It was Saturday when I chose to let go. Saturday morning. Early. Hours before the sun came up.

Five hundred plus posts on a blog I thought was a bad idea. Who would read it? A handful of people, maybe. Turns out I was wrong.

Now I have a memoir in progress. One essay published. Nine queries out into the world. Work with my name on it. A wife who loves me and reminds me every day how much I am worth. Three kids. A Dad who calls me just to talk, or when he’s discovered something new or has a life lesson he’s eager to share. A golden doodle who rivals Pooh’s friend Tigger for hopping and jumping. By any honest measure, I am a man surrounded by abundance. I am blessed.

So I closed the laptop, picked up Anne Lamott and read for a while.

Later that morning, both of us in bed drinking our coffee, Alissa held my hand, squeezing it. She didn’t say anything for awhile, which is one of her gifts. Then she looked at me.

“Joe, you keep forgetting who you are.”

I wanted to argue with her and tell her she was wrong, but there was no way that was going to happen.

“You show up,” she said. “Most of the time you never really realize it. Not until the moment is gone. You pay attention, noticing details. You tell the whole truth even if it’s hard to do so. You love your kids. And mine. You call your dad. You do the work God gave you. The rest of it? It’s not yours to carry.”

I sat with that until I noticed my coffee was cold.

Here is what I noticed. The work I am good at? It’s good. It doesn’t matter whether or not I get paid for it (though getting paid would be really nice). The stories I tell are real. Who I am becoming is being shaped by faithfulness, not by metrics.

Show up. Pay attention. Get out of the way.

I had been doing the first two beautifully. The third one I forgot. I was showing up and paying attention and then standing in the middle of the road, waving my arms around, jumping up and down, hoping someone would notice. But getting noticed has never been the work. The work is the showing up. The rest belongs to God.

The agents will write back when they write back. The right job? It’s out there. Somewhere. The blog is growing. But none of that changes what I will do tomorrow morning at the desk, which is the same thing I did this morning, which is write one true sentence and then another.

And I have Alissa, who keeps reminding me.

That’s a pretty amazing bonus.

I am not forgotten. I am held. I just had to stop my mind from running, long enough to feel it.