Recently, I found some handwritten pages I had kept for more than forty years. I believe I wrote them sometime around 1984 or 1985, based on other writings from that period. They weren’t dated, and I had almost forgotten about them.
When I began reading, I recognized the young man who had written those words. I remembered how much I loved spending time with God, praying, listening, and writing down what I believed He was saying to me. Hearing God’s voice was one of the things I treasured most. I didn’t always understand what I heard, but I wanted to listen. Sometimes I would write it down without knowing whether the words concerned something happening in my life or something I might understand later.
I’ve always believed the Bible is the Word of God. These pages were something different. They were my personal record of what I believed God was speaking to my heart.
What surprised me wasn’t simply finding the pages. It was reading them after having written the story of my life. One sentence caught my attention:
If your eyes become cloudy, and you can no longer see, then you must walk by faith.
I don’t remember what I thought those words meant when I wrote them. Perhaps they spoke to something I was experiencing at the time. I really don’t know. But I know what they mean to me now.
Years later, there would be a season when I could no longer sense God’s presence as I always had. I’ve shared that experience in my memoir. It was an experience unlike anything I had known before, and I couldn’t understand why it was happening. Reading that old sentence brought those memories back. I had written about walking by faith long before I experienced just how difficult that could be. I wonder whether I understood the words at all when I first wrote them.
Then I read another sentence:
If when you can’t see, you walk — Then when you can see, you can run.
I smiled. Of all the things I might have written as a young man, there were those words about walking and running. I had no idea how important running would become in my life. I certainly didn’t imagine that decades later I would write a book with a road at the center of its story.
I’m not claiming those words were necessarily a prediction that I would become a runner. They may have meant something entirely different to me when I wrote them. But after looking back over the life I’ve lived, I couldn’t help noticing the connection. What had once been words on a piece of paper had become something I could recognize in my own experience.
Near the end of the writing, I found these words:
Keep walking. Keep persevering. Finish the race.
Looking back over my life, I can see the times I kept going and the times I didn’t. There were moments when perseverance came easily and others when I could barely imagine taking another step. I didn’t always finish well. Sometimes I made choices that took me far from the man I wanted to be. Yet those words were still there, written decades before I knew how much I would need God’s grace.
I don’t know everything they meant when I first wrote them. I don’t know that I ever will. But I find it remarkable that after everything I’ve experienced, I can read them today and recognize so much of my life.
Finding those pages reminded me of something I’ve come to believe over the years. When God speaks, we may not understand everything He is saying at the time. His words may have meaning for the moment we’re living, for something still ahead, or even for something in our past that we haven’t yet understood. And I believe His purposes can extend beyond our own lifetimes.
I didn’t find these writings because I was looking for evidence that God had told me what my future would hold. I found them after writing much of my story, when I was already beginning to recognize connections I hadn’t seen before. Perhaps that’s why they meant so much to me.
The young man who wrote those pages didn’t know about the roads ahead. He didn’t know what he would accomplish, what he would lose, or how many times he would need to begin again. He simply loved God and wanted to hear His voice.
More than forty years later, I still love Him just as deeply. And I still want to hear His voice.
From my original handwritten notes, believed to have been written around 1984–1985. At the time, I was simply recording what I believed God was speaking to my heart.
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