He Reached Down

On Sale August 15.

In 2012, Mike woke at 2 a.m. with a manufacturing solution fully formed in his mind, filled seventy pages of notebook with diagrams by sunrise, then spent the day scrubbing his garage to a museum shine and maintaining his yard to a standard no one had asked for. That afternoon, his therapist had a different name for it: bipolar disorder. It would take five more years, two DUIs, an affair, a divorce, and a fired-from-everything collapse before the diagnosis stopped being a roller coaster and started being a door.

He Reached Down tells that story without flinching from its worst chapters—the dry-drunk for thirteen years that ended with a single beer at a Christmas party, the bourbon bottle on one side of him and a pistol on the other during a fire alarm he ignored, the crash that finally landed him in handcuffs instead of just another close call. It also tells what came after: a woman who, instead of recoiling from a man preparing to disappear under a bridge, asked him to move in with her; a rector who heard a six-page confession and asked simply, "How does the backpack feel?"; and years of a slow, repeatedly interrupted return to a daily practice of prayer—a settled, ordinary life he wasn’t expecting to be disrupted again, until an unmistakable call to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church arrived anyway.

He Reached Down will speak to readers who have wrecked something real—sobriety, marriage, career, sense of self, or a vocation they didn't trust yet—and for the ones standing beside them who absorbed that collapse. Both are suspicious of conversion stories that resolve too cleanly and both want the same thing: proof, rendered in specific and unflattering detail, that a ruined life can still be reached for—and companionship for the unglamorous, repeating work of staying close to the One who rescued you.