“I have a story for you, Sean,” the email began.

She was a cleaning woman. Two kids. One cat. She was going under, fast. She could not afford this month’s rent. The landlord was already preparing to kick her out.

She was working from can to can’t. Sunup to sundown. Just making ends meet. But the ends weren’t meeting. Her oldest son, 14, was also working to pick up the slack. He bussed tables in a local bar-slash-restaurant.

Each evening, after the woman finished cleaning hotel rooms, she joined her son at the restaurant to wash dishes until 1 a.m.

It was during one such late shift that our story begins.

They had just gotten off work. Mom was tired, dragging with exhaustion. And even though it was past midnight, Mom and son sat on the curb to eat their complimentary to-go suppers.

They balanced the Styrofoam boxes on their laps. And that’s when Mom lost it. The reality of their lives came crashing down on her. Hard.

It was a sudden realization of the heaviness

of life. The instant recognition of one’s lower position in the great hierarchy of human suffering. Sometimes it all hits you at once.

Her body was sore. Her hands hurt. Her back ached. Her brain was tired. Her whole being was exhausted from living without sleep. And her family was about to be homeless.

She broke down into tears.

Her son held her. He told her, “Everything will be okay, Mom.”

But what did he know? He was too young to know how life works, she thought. Because the truth was, nothing ever worked out. The truth was, life is an excrement sandwich. Eat it or starve.

And that’s when something happened.

At the edge of the parking lot, a man came walking. He carried a backpack and walking stick. His clothes were rags, his face unshaven. He smelled as though he had not…

How I ended up walking into a sliding glass door in a supermarket is pretty simple. I got a text from my wife. I looked at my phone to read the message and, WHAM! Goodbye nasal cartilage.

I’m not surprised this happened, inasmuch as whenever I am at the supermarket I receive a lot of texts from my wife. My wife is one of those people who prefers to text her supermarket list one item at a time.

It’s unclear why she won’t give me the entire list at once. Maybe her list is a state secret. Maybe the grocery list is privileged information.

Either way, I usually receive her fragmented supermarket list in the form of random neural firings, such as the following verbatim text: “we r out of non-iceberg.”

Truthfully, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what “non-iceberg” was, but I figured it was a Coors product.

So once I gather all items on her list, I’ll be standing in the checkout line and—DING!—another text comes through. I often receive this text at the

exact moment I am placing my non-iceberg items on the conveyor belt.

The text will read something like: “we r out of good toilet paper.”

At which point I will sheepishly apologize to the cashier and quietly ask to cancel my sale so that I can leave the checkout lane to locate truly stellar sanitary tissue.

But the cashier usually tells me, no, it’s okay, she doesn’t want to cancel my sale since she’s already scanned half my items, she says she’ll just wait for me to jog across the store and fetch the toilet paper. At which point everyone in line behind me collectively agrees to set fire to my car.

The cashier then flips on her blinking aisle light, signaling that there is a major problem in Checkout Lane Five. And she tells me to “hurry up.”

This puts a lot of…

We had hiked almost 30 miles that day. We had been on the Camino de Santiago for a month. Everything on my body was either tired or non-functioning.

We stopped at a hostel-slash-bar in a fleck-on-the-map town. For supper it was “pinchos” which is the Spanish word for tiny, stale, rock-hard sandwiches which have been sitting on the café counter since before your birth.

We sat at the bar with other pilgrims, drinking tepid beer, eating in silence. Too tired to talk.

Seated beside me was an elderly pilgrim who seemingly had energy to converse. His beard was white. His skin was shoe leather. His odor was ripe. He looked like a cross between Moses and a Hobbit.

He had a heavy French accent. The left half of his face was paralyzed. There was a string of rosary beads dangling from his pocket.

He told us this was his seventh Camino. He said he first hiked the Camino after he died.

“Died?” said a priest who was sitting at the bar.

“Oui,” said the old

man.

At first, we weren’t sure we heard him correctly.

