On Tucker’s last morning with us, I woke to the sound of him whining outside my bedroom door.

My first thought was that he needed to go outside.

Then I heard the storm.

As I walked toward the front door, Tucker jumped up at me. But when I opened the door, he showed no interest in going outside. It wasn’t his bladder that had gotten him up. It was the thunder.

I let Frankie and Sam out of the laundry room, and they weren’t interested in facing the weather either.

So I did something I’ve done many times before.

I laid down on the living room floor.

The dogs joined me.

As the rain fell and thunder rolled, I breathed in and out the same words:

We’re safe.

We’re healthy.

We’re free.

As I lay there, I thought about the story of Jesus asleep in the boat while the disciples panicked around Him.

The storm was real.

The fear was real.

But Jesus wasn’t afraid.

I also found myself thinking about the hymn It Is Well With My Soul.

Recently, I learned the story behind it. Horatio Spafford wrote those words after losing all four of his daughters in a shipwreck. As he crossed the ocean to join his grieving wife, he passed near the place where they had died.

It was there that he wrote:

“When sorrows like sea billows roll…”

And somehow, he could still say:

“It is well with my soul.”

I got goosebumps when I learned that story.

Because those words weren’t written after the storm.

They were written in the middle of it.

For the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about storms.

Not thunderstorms.

Life storms.

The kind that arrive without warning.

The kind that leave damage behind.

The kind that shake loose things you thought were secure.

Before my first breakdown, I had been working incredibly hard on myself.

I was going to therapy.

Working the steps of AA.

Attending church.

Volunteering.

Studying.

Writing.

Exercising.

Sharing what I was learning.

If I’m being honest, there was some desperation mixed in with all of it. I felt like I was trying to reclaim a life I had nearly lost.

I thought I was rebuilding my life.

Then the storms came.

And it felt as though everything I had been trying to build was flattened.

I was angry.

Confused.

Heartbroken.

I couldn’t understand why, after so much effort, surrender, growth, and hard work, everything seemed to collapse anyway.

For a long time, I focused on the damage.

The things that had changed.

The things I had lost.

The things I couldn’t understand.

But eventually, I noticed something else.

I noticed what remained.

What was left behind from the wreckage wasn’t nothing.

It was a foundation.

And slowly, I began to realize that the foundation was what I had been building all along.

The therapy.

The recovery.

The prayer.

The studying.

The writing.

The learning.

The growing.

None of it was wasted.

I thought I was building a house.

Instead, I was pouring a foundation.

And when the storms came, the house took some hits.

But the foundation held.

These days, I don’t know exactly what comes next.

I recently left a job without knowing precisely what will replace it.

I don’t know exactly how every bill will get paid.

I don’t know exactly what opportunities are around the corner.

But something has shifted.

For most of my life, trust meant believing everything would work out.

Now I think trust means something different.

Trust means knowing what remains after the storm.

I’ve seen what remains.

I’ve seen what held.

I’ve seen the foundation.

And because of that, I can take the next step.

Not because the forecast is clear.

Not because the storm will never come again.

But because I’ve already seen what survives it.