If you’re in a dark place, you aren’t buried. You’ve been planted. Bloom.
That’s the line I wish someone had leaned over and whispered to me in the years when silence and sorrow felt like a lid pressed down on my chest. It’s also why I wrote this book — not for neat answers, but for the one thing a story can offer that a checklist cannot: the steady, human proof that you are not alone. This may be for you. Or for someone you love.
Memoirs aren’t instruction manuals. They don’t hand out ten tidy steps to fix a life. When they’re honest and raw, they do something quieter and fiercer: they give shape to the ache, language to the silence, and they lean close in the dark to whisper, me too. They are lanterns held up in a long, dark room — not to tell you what to do, but to show that survival is possible, that redemption is possible, that hope can outlast silence.
Stories go where advice cannot. A list of steps can feel like a cold stone when you’re already sinking. But a lived story — someone who has been carried through the impossible — can slip past shame and breath new air into a tired heart. A sad story that finds its way to a hopeful ending is medicine; it doesn’t erase the hurt, but it proves something truer: even in sorrow, God’s grip does not let go.
That is why I keep coming back to the prairie. On the prairie the soil cracks wide beneath the western sun. Storms strip the fields bare. Bones bleach in the light. And still — after rain — something green will push through. Wildflowers rise where you would swear nothing could grow.
Dead doesn’t mean done. The prairie knows how to rise.
Robert Nail put it like this in Prairie Land:
Each man holds within his heart
The dreams of a land all his own.
No other land will do.
No other land is home.
And then the couplet that still stops me cold:
Here beneath the western sun
I know at last my quest is done.
That is the heartbeat of Bones Beneath the Prairie. Not a sermon. Not a how-to. A witness — a story that begins in the dark and refuses to stay buried.
So if you — or someone you love — are standing in that place that feels like the end, hear me now: you’re not buried. You’ve been planted.
Bloom.
God’s Word proves it.
“Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.” — Ezekiel 37:5
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