The young priest adjusted his glasses and took a long look at the old man. I could tell what the priest was thinking. I was thinking the same. The old man LOOKED plenty alive. And he definitely smelled alive.

The old man went on to tell a story. When he was in his 40s, he died for several minutes. He said he was on the toilet, of all things. He had a stroke. He collapsed. And thus began an ethereal experience that changed him.

“What happened?” the priest asked.

The the old man said he exited his body, floating high above it. He watched paramedics stuff his body into a bodybag.

After that, a glowing woman appeared. She was made of light. She whisked him away into a world of whiteness.

“Whiteness?” the priest asked.

“The Lord is my shepherd…”

It’s hard for Americans to imagine shepherds. We don’t HAVE shepherds in our culture. We have Walmarts and Chipotles.

But I was in Europe recently, where they have tons of shepherds. And do you know what an elderly Galician shepherd told me? He explained that Americans DO have shepherds, sort of. They’re called cowboys.

The Lord is my cowboy. Has a nice ring to it.

“I shall not want…”

Want. That word. “Want” means “lack.” As in, “I shall not go without.” I will be taken care of.

“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul…”

“Restore.” To bring something back from the dead. You can “restore” deleted files on a computer. You can “restore” antiques. You can restore a 1976 Chevrolette Chevette—although why would you?

And “soul.” The real you. Your soul is your living, breathing core. The mysterious electromagnetic pulses your heart emits. The unique, non-material matter of yourself that cannot be defined.

Make no mistake, your soul is not

your body. Your body is just Temporary You. A reflection in the mirror. But it’s not Real You.

Real You was cradled in the bosom of God before time began, long before you were in the womb. Your eternal soul existed before this giant mess we call humanity. Before your body was made. Therefore, in a way, you weren’t ever born. Not really. Consequently, you never really die.

“He leadeth me in paths of righteousness…”

The right path. Have you ever felt that nudge inside you to do the right thing? A tiny voice that says: “Pull over, help this old man change his flat tire.” Or: “Be nice to this snotty cashier, she’s going through a lot right now.”

Sometimes, the voice says: “You don’t need this toxic person in your life, it’s time to let them go.”

Either way,…

Charlotte is a student at West Virginia University. The 19-year-old emailed me asking for relationship advice concerning her ex-boyfriend, John, who once hurt her very badly.

Tragically, I don’t give advice. But I can tell you a story, Charlotte.

Our story is about Eleanor the raccoon. Eleanor was a very nice raccoon. Everyone loved Eleanor because she was polite and had good manners.

Eleanor always washed her hands before she ate. Eleanor always said “please” and “thank you.” And she always said “excuse me” after she belched, even if nobody was around.

One night, Eleanor was digging through the trash, hunting for Cheetos. She loved Cheetos. And you could always find Cheetos in the trash bins of Mountain Brook, where humans ate many, many Cheetos but never admitted this to their Fourtune-500 friends.

Just as Eleanor was about to give up looking for Cheetos, she FOUND SOME! A bag of Cheetos, half empty—or half full, depending on your personal world philosophy.

Eleanor snatched the bag into her little hands and almost started singing; she was

so happy. She scurried into the forest.

On her way home, as Eleanor was about to cross the creek when she realized she had a problem. Crossing the stream with the Cheetos would be difficult. She would have to hold the bag above the water as she swam.

Fortunately, raccoons are strong, competent swimmers, and Eleanor was basically the Michael Phelps of the raccoon world. So she sealed the bag tightly, then held it high above her head and was very glad she had applied deodorant this morning.

Just before Eleanor stepped into the water, she heard a voice.

It was Larry, the snake. Larry was lying beside the stream, gazing wistfully across. And he was weeping.

“What’s wrong?” said Eleanor.

“I need to cross the stream,” said Larry, “but I can’t swim well because I am a copperhead, and the current is too strong…

My wife and I are eating at a Chinese restaurant. We’ve been driving for hours through South Carolina. We pulled over to refuel and address pressing bladder issues.

