Someday you may face a decision and wish we could sit down together and talk about it.
Maybe it will be about work.
Or family.
Money.
Faith.
A mistake.
A risk worth taking.
Or a road you are not sure you should follow.
You may wonder what I would say.
Someday I will not be there to answer.
That is why I wrote this book.
I cannot know what questions life will ask you. I cannot leave you an answer for every situation.
What I can leave you is some of the thinking that helped me find my way.
The stories in these pages come from choices I made, mistakes I paid for, people who taught me, and questions I am still asking.
Some lessons came from my parents. Some came from work and failure. Some came from Chrystina and our children. And some took decades before I understood what they meant.
I do not expect you to live my life.
I do not even expect you to agree with everything in this book.
I hope you understand why I came to believe what I believe.
Use what helps.
Question what does not.
Improve what you can.
Life will give you circumstances I never faced and choices I could not have anticipated.
You will have to decide for yourself.
That is exactly as it should be.
But before you can understand why I see the world the way I do, you need to understand what came before me.
None of us begins with ourselves.
We begin with what other people carried for us.
And that is where this story begins.