My grand ministry adventure out west was not turning out the way I'd hoped. My wife and I were so excited. With a sense of God's leading, we packed our stuff and moved 3,000 miles away from our families and friends and everything we knew. But it turned out we'd made some fatal assumptions. We thought we were moving to the progressive, cutting-edge, free-thinking West Coast, but the town we were moving to was in many ways more conservative than the Bible Belt where we grew up. And though we often associated Washington with near-constant rainfall, the area where we landed was a bona fide desert—eight inches of rain a year!

It was a spiritual desert for me as well.

It was then that I found a scrap of paper with a name and phone number. A friend had recommended a spiritual director to my wife. At the time I'd never heard of spiritual direction. It sounded a bit vague to me, might even be New Age for all I knew. But I was starting to get desperate.

After talking on the phone with this woman ...