I haven’t brought this up in years. But it keeps coming back to me. I’ve told parts of this story before, only to a few I trust, and usually with some hesitation.
I don’t want people to think I’m delusional or pretentious or unapproachable. It’s just strange in a way that doesn’t invite easy interpretation.
In the fall of 2014, I was sixteen years old, camping in Red River Gorge with my youth group. The kind of trip where you’re supposed to find God in nature or bond over burnt marshmallows or whatever youth pastors hope happens when you take teenagers into the wilderness.
On the last night of the trip, we’d let the fire die down to coals. James was playing the guitar quietly. The conversation had turned serious in the way it often does late at night—questions of faith, doubt, and what any of it means when you’re a teenager staring down the rest of your life.
Then a man walked out of the treeline.
No headlamp. No backpack. No sound announcing his approach. He simply appeared at the edge of the firelight and sat down on a log like he belonged there. He sat directly across from me.
None of us knew him.
After a moment, he looked up and spoke towards me. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just calmly and with an unsettling specificity. He spoke about being singled out. About facing what would seem impossible. About a life that wouldn’t make sense until much later, in retrospect.
And then he stood up and walked back into the woods.
We sat there in silence for a moment. Eventually someone said, “Should we… follow him? Make sure he’s okay?”
A few of us grabbed flashlights and swept the area. There was nothing. No footsteps. No tent. No sign of a campsite. No vehicle at the parking area down the trail.
By morning, it had become a story. Something strange that happened on a youth group trip. Easy enough to laugh off and move past, which I did for the next twelve months or so.
Except things like that tend to linger, whether you want them to or not.
* * *
Almost exactly one year later, I was hit by that car.
The injuries were severe. Traumatic brain injury. Weeks in a coma. Doctors used phrases like “long-term care facility” and “significant cognitive deficits.” There were real questions about whether I would wake up, and if I did, how much of myself would still be intact.
Today, I’m a trial lawyer. I believe in evidence, testimony, the weight of facts. But I’m also someone whose life got shattered and reassembled in a pattern that defies easy explanations. So I’ve learned to hold space for mystery.
Was the man at the campfire real? Obviously, in some sense—people saw him, heard him. But who was he? Angel, prophet, random hiker with a flair for the dramatic? Does it matter? He said something that meant very little to me at the time. It’s gained weight over the years.
What I keep circling back to is the timing. Not just that something was said before something happened, but that the words created a kind of scaffolding for my life. Something to grab onto when everything else collapsed.
I used to think God worked in clear lines: prayers answered, paths illuminated, burning bushes and audible voices. Now I’m not so sure the clarity is the point.
Maybe the sacred shows up at the edges—campfires and hospital rooms, the space between what was and what’s becoming. Maybe it speaks in riddles because certainty makes us lazy, and the point is learning to walk by something other than sight.
Or maybe a man just wandered out of the Kentucky woods, said something memorable, and wandered back. And a year later, completely unrelated, a kid survived what he shouldn’t have.
Stranger things have happened.
But I’ve lived long enough in the territory of the inexplicable to know: We don’t get neat explanations. We get stories that echo, threads that hold, words that resurface exactly when we need them.
And sometimes, if we’re paying attention, we get to witness the mystery firsthand—even if we never fully understand it.
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