The Rock and the Readying: How Two Decades of Heartbreak Prepared Me for One Moment

The basketball still echoed off the backboard as Josh and I called it a day. Same Nike sweatshirt, same smile, same promise to meet up tomorrow at the park with the guys. That was Tuesday. Wednesday, I was rigging ropes on Tallman Mountain State Park, watching Tommy—a Vietnam vet with steady hands, a thousand-yard stare, and a Marlboro red hanging from his mouth—pull a body back from the cliff's edge. When we turned the victim over, I saw that same Nike sweatshirt. Josh's face. My friend had cut his wrists with bottle caps before hanging himself from a tree overlooking the Hudson River and a several hundred foot fall.

I was sixteen. A volunteer firefighter for barely six months. And in that moment, something inside me shifted—not broke, but hardened. Like metal in a forge.

For the next twenty-five years, I would carry badge after badge, serve in role after role, thinking I was just doing my job. Volunteer firefighter. Seasonal highway worker. Park ranger. Court clerk. Corrections officer. Police officer. Each position brought its own catalog of horrors: the domestic violence calls where children cowered in corners, the fatal accidents where families were shattered in an instant, the overdoses where mothers held their sons' lifeless bodies. Nearly eighteen years in law enforcement alone, witnessing humanity at its most broken.

I thought I was serving my community. I didn't realize I was being prepared.

The Collision

The cardiothoracic pediatric surgeon's words hit us like a freight train: complex congenital heart defects, multiple surgeries, uncertain prognosis and complications. My wife and I sat in that office, our unborn son's future hanging in the balance, and I felt two lives colliding—the one where I responded to other people's tragedies, and the one where tragedy was now visiting my own doorstep.

But something unexpected happened in that moment of impact. Instead of crumbling, I felt something click into place. All those years of trauma, all those sleepless nights processing crime scenes I couldn't unsee, all those moments when I'd held other parents as their worlds fell apart—suddenly it all made sense. Not the suffering itself, but the steadying that comes from walking through fire again and again.

As absurd as it sounds, I could hear the echo of an ancient myth: Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder up a mountain for eternity. I'd always focused on the punishment aspect, the futility. But sitting in that surgeon's office, I realized something different. The goal was never reaching the summit. The goal was the pushing itself—the daily act of resistance against despair, the muscle memory of perseverance, the callused hands that come from refusing to quit.

Every traumatic call I'd responded to hadn't just broken something in me. It had built something too.

The Refining

Scripture speaks of being refined like gold in the furnace: "But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold" (Job 23:10). For decades, I thought the furnace was punishment. Now I understand it was preparation.

Each emergency call was another degree of heat. Josh's suicide taught me that evil is real and random and devastating. The fatal car accidents taught me that life is fragile and precious and fleeting. The domestic violence calls taught me that people can endure unimaginable suffering and still choose love. The overdose scenes taught me that hope can survive even in the darkest valleys.

I wasn't accumulating trauma—I was accumulating trust. Trust that I could face the unthinkable and not be consumed by it. Trust that God's presence is most real not in the comfortable moments but in the furnace itself. Trust that every breaking was also a building.

When that surgeon delivered our son's diagnosis, I didn't fall apart because I'd already been taken apart and put back together dozens of times. The furnace had done its work. Not to destroy, but to refine. Not to weaken, but to prepare.

The Readying

Now, as my wife and I navigate this new terrain of specialist appointments and surgical consultations, I see clearly what I couldn't see before. Every crime scene was boot camp for this moment. Every grieving family I'd comforted was preparation for comforting my own heart. Every time I'd looked into the abyss and chosen to keep serving was practice for looking into uncertainty and choosing to keep hoping.

This isn't about finding silver linings or pretending pain doesn't hurt. Josh's death devastated our community. The families I've met in my law enforcement career carry scars that will never fully heal. I've been through hundreds of personal and professional experiences that bare weight on me. My son will face challenges I'd never wish on any child.

But there's something powerful in recognizing that our greatest trials often come disguised as ordinary service. I thought I was just answering calls. God was building the man who would one day need to be strong enough to fight for his son's life.

The rock I've been pushing all these years—through academy training, through midnight shifts, through scenes that would haunt most people's dreams—wasn't my burden. It was my preparation. Every push made me stronger. Every step up that mountain built the endurance I'd need for the climb that mattered most.

As we prepare for our son's arrival and the battles ahead, I'm not naive about the road we're walking. But I'm also not afraid. Twenty-five years of public service heartbreak taught me something crucial: the God who was present in every emergency call, every tragedy, every moment when hope seemed impossible, is the same God who is present now.

The furnace is still hot. The rock is still heavy. But I've learned to push it with purpose, knowing that every step—no matter how painful—is preparing me for whatever comes next.

Some men are made in boardrooms. Others are forged in furnaces. I'm grateful for every degree of heat, every ounce of weight, every scar that prepared me to be the father my son needs me to be. The rock and the readying were never separate things. They were always the same thing: love disguised as labor, preparation wrapped in pain, and a father being made ready for the fight of his life.