Yesterday, my wife and I had one of those conversations married couples eventually have when they are old enough to know that “forever” still has an earthly ending.

We talked about what happens someday when one of us is no longer here. It was a responsible conversation between two people who love each other, and nothing about it should have unsettled me as much as it did.

But it did.

I woke this morning still carrying something I couldn’t name. That bothers me because I have spent much of my life trying to understand what happens inside us. I have written more than forty books exploring faith, love, loss, forgiveness, regret, gratitude and letting go, yet apparently authors are not granted immunity from being mysteries to themselves.

At first I thought I was troubled by the practical things we had discussed. Money. Possessions. Houses. The things we accumulate and eventually leave behind. But sitting alone with it, I began wondering whether money was simply the language my fear had borrowed.

Maybe what I was really thinking was: Will I be okay if someday I am the one left behind?

And beneath even that question was another one I liked considerably less: Will I still belong?
That realization humbled me.

There have been enough departures in my life that perhaps some part of me still wants guarantees against another one. I can call it planning. I can put numbers around it. I can arrange beneficiaries and documents and convince myself I am simply being responsible. But somewhere beneath all that paperwork may still be a little of the boy, the father, the husband and the older man asking the same deeply human question: Please don’t leave me without a place to belong.

None of that diminishes the life my wife and I have built. Quite the opposite. I believe in her. I believe in us. We are happy, comfortable, ridiculously blessed in many ways, and I know that love cannot be measured by what eventually appears on a legal document.

Perhaps that is why this has challenged me.

I have spent years writing about holding things lightly, trusting God, accepting what comes, and believing that if something was meant to be, it will be—and if it wasn’t, it won’t. It is considerably easier to write those words than to discover the place in your own heart where you are still gripping something tightly.

Maybe faith isn’t proven by never becoming afraid. Maybe it is discovered when we finally recognize what we are afraid of and loosen our hands anyway.

Paul wrote that three things remain: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love. This morning I am wondering whether I have sometimes tried to make money provide what only those three things can give me. Security. Permanence. Assurance that I matter. A guarantee that I will not be abandoned.

Money is terribly unqualified for that job.

So today I am not trying to solve the feeling. I am trying to listen to it. Perhaps there is still something here for God to teach me, something for me to understand about the difference between being provided for and being loved, between possessing something and belonging somewhere.

After more than forty books, I find myself once again confronted by the uncomfortable truth that I am still a student of the very things I write about.

And strangely, I think that is encouraging.

Because perhaps faith, hope and love were never things we were supposed to finally master.

Perhaps they are the things we keep choosing when life reminds us how much we still want something we can hold in our hands to promise us that everything will be okay.

And today, I am choosing to believe that love already has.