I began this journal in April and earlier today, at a bustling city park, filled its last pages. In detail – which is to say it reads “I’m fucking sad” on and on with few further insights – are entries on my divorce, my parents’ illnesses and treatments (they’re fine now!), deaths, friends moving and the loss of a job I adored.

Many of my pillars have collapsed or taken severe damage this year. I’m a predestined sadsack even when life is going great. How shaken I am now! Especially since I felt I was building The Good Life™️.

Who’s to say I wasn’t? A friend has said to me often: we can do everything right and life can still go wrong; all we do is make the best decisions we can with the info we have.

Some have called this my Job year. My home stands, my family breathes, I’m yet to develop septic sores (though quitting drinking at 23 and getting divorced at 27 does put me on track for shingles at 32). Hardly a one-to-one comparison.

But like Job, embarrassingly, expectedly, I’ve wondered why this is all happening. When he finally gets God’s ear, God not only doesn’t answer him but doesn’t even acknowledge Job by name. “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? … Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?… Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper?” Brutal!

Marilynne Robinson posits if the universe is all just the same matter that burst into form from the big bang, then Job was right there as the foundations were laid – we all were.

In college I got high and watched a 30 minute time-lapse video of how the universe will end over the next trillions of years. Humanity dies 90 seconds in. “Isn’t it peaceful to think none of this lasts?” friends asked while I hoped for a cartoon anvil to crush me. Peace couldn’t feel further.

I still find no peace thinking about my blip existence. But reflecting on these endings at a park surrounded by others experiencing their own beginnings and endings, none new under the sun, all people of the same afflicted matter that boomed billions of years ago, I feel less alone.

I hope I help others feel less alone in return. Frederick Buechner said, “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Vocationally, my deep gladness is to help people see Lexington as i see it – home. I really felt like I was doing that through my work at CivicLex and the paper. Personally, everyone I meet is joy, and my gladness blooms if I help one see themself as joy. Both of those can continue.

“Love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction,” Simone Weil wrote.

“He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though the nail pierces it finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center; it is not in the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God … this nail has pierced cleanly through all creation, through the thickness of the screen separating the soul from God. It finds itself at the intersection of the creation and the Creator. This point of intersection is the crossing branches of the Cross.”