South Dakota. As the sun rose, I found myself photographing a small white chapel against a magnificent morning sky.

A woman appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and asked me a question.

"Do you know Dignity?"

The puzzled look on my face must have answered her.

"Next rest stop," she said.

And she was gone.

In the still wakening morning, I encountered Dignity,

The magnificent sculpture of a Native American woman standing with her arms outstretched, overlooking the Missouri River.

I was deeply moved.

I have returned to visit her, and be still, every time I've passed that way.

Continuing west, my first night in South Dakota was spent boondocking along the canyon wall of the Badlands.

The following morning, I awoke to another extraordinary sight.

The pre-dawn sky, painted a brilliant ribbon of color across the horizon above my little teardrop trailer.

I photographed it, knowing that God was indeed leading the way.

A week later, I found myself at Pathways Spiritual Sanctuary in the Black Hills.

I spent an afternoon wandering through its extraordinary peace and beauty, stopping to contemplate the inspirational messages placed along the paths. Rest at benches provided along the way. Sometimes add a reflection to the journals awaiting at each bench.

One of the sign posts read:

"A bend in the road is not the end of the road... unless you fail to make the turn."

As dusk settled over this place I came upon a cast where handprints were embedded in concrete beside an exit prayer of affirmation.

I placed my hands in those impressions and reflected on the extraordinary encounters of the preceding week.

"How funny it is that I keep stumbling on these places!" I thought.

And then, clearly, unmistakably, four words were placed upon my heart. "I led you here."

At that moment, I had never felt more loved or cared for in my life.

Little more than a week earlier, I had stood beneath a moonlit sky and surrendered my life to God, admitting that I could no longer make the journey alone.

Now I understood something I hadn't understood until then.

I was never walking alone.