In the summer of 2021, after the collapse of my marriage and career, I was pulled into a darkness I didn't think I would survive.
Depression stripped life of meaning. Some mornings I couldn't rise from bed. Some nights I wished for it all to end. I reached for whatever could hold me together: pills, prayer, meditation, and the mindset practices I had learned from the law of attraction.
And then, in that emptiness, something unexpected broke through.
My mind began slipping into altered states of consciousness. Dreams, visions, trances. Moments where my ego dissolved and another reality revealed itself. They did not feel abstract or symbolic. They unfolded during a period when my mind and body were pushed to their limits. Under those conditions, something began to change.
Neuroscience offers part of the explanation. The altered states I experienced are associated with a temporary quieting of the brain's prefrontal cortex — a phenomenon researchers call transient hypofrontality — and with gamma brainwaves, one of the fastest types of electrical activity the brain produces. Everyone's brain produces brief bursts of gamma during ordinary moments of sharp focus or sudden insight, but sustained gamma activity has been documented much more rarely, particularly during advanced meditation, deep creative flow, and certain altered states of consciousness. What I experienced had a name, even if I didn't know it at the time.
Science can describe what happened in my brain. It can explain the mechanisms involved, but not the meaning of the experience. That meaning belongs to the realm of faith. For me, these experiences were profoundly spiritual.
Looking back, I believe I was living through what some psychologists have called a spiritual emergency — a period in which psychological collapse and spiritual awakening become impossible to separate. At the time, I had no language for what was happening to me.
The first — and most transformative — of those experiences happened on the night of July 22, 2021, in a hotel room in Key West. I sat down at a desk sometime before midnight and began writing a cover letter to WCM Investment Management, the company I dreamed of working for. I did not plan it. I was not editing as I went. I was not crafting. It felt as though it were being dictated to me, and I was simply trying to keep up. Time disappeared. I wrote without stopping for seven hours. As the sun rose, I sent it.
Three days earlier, I met with a psychic my ex-wife had recommended. She looked at me and said, "God loves you. You are going to get your dream job. You are going to be happier than you ever thought you could be."
I had no reason to believe her. But I was out of alternatives. I was out of everything except, somehow, the capacity to believe that she might be right. That was the only raw material I had.
So I believed her instead.
Not because the facts supported it, but because, for the first time in longer than I could remember, I let myself become that child Jesus spoke of — undefended, trusting, without the armor of pride or the weight of accumulated cynicism. A child again, by necessity — thirty-seven years old, completely surrendered. Naked, yet unashamed.
What I had that night was not evidence. It was faith.
Only years later did I realize Jesus had already described the path I had walked. He taught that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains. That all things are possible for the one who believes. That unless we become like little children, we will never enter the Kingdom of God — not a place, but a new way of living in the presence of God. And that no one can see that Kingdom unless they are born again — born not of the flesh, but of the Spirit.
At the time, I understood none of this. I lived it before I had the words to describe it.
It was only much later that I fully understood what had happened that night. I believed I was writing a cover letter that might save my career.
I now believe God was saving my life.
What felt like the most desperate night of my life became the beginning of everything that followed.
Sitting at that desk, the stories I had told about myself began to give way — the narratives of who I was supposed to be, the ambitions and defenses and old wounds the ego had spent thirty-seven years constructing. I felt them collapse, one by one, until there was nothing left of the man I had been. And in the space where he used to be, something else arrived: not a plan, not an ambition, but something I couldn't name and didn't need to, because for the first time I simply knew it was there.
I do not say this as metaphor.
I believe I was reborn that night.
What emerged on the page was not a cover letter. It was a confession — a man emptying himself completely. His divorce, his failures as a husband, his fears as a father. The distance between who he had been and who he had always hoped to become.
For the first time, I saw him with compassion. I thanked him for carrying me this far. God had already forgiven him. All that remained was for me to do the same.
That was the moment I understood how God loves us. Not because we have earned it. Not because we have arrived somewhere worthy of it. But because God loves us the way a father loves his children. It is a kind of love that does not bargain. It does not keep score. It does not disappear when we fail. God simply loves. And that love is there waiting for us when we finally stop defending ourselves against it.
What began as the pursuit of a career became a deep relationship with God. In finding Him, I discovered that the greatest calling of my life was not to achieve my dreams, but to use my own suffering to help others find meaning, purpose, and hope in theirs.
The letter was never really for WCM. It was my truth.
And the truth set me free.
