Life in Port Isabel still has a way of wrapping you in its beauty—a warmth that seeps into your bones and loosens the weight you didn’t even realize you were carrying. Each day begins with a sunrise that paints the sky in colors so vivid they feel borrowed from another world. The ocean breeze, the slower rhythm, the flip-flops that have replaced real shoes—all of it creates a life that feels far removed from the fears I once thought would always define me.

And yet, some fears don’t disappear just because the scenery changes.

I’ve been thinking again about a movie I saw as a child—Doctor Faustus, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I was too young to understand its theology, but not too young to feel its terror. The idea of trading what matters most for temporary relief, only to lose everything, lodged itself deep inside me. The demons in that film were relentless, consuming, inescapable—and they followed me far beyond the screen.

Decades later, those fears still visit from time to time. I’ll wake up from a dream where everything good in my life slips away, leaving only dread behind. I know it isn’t real. But fear doesn’t answer to logic, especially when it learned its language early.

What has changed is how I meet it.

Here in Port Isabel, healing doesn’t arrive all at once—it shows up in moments. In friendships formed over time. In evenings by the pool. In meals shared. In the quiet presence of Melody beside me. And somewhere along the way, these reflections stopped living only in my head and began finding their way onto the page.

Many of the books I’ve written over the past few years were born from this exact tension—between fear and gratitude, memory and meaning, loss and presence. Not as solutions, but as companions. Proof that even when fear lingers, it doesn’t get the final word.

I no longer believe peace means fear disappears.
I believe peace means fear no longer drives.

The life Melody and I have built, the work I’m grateful to do, the stories I’ve been trusted to tell—they remind me daily that goodness is not fragile. It endures. It grows. It waits patiently for our attention.

Wherever you are reading this—surrounded by snow or sunshine, certainty or questions—I hope you find the moments that ground you. Life will always hold both beauty and struggle, but it’s the beauty we choose to notice that steadies us.

Sometimes, all it takes is a sunrise.
Sometimes, it takes writing your way through the dark—
one honest page at a time.