I am not trying to argue with you about anything. I spent forty years not believing very much of what is in here, and I would not have responded to an argument either. What changed me was not a sermon or a clever proof. It was a slow, almost embarrassing accumulation of moments — small ones, mostly — where I came to suspect that Someone had been speaking to me my whole life and that I had not been listening.

This book is the record of how that suspicion grew into certainty.

I am not a pastor (yet, anyway). I am not a trained theologian. I am a man who used to swear at traffic, read self-help books, and answer altar calls without quite knowing what they were. I drank too much in my twenties. I cared more about looking right than being right. For most of my life, I categorized my days as “lucky” or “unlucky” and looked for the pattern that made the lucky ones repeat.

What I will tell you in these pages is what eventually became obvious to me: there is a pattern. The lucky days are the ones I am paying attention to. The unlucky days are usually the days I have stopped listening to a voice that has not stopped speaking.

You do not have to believe that yet. You only have to keep reading.

If at any point along the way you wonder whether God is trying to get your attention through this book, that is not a coincidence. That is the whole point.

— John