The ocean calls each morning — a gentle whisper inviting us to leave the mark of God upon the sand. We go not out of duty, but because to stay away would be to deny the call He placed in our hearts. With rake in hand, and a fire poker I’ve adopted as my pencil, we walk toward the shoreline in quiet devotion. Our intention is simple and sacred: to trace a labyrinth that will wait in the sand for the souls who need it — a path for seekers to stumble upon, and in walking its turns, remember their own.
The path to the beach is simple, almost ordinary, and yet something in it feels like a prayer. When our feet touch the sand, I slip instinctively into service. Adi settles beside me in her bright “hot pink” beach chair, doing her work as the sun rises to greet us. These are our mornings on the shores of Galveston.
I’m not entirely sure how or why this began. After we attended a public labyrinth on New Year’s Day, Adi challenged me to learn how to create them on our own. It was the first eclipse of the season that gave her not only the idea, but a deadline: “Let’s learn to make a labyrinth before the next eclipse season.”
The challenge was resolute — a timeline etched more deeply into the cosmos than the patterns we would soon press into the sand. It took only three days for me to learn the motions, and before long we were anonymously leaving these spirals along the shores of Galveston for seekers we would never meet.
This morning was no different from the others, and yet it was entirely its own. The ocean’s breath touched my feet as I began etching the labyrinth, and I recognized again that every turn in the sand is a turn inward toward the One who sculpted the shore itself. My prayer was simple, carried silently with each curve: Whoever finds this—whoever needs it—may the mere presence of this pattern awaken what has not been forgotten, only buried.
Let the wind, the waves, the wide-open sky whisper to them the truth we so often misplace: that any sense of separation from the Creator lives only in the narrow corridors of the mind.
As I traced the first line of the labyrinth this morning — the ocean breathing against my ankles, the sand yielding beneath each step — my mind drifted to how far Adi and I have come in these past eighteen months. It was during another eclipse season in early 2024 — those celestial thresholds that always seem to bring monumental turning points — somewhere between the shadowed moon of March and the darkened sun of April, that our lives nearly ended.
We were out running errands that day, nothing remarkable or memorable about the list we carried. But before we left the parking lot for our next stop, Adi paused.
“I need to buy tickets to Confluence right now before the price goes up. Today is the deadline.”
Confluence, for those who have never experienced it, is far more than a gathering. Set on the regenerative hills of Sovereignty Ranch in Bandera, Texas, it is a living tapestry of souls who are remembering who they were before the world told them otherwise. It is a place where we learn to navigate an ever-shifting landscape with more connection, more confidence, more sovereignty, and more alignment with the perfection of the natural world. A place where people come not to escape reality, but to reclaim it. Adi knew this. I did not. And if I’m honest, I wasn’t exactly in a “yes, and” frame of mind that day. I didn’t want to go. I resisted.
But her pause — her instinct — created a delay of only minutes. Minutes that would place us on the ominously named Dead Man’s Curve at the very moment destiny was waiting.
With tickets now in our proverbial hands, we pulled out of the parking lot to finish our evening errands. The sun was slipping into its descent, the sky blazing with orange and red hues — the kind of sky that announces the end of another ordinary day on Earth. But this day would not end ordinarily.
It was in that fading light that I saw him first.
A car drifting into our lane. Headlights fixed on us. A drunk driver barreling straight ahead on a stretch of asphalt with a reputation for bad luck. He was going seventy miles an hour, missed the turn entirely, and hit us head-on with the full force of his momentum, spinning our car toward oncoming traffic.
The screech of twisting metal pierced the dusk, and the acrid burn of the airbags filled the car. In that suspended breath between impact and stillness, Adi and I felt the same truth rise within us: how swiftly this fragile, precious thing we call life can be taken.
It wasn’t until later that we learned the deeper mercy — that the angle of the collision had spun us just enough to wrap our car around the guardrail instead of sending us across it. That thin band of steel became the very hand of God, shielding us from the lanes that surely would have finished what had begun.
As the dust settled and the world returned in fragments of sound and fractured light, we knew — with absolute clarity — that God had intervened. We were saved, held, protected in a way that left no room for coincidence. We were on borrowed time now, living inside a grace we did nothing to earn. Our final chapter could have closed that night, yet the Author had chosen to write an epilogue.
In the weeks that followed, we convalesced. The adrenaline that had carried us through the crash faded, replaced by aches, bruises, and the quiet unraveling of shock. And as Confluence loomed on the calendar, my enthusiasm waned even further. We would be camping on the ranch with no working restrooms or showers — something I had not agreed to in any lifetime. My idea of camping is the Marriott. This was decidedly not the Marriott.
I grumbled my way through the first two days of Confluence, not exactly embodying the stellar “Plus One” I usually pride myself on being. I attended only a handful of the talks Adi was excited about. The rest of the time, I wandered the ranch looking for anything to distract myself from the fact that I would have preferred to be literally anywhere else
It was in this state of quiet self-pity that God spoke in a way I could not deny. Adi and I joined a large gathering of people — two to three hundred strong — standing together in an unremarkable field beneath a canvas tent, waiting for the eclipse. As the moon slid over the face of the sun, day dissolved into night. Total darkness fell across the land, the kind of darkness that carries its own presence. A hush moved through the crowd, a reverence so complete it felt like the earth itself had paused to listen.
And then, as the first sliver of sunlight returned, something shifted. I felt it deep in my chest — a stirring, a knowing, a wordless understanding that life would never be the same again.
“Something just shifted,” I said to Adi, watching her hold her hands to her heart.
“Things will never be the same again.”
I cannot explain it logically, nor have I experienced anything like it before or since. But in that moment of returning light, in that breath between darkness and day, I knew that Adi and I were being guided toward something far larger than either of us could comprehend.
In the fall of 2025, Adi and I found ourselves once again on the land at Sovereignty Ranch. This time in service to a Fall Festival that was being held. When we shared our story with the Confluence team — the accident, the epilogue God had written for us, the labyrinths we quietly leave on Galveston Beach — they listened with a kind of recognition. And then they said the words that landed in me like a bell striking its note:
“You have to do a labyrinth at Confluence.”
In that moment, it felt as though the spiral of our lives had brought us full circle. Every twist, every detour, every mercy along the way had led us back to this place, this land, these people.
And suddenly we were left standing at the edge of a larger realization:
Is this God’s plan?
Is this what all the turning was preparing us for?
What began as survival had become calling.
What began as reluctance had become purpose.
What began as an ending had become a beginning.
And standing there on that familiar soil, I felt the quiet truth settle in: the path had never been random. Every step, every heartbreak, every narrow escape, every morning we traced God’s name into the sand — all of it had been shaping us for this moment. Not to arrive at an answer, but to learn how to listen. To follow. To say yes when the wind shifts and the veil thins.
For the first time, I understood: the labyrinth was never just something we made.
It was something God was making in us.
Confluence will be held at Sovereignty Ranch in Bandera, Texas April 23-26, 2026.
For tickets visit: https://www.confluenceevent.com