And we found this place.

The waitress asked what we wanted. We ordered a seaweed salad. This particular salad was colored Disney-World green and tasted like eating bait.

My wife took a bite and said, “Remember when we first got married?”

“I do,” I said.

“Remember when we used to get takeout from that Chinese place over by the Kmart?”

“Yes.”

“Remember how we’d always get the seaweed salad?”

“I do.”

She took a bite. Green earthworms hung from the corners of her mouth. And I couldn’t help but remember those younger kids who used to eat Chinese food a lot.

Me with my long hair. Her with her bangs. We were poor. We had one window unit A/C in our apartment, which only worked on days of the week beginning with L. The world still had Kmarts back then.

The Chinese restaurant in our hometown was cheap. Duct tape on the

cushions. There weren’t many places to go for dates. So that’s where we went.

The food at the old Chinese restaurant was stellar. And food has always been so important to the woman I married. Some people eat to live. Jamie lives to eat.

I met Jamie after she graduated culinary school. She wore chef’s whites for a living. She bossed people around in a kitchen while stirring steel pots, angrily shouting French words, using strange phrases like, “This béarnaise has broken, dangit!”

To call her job a high-stress job would be like calling a Carnival cruise ship a “dinghy.”

Food service is one of the hardest jobs known to man. Being a female chef is even harder. You constantly have male staffers with “tiny spoon syndrome,” trying to prove how macho they are. Some guys don’t like having a…

South Carolina. The distant backroads. Deep forest. Lots of Spanish moss. I am stuck behind an asthmatic pickup.

The truck is a ‘78 Ford. F-100. Two-tone. Brown and vanilla. Five liter engine. Probably a three-speed manual. I know this because my old man drove the same truck.

The Ford travels 29 mph. The driver’s arm hangs out the window. And I’m transfixed by his license plate.

Namely, because the South Carolina license tag has the state motto imprinted on it. The motto is located at the top, in white text. Just beside the $640 registration sticker.

“While I breathe, I hope,” says the adage.

I’ve never known a more beautiful state motto. Especially when you consider some of the other state mottos.

Such as North Carolina’s motto: “Esse quam videri,” which means, literally, “To be, rather than to seem.” Um. What?

California’s motto is one word: “Eureka!” Idaho’s is, “Let it be perpetual.” Florida’s state motto is: “Ask about our grandkids.”

But I like the South Carolina slogan. Those words speak to me. Namely, because a few

years ago, the doctor thought I had cancer. I went through miniseries of misery, only to find out that I’m okay.

Still, those years of wondering were double, double toil and trouble. And all the cancer veterans I’ve talked to say the same thing: “It’s not cancer that kills you, it’s the worry that goes with it.”

Well, that was years ago. And what a difficult time that was for me. During that one year, I lost six friends to the C-word. And one to suicide. At times, I thought I was about to have a nervous breakdown.

But that bad experience is in my rear view mirror now. And in many ways, I’m not even the same guy I was. I eat healthier—mostly. I exercise more. And ever since walking through Spain, I pray all the time. I pray even when I’m…

The little boy was with his mom, sitting in a truckstop diner. The boy was bald, wearing a loose T-shirt. A large bandage showed from beneath his collar.

Before the boy sat a massive meal. Bacon. Eggs. Huge glass of chocolate milk. Stack of pancakes bigger than a midsize SUV.

“It feels so weird, my stitches itch,” the boy said.

“Eat your pancakes,” said Mom.

Mom looked tired. Her hair looked like she had slept on it. Her clothes, crumpled.

“How many days was I in the hospital?” the boy asked.

The mother sighed. “Twenty-six. Now eat your pancakes.”

Everyone in the little restaurant was staring at mother and son. Especially the trucker in the booth behind them, who couldn’t help but eavesdrop.

Mother and son ate in silence for a while. The boy was inhaling his food while Mom nursed a mug in both hands, staring wistfully out the window.

“Did they cut all the cancer out?” the boy asked.

