I built a life on trusting my own understanding.
Not arrogance — I'll never call it that. Just what happens when your own read on things hasn't let you down yet. I could see three steps ahead on most things. I could talk my way into a room and talk my way back out of trouble. If something needed figuring out, I was going to be the one who figured it out. So I leaned on that. Harder, when things got uncertain. Tighter, when the ground started to shift.
Then I died.
May 13, 2021. And Jesus sent me back — not to the same life I'd built before, but with words already in my ear I never asked for and can't shake: there is still so much for you to do.
I wish I could tell you I came back leaning on Him instead of myself. I didn't. I came back grateful, shaken, changed in the ways that show up right away — but underneath it, still the same guy who trusted his own read on things more than he trusted anyone else's, including God's. Still gripping the wheel. Still assuming that if I could just think clearly enough, plan carefully enough, understand deeply enough, I could keep steering this.
And then the one tool I trusted most started failing me.
Primary Progressive Aphasia doesn't ask permission. It takes the very thing I built my whole identity on — my understanding, my ability to find the word, to follow the thread, to explain myself clearly — and it erodes it. Slowly. Unmistakably. There is no plan sharp enough to out-plan what it's doing to me.
For a long time, that felt like the cruelest thing to lose. The one thing I trusted most, going, on a timeline I don't control.
But here's what I didn't expect. Every time my own understanding came up short — every stumbled word, every thread I couldn't quite follow to the end — I had exactly two choices. Panic at what I was losing. Or lean somewhere else.
I wasn't given a life where "lean not on your own understanding" is a nice devotional thought. I was given a life where it's the only option left standing. And in the actual, forced letting go of the one thing I trusted most, I found out Proverbs 3 wasn't being poetic. Lean not. Not "don't rely on it too much." Put your weight somewhere else entirely.
I don't know how much of my own understanding I'll have left a year from now. I've made peace with that in a way I couldn't have before this diagnosis forced the issue. What I do know is this: the moment I stopped needing my own understanding to hold everything together was the moment I actually started to move — not steering anymore, but following.
I was a menace to my own understanding for most of my life. I'm not anymore. Not because I got smarter. Because I finally leaned somewhere else.
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