There are stupid rules you can dismiss. And then there are rules you simply obey. When the captain of your boat says no bananas, you do not bring a freaking banana.

Tonight I spent two hours negotiating with my two-year-old granddaughter, Amilia Rose. She is one of those deeply intuitive, profoundly beautiful little souls who feels everything, and she has one small challenge: she absolutely hates bedtime.

There is a point where you have to stop roasting marshmallows in the pit of despair. After looking the deep challenges directly in the eye, after standing in ruins of what we lost, I reached that point this week. 

I spent part of this morning with Jeremiah. Not a long sojourn. Just enough to sit with him. And what struck me is how little he resembles the figures we typically celebrate. No conquests. No empire. No public triumph. He is remembered, simply, as the weeping prophet.

There are moments in life when the weight simply becomes more than you know how to carry. That is where I find myself today. Over the past several weeks, it has felt as though wave after wave has continued to roll in before I have had time to regain my footing. The fire that destroyed our family cabin was far more than the loss of a building. It represented one of the great symbols of stability in our family’s life. It held generations of memories, our handcrafted family crest, the checker table where our children and their friends signed their names as they stepped into marriage, the rock boards that chronicled decades of adventures around the world, and countless reminders that family is built one meaningful moment at a time. Then the rains came. Beaver is much more than the town where I grew up. It is the landscape of my childhood. A complex, beautiful childhood where I learned some of life’s greatest lessons, where I experienced the generous love of my mother, the quiet wisdom and unwavering faith of my blind father, and where so much of the stability that has anchored my life first took root. The mountains above Beaver were my sanctuary. As a teenager, they became the place I escaped to think, to dream, to wrestle with life, and to find peace. Those mountains helped shape the man I would become. Now they have been ravaged by fire. Stripped bare, they could no longer absorb the rain. Floodwaters rushed down the mountainsides, carrying ash, mud, charred timber, and debris into the valley below. Roads were washed away, and Beaver, the town of my childhood, flooded. Even the road back to our cabin disappeared beneath the destruction. I couldn’t even return to gather what little remained. It felt as though the land itself was grieving.

Ever since I shared the story of our family cabin burning to the ground, one question keeps coming up. (If you missed that story, you can read it here.) “What happened to the rock board?” Truthfully, I’ve thought about little else. Over twenty-seven years beginning in 1999, we filled nearly four boards with four hundred and three rocks—four hundred and three distinct family adventures and experiences. Mount Everest. The Great Wall of China. Petra. Hundreds of places. Hundreds of experiences. Each stone held a story that shaped who we became.