Mother was crying now. “Eat your pancakes.”

She tried to hide her face but was unsuccessful. Sometimes there is nowhere to hide

one’s face.

The boy just watched his mother weep. “I’m worried about you, Mom.”

Mom laughed through snot and tears. “You’re worried about ME?”

He nodded.

Things went silent for a while.

That’s when something happened. The trucker from the nearby booth rose to his feet. He approached their table. He was every American truck driver you’ve ever seen. Powerfully built, slightly round in the middle, a ring of keys on his belt, and scuffed boots.

The man stood before their table, wearing a meek expression, hat in hand. The man said he couldn’t help but overhear their conversation. And, well, the man was wondering, would it be okay if he prayed for the boy, ma’am?

Truthfully, Mom was a little weirded out by this request. After all, people HAD been praying for the boy back home.…

My mother always told me to smile. Especially when I didn’t want to. She often told me to smile when I was sad, when trying on school clothes, or whenever I was forced to eat beef liver at gunpoint.

“Smile,” she’d say.

A mother knows how her child is feeling by looking at their face. Are you in pain? Upset? Angry because your Little League team lost opening game? Your mom knows. Because your face tells the story.

So smile.

Often, my mother would follow up this gentle command with: “You have a lot to be thankful for, young man.”

Turns out, you have 43 muscles in your face. Your face contains more muscles than any other body part. The only anatomical region coming close to having this many muscles is your back, which has 40 muscles, excluding your butt muscles which are the heaviest in the body.

(FACT: Two average adult buttcheeks, skin and muscle combined, weigh 33 pounds.)

Why is your face so muscled? Because. Your face was not just

made for photographs. Your face is a precise signaling system.

You can communicate entire paragraphs with only your face. It’s how you were designed. Don’t believe me? Try getting lost in a foreign country without cell service or a functioning GPS. By the end of the day your face will be tired.

As it happens, the default mode of your face, according to research, is smiling. Recent studies discovered that we are born smiling. Doctors used 3D ultrasound technology to find that developing babies smile in the womb.

Once born, babies continue to smile. Even when crying, they are flexing their smile muscles. And babies keep smiling throughout childhood. A child smiles, on average, 400 times per day. Whereas the average adult smiles less than 20.

Something else researchers discovered is that a smile is catching. It’s called the “yawn effect.” Just seeing someone else smile stimulates your…

A small town. The kind of beautiful American hamlet where all that’s missing is the Norman Rockwell signature. There was a party happening on Main Street. Lots of people.

I followed the sound of distant music and many voices and realized I was wearing pajamas.

I shuffled into town barefoot, with sleep crusted eyes. People were everywhere. I saw women positioning casseroles on card tables. Children playing tag. Old men in aprons were deep frying fish.

A band was playing music near the hardware store. People were dancing. And upon each front porch, attached to every home, were crowds of people, mingling, laughing, drinking lemonade and sugary tea.

Everyone was there. All my loved ones. All those who died. Friends whose lives ended young. Relatives, who were called away too early. They were all right here, holding paper plates, laughing with each other.

Also, I saw multitudes of unfamiliar children, dancing while the musicians played “Hokey Pokey.” I asked an old woman who all these children were. “Those are babies who died in

the womb,” the woman said.

We were interrupted when a large pack of dogs came running through the town, careening up Main Street, greeting people. Among them, I saw my own former dogs.

Lady, the cocker spaniel who died in my arms. Joe, who was killed in a hit and run. And Ellie Mae, the bloodhound who died in a cold, sterile veterinary office.

In a nearby backyard, I watched old friends play baseball. The pitcher was my cousin, Cosby. My friend Lynn was playing shortstop.

Then a familiar woman stepped up to the plate, holding a bat. She was a teenager, long and beautiful, with raven hair. She looked so familiar, but I couldn’t place this young woman.

And that’s when it hit me. It was my grandmother.

Later, I was hungry. So I waited in line at one of the food tables, holding a paper…