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A Pause, Not a Surrender
Wilfred Owen was a well known poet around the time of World War I. He wrote:
“Light many lamps and gather round his bed. Lend him your eyes, warm blood and will to live. But death replied, ‘I choose him.’ So he went, and there was silence in the summer night. Silence and safety, and the veils of sleep. And then, far away, the thudding of the guns.”
There’s something haunting in his words —a contrast between the quiet and what comes next. Silence before the storm. A pause before the battle.
In a privileged place during a privileged time, most of us living in the United States have never experienced war the way Owen did, bust most of us know the feeling of standing on the edge of something hard, knowing that there is an “effectual struggle” ahead. Sometimes, that moment right before we have to move forward can feel eerily still. If we’re not careful, we might mistake that stillness for defeat.
Crossroads and Course Corrections
A few years ago, I found myself in one of those moments where a pause felt a lot like losing.
It started like a lot of my stories do, with a run. I don’t run much anymore, but when I did, I ran with the same group of guys for years. We’ve had plenty of conversations over the years that go well beyond pace and mileage.
On one particular morning, one of my friends and I were running alone, and that morning was something different entirely.
My friend brought up an article I’d written, The Thing About Crossroads, and we started talking about pivotal moments in our lives — times when we’ve had to make decisions that would change our trajectory. He told me about his teenage years, about a moment when he stood outside a church, ready to walk away, only to hear a quiet but unmistakable whisper:
“If you leave now, you may never come back.”
It stopped him. He turned around, walked back inside, and that decision shaped the rest of his life.
I started sharing my own stories. I told him about my kids and their struggles, most of them commonplace for kids of that age. I told him about one of the most profound defining moments I had, sitting at Grandma Dee’s kitchen table, a crossroads I hadn’t…
