“If I Could Call Back, I Would. But Now I Build.”

There are days I still wish there was a payphone at the edge of time.

A place I could drop in a coin and reach back—

to tell Joshua I love him one more time.

To warn myself.

To freeze the moment before everything fell apart.

But there’s no going back.

Only through.

And so I do whatever it takes.

Not because I’m fearless,

but because I’ve been through fire

and I refuse to come out without purpose.

Some people think I’m just resilient—

but this journey didn’t start in grit.

It started in design.

In my bones, I’m a man who values good engineering.

I spent years learning how to plan and build around whatever came up—

terrain, weather, variables.

You adapt. You solve. You make it work.

But then death showed up.

The kind of break an engineer can’t fix.

There was no schematic for that.

No redundant system to reroute the pain.

And in that devastation, I had to make a choice.

I couldn’t bring him back.

But I could build forward.

So I made a vow:

I would try four times as hard.

To build something that mattered.

To create something rooted in meaning.

To serve, to love, to live—and never quit.

“If happy ever afters did exist…”

That lyric used to hit hard. Still does, some days.

But I’ve learned that even without fairy tales,

you can still write a redemptive story.

I’ve learned to live in the liminal space.

The not-yet.

The maybe-so.

The just-for-today.

Truth is, I don’t always know if the work I’m doing

will bear the fruit I hope for.

But I know what I can’t do—

I can’t give in.

I can’t numb out.

I can’t walk away from the promise I made in silence.

If there’s no payphone to the past,

then I will build with open hands and fire in my chest.

Not with certainty. But with conviction.

Because Joshua deserves a father

who did whatever it took.

And because God is still writing—

even in the silence.