When the song knew First

It started with a doctor, not a priest, not a therapist. Just a VA doc telling me I was too sedentary.

I didn’t argue. I walked.

At one point, I was living in Florida with an old friend. He was working on his VA rating and talked me into applying. I did, and the rating was good enough to get medical care. I scheduled an appointment, ran some tests. Overweight yeah, I’d been stationed at Fort Couch too long. I used to stay in decent shape after the military, but a knee injury during the 2014 Tough Mudder in Seattle gave me the excuse I needed to stop.

High cholesterol? Sure. Garbage diet.

My partner calls me mapache , Spanish for “raccoon”, partly because I never sleep, so I’ve got the dark circles around my eyes. But I say it’s because my diet belongs in a trash can.

Pre-diabetic. Sedentary. Working from a chair.

So the doc told me: walk.

And I did. Every night, after work, for a year. Sometimes at 9 p.m., sometimes closer to midnight. I’d go out and walk for about 45 minutes. Oklahoma nights are quiet in that in-between hour, when the day’s noise is gone but the world hasn’t quite gone to sleep.

My usual route curved past a Roman Catholic church with a Marian shrine. At first, it was just a halfway mark. A point to turn around. A visual checkpoint that made the loop feel complete.

It wasn’t symbolic. Not then.

But somewhere along the way, a client conversation flipped everything upside down. We were talking about avoidance. About how avoiding the things that remind us of our pain doesn’t protect us, it preserves the power of the person who caused it.

That hit like a wave.

I hadn’t turned away from faith in a sudden storm. It had been a long tide, starting in a childhood where obedience was about avoiding pain. I spent four decades on that drift. Not out of rebellion but because I didn’t know that love without fear could exist. It had been fear, fear shaped by the memory of a man who used scripture like a weapon. When I was a child, my mother dated a deacon in a Southern Baptist church. He was horribly abusive. By avoiding faith, I wasn’t healing. I was handing over the reins to someone who should never have held them. And every night I walked past the shrine but wouldn’t face it, I was letting him stand between me and something I hadn’t even had the chance to define for myself.

At first, it was just a glance. Then a pause. Then one night, I sat quietly still not praying, just remembering.

I never meant to pray. Not in any way I’d admit to, anyway. I wasn’t looking for faith. Not even peace.

I just wanted to feel something.

After everything I’d experienced what I grew up with, what was stolen in the name of God, what the uniform hardened in me I’d gone cold somewhere inside. I didn’t need a miracle. I just wanted one ember to flicker.

That night I asked for nothing specific. I said quietly, “I don’t need a miracle. I don’t need a grand sign that clears away my doubt. I just want to feel something again.”

On the walk home, I put in my earbuds, shuffling YouTube. And “Arms” by Christina Perri started playing. A song I’d probably heard a thousand times without hearing it at all. By the first chorus, I was crying. Full, unguarded tears. Not sadness. Not even release. More like recognition like the song knew something before I did. That I was ready. I sat on a bench outside the church and let it happen. No visions. No revelations. Just the feeling of being… seen. And the strange sense that something call it God, grace, presence had answered, not with words, but with music.

“I tried my best to never let you in to see the truth
And I’ve never opened up, I’ve never truly loved
‘Til you put your arms around me
And I believe that it’s easier for you to let me go”

• Christina Perri

I’ve always been skeptical of pop. Too polished. Too packaged. But Christina Perri had always felt like an exception. Not flashy, not forced just honest. And in that honesty, beautiful. I’d heard Arms before, but I hadn’t listened. Not until that night, cracked open by silence and longing.

Perri once said the song is about the fight between the heart and the mind, the heart that wants love, and the head that says you can’t. It’s a love song, but it hits something deeper. How many times has your heart yearned for acceptance, only for the voice of pain to whisper: you don’t deserve this? It was like she gave language to something I hadn’t been able to name. It wasn’t just a song it was someone standing beside me in the dark, saying: I see you.

If the words hadn’t been so raw, so brave, they wouldn’t have reached me.

But they were.

And they did.

And maybe that’s why, in that moment, I didn’t need a hymn. I just needed her.

But the bigger shift came later, in reflection. That night didn’t just reopen faith. It reframed my entire life. I started to see that the pieces of my story, the ones I wanted to cut out, were actually chapters that led me exactly where I needed to be. In the days that followed, the signs weren’t grand. A video that named an old question I’d never voiced. A comment thread that mirrored my thoughts. Little moments that felt more like winks than messages. And somehow, that was enough.

I didn’t rejoin a church. I didn’t proclaim a faith. But something shifted. I stopped walking away and started walking with.

If I hadn’t been hurt, would I have understood the true depths of despair? If I hadn’t been so broken I was just existing, would I have woken up needing to do something more? Without the Navy, I wouldn’t have become someone I could respect. I wouldn’t have found discipline, purpose, or even school. I started in computer science. Hated it. Graveyard shift, late-night commercial: “Become a medical assistant.” That led to addiction medicine. That led to nursing. That led to organic chemistry, which nearly broke me, but also led to psychology. I loved the psych classes. so I kept going.

Addiction counseling came next, but I disagreed with core philosophies there. A supervisor told me, “You need to learn to crawl before you try to run.” That unsatisfying answer? It pushed me forward toward counseling psychology, toward therapy, toward exactly where I needed to be. Every detour school, mistakes, burned-out jobs, even that knee injury led right here. And if I hadn’t walked every step of that strange, painful road… I wouldn’t be able to help others find footing in the fog.

Even my relationship long-distance, unconventional, cross-cultural became part of that path. I used to ask, “Why does she have to be so far away?” The answer came, unexpectedly, through a video:

“I didn’t know how to love them the way they needed to be loved.”

That was it. I had to learn. And I wanted to. Another video said:

“Love is a choice, not a feeling. You wake up and choose it. Choose them. Every day.”

I wasn’t just learning to believe again. I was learning to love again. To stay. To be present. To be a partner, not just a person.

Even my teasing about testing God circled back. A verse I hadn’t searched for popped up in a video:

“You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”

My only reply:

“Okay. Message received.”

I used to think stories needed a clear message. But most of mine didn’t look like lessons until I was already living the next chapter. If there is a message in this one, it might be this:

Sometimes, life draws your path in reverse.

I didn’t become a therapist to fix anyone. I followed a spark. Got curious. Took a class, and somewhere between psychology and philosophy, I realized this wasn’t a job, it was a calling. Not to lead, but to walk beside. Not to have answers, but To ask better questions.

Even the nearly forty-year exile from faith had its place. I was a Christian once out of fear, trained to obey with clenched fists. I had to leave it behind to come back with open arms. Not because I was afraid not to love God, but because I wanted to. In my own language. At my own pace.

The shrine never was meant to convert me, and this chapter isn’t here to convert you. What I hope it offers is something quieter:

Avoidance may protect you in the short term.

But it gives the wound permanent lodging.

Facing it takes courage, but it’s the only way I’ve ever seen someone truly heal. Including myself.

That pop song? I still joke that pop can be soulless. But this one… This one cut through everything. I still tear up when she sings, “I hope that you see right through my walls…”

She did.

And I did.

And maybe if you’re still reading this you do too.

None of this was planned, but here I am, writing it. Somehow, every broken road feels like it was pointing here all along. Not to a finish line. But to a bench outside a shrine… Where one man sat down long enough to feel what he’d been missing.

And maybe that is the invitation here.

Not to believe what I believe. Not even to feel what I felt. Just to stop long enough… To notice what is already waiting for you.

The song knew first. The rest was just catching up.