The year hot cocoa got a bad rap.

I’d like to add something to yesterday’s conversation about fear and The Calling:

It occurred to me last night while I was washing dishes after dinner that I have become pretty comfortable with the unknown and the state of not always knowing the way forward.

This character trait of mine became illustrated to the MAX when, while traveling the world at the age of 29, I ran out of money somewhere between Dublin and Tel Aviv.

I had booked one of those trips where all of your flights are “connected.” I guess there’s a name for that which I can’t recall, only that the booking service I used touted this method as being a cost cutter. How clever I felt when, from the comfort and romance of my cushy living room in New Orleans, I made a plan to take a 2 week-long excursion to Jerusalem to visit my brother (10 weeks into a poorly budgeted international trip), using Dublin as a home base. The caveat, however, of having booked all those exciting flights at once (I learned all too late) is that if you don’t show up for even one leg of your trip, no matter how many destinations you’ve booked, every flight thereafter gets canceled. This meant that if I had decided to make the more prudent choice to hunker down at a friend’s place in Limerick with my remaining $14, where at least I knew that groceries were extremely cheap and I could probably couch surf for the last couple of weeks, my flight back home from Dublin to Florida would have been nixed.

This was the year that I found God again.

This was the year that I had decided, no matter what, I was going to be okay and that help would find me. I therefore boarded a plane from Dublin to Ben Gurion Airport with $14 in my bank account and a 20 euro note that a concerned friend back in Ireland had shoved into my pocket upon hearing of my predicament.

And although if I could go back in time I would do many things differently, that was the trip that really showed me what I was made of. That was the trip where I became inspired to write my first novel, God Comes to Black Pool; where I got to experience the perfect love of a kindred spirit; where I got to see my brother happy and in his element, finally; where, wandering around Jerusalem, subsisting on hot cocoa and cheap falafel sandwiches, sitting very still in cafes or at the gates to the old city, or next to a giant tree where all of the birds in the entire city would come for bed, I really saw how broken I had become. And yet I never lost the will to go on. 

Despite all of this—despite every setback, every pain that stung like failure, every interaction I had that made me feel small, I knew in my bones that after all of this, everything, one day, was going to be glorious.

I suppose some people would call that grit. The ability to forge onward despite what’s going on outside of you. It’s the upkeep and maintenance of the interior landscape that makes confidence and calm possible, despite a raging storm on a vast and fathomless sea of unknowns.

I did not plan to become this gritted. I never desired to become strong through hardship. And yet, here’s something like a secret:

It does not take setback, failure, or hard times to make you strong. That which has the power to knock you down and challenge you beyond anything you’ve ever known is constantly lying in wait within you. Merely do whatever it is you feel called to do. And then do it again. And again. And again.

You may wake up one morning and suddenly not recognize yourself.

Or, as it happened with me, you’ll wake up one morning and suddenly recognize yourself again for the first time in a very long while.

Go kick some ass today, dear reader.