So here it is, the book I guess I’ve been writing since I first started scribbling notes to my daughter as she lay dying. It’s not what I thought it would be, but then neither is my life, nor yours, nor that of anyone I know. I suppose that’s fine. I suppose we haven’t a choice about whether it’s fine, but I suppose it’s fine all the same.

There are things here that were hard to write. There are things here that reduce me, that illuminate the chasm between what I want people to see and what I really am. I suppose that’s all for the best as well, this humbling. Those of you who thought you knew me, and who thought better of me than you should — I am sorry. Set not your hopes on any man, friends. Certainly not this one.

But there are things here — glimpses, perhaps, of sunlight above the clouds — that fill me up with breath and life, that made me grateful as I wrote them. There is brokenness in any man’s life, but there is grace, at least in this man’s life. Unmerited, unexpected grace.

It’s what we cry out for, each of us, that we be given just a spot of mercy, just a cool drink for parched throats, that we not be held to account for all the worst that is in us, but that we be given hope and time to draw a little closer to the best that is in us, which is printed there by God.

I hope you find a spot of mercy here. I’ve been gratified thus far by people who have read drafts and done the two very human things I did while writing this book, which is to weep, and to laugh.  Good tears, the kind that leave you feeling fresh-scrubbed and emptied out. Good laughter, the kind that comes from your belly and fills up the hearts of people who hear you doing it.

There’s a fine line between grief and joy, after all. At least for those who understand, deep down in the eyes of our hearts, that what happens here, on this darkling plain, is not the end of us. Thank God it is not the end of us.

I’ve written this book about our home, room by room. That’s because we live out our short lives room by room. We learn that someone we love is gone as we stand holding the phone in our kitchen. In our bedroom we conceive the child who will enchant and grieve us. In the privacy of our shower we quietly weep over the coming divorce or the depression that will not go away or simply because we are broken.

Life happens room by room, and God comes to us in all these places, if we will let him, if we will just see him, if we will only know that he is never so distant as too many churches and theologians have made him seem. If God is anywhere, then he is with his children. We forgot this as we stripped away the sacred things. My home is a sacred place. Your home is a sacred place. It is sacred in spite of us, and because of us. I hope that after reading this book you’ll see your home this way too, as somewhere more holy.

Tony Woodlief