Grace, Cracked Walls, and Unswiped Pizza

I’ve been thinking a lot about change lately. Not the kind you plan for, but the kind that sneaks up on you, the kind you don’t fully understand until years later. That kind of change doesn’t happen all at once. It’s messy, it’s uncomfortable, and it rarely looks like progress while you’re in the middle of it.

I think about when I opened 4th Dimension in my own home. That house was a lot of things. It was my first home, the one where I drank myself into oblivion and, years later, the same one where I started putting my life back together. It sat five houses away from the house where I grew up on Weil Street between Hadley and Locust.

That block wasn’t just a neighborhood. It was home in every sense of the word. I grew up on the second floor of a duplex with my grandparents living downstairs. Across the street, I had an aunt, uncle, and cousins. Three houses down, there was another aunt, more cousins, and my great-grandmother. The block was the center of everything. Countless family Christmases. Backyard barbecues. Dodging stray fireworks at Gordon Parks’ Fourth of July. It wasn’t just where I lived. It was where my life happened.

When I opened 4th Dimension, that house became something else. It wasn’t just mine anymore. It turned into a sober living house, a place where other people could begin again too. For two years, I lived there, slept there, and built the organization from scratch. Fourteen of us crammed into a space designed for far fewer, all navigating recovery and life together.

Eventually, I moved down the block, from the 2800 block to the 2700 block, with my new wife. It should have felt like a fresh start. Instead, I hated it. Every wall felt off. Every floorboard creaked. There was no space, no comfort, no anything. The house was too small, too loud, too… not my old home. I sat in that place, grumbling about everything, refusing to see anything good about it.

But then, gradually, I started to notice something. The view from that house was different. I could see Riverwest from a new angle, literally and figuratively. It wasn’t some grand epiphany. There wasn’t a moment where I thought, “Wow, everything’s better now.” It was slower than that, almost imperceptible. Over time, the house started to feel less like a mistake and more like a beginning.

I moved out of an uninsulated attic into an insulated bedroom with my wife. I went from living with fourteen people to living with one. For the first time in years, I could time everything right, knowing exactly how long it would take to get to the bathroom because there was no line. I could open the fridge and know my four-day-old pizza was still there, untouched and un-swiped.

The ridiculousness of it all hit me one day. I had spent so much time focused on what I had left behind that I missed the quiet joy of what I had now. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t immediate. But over time, I began to see the beauty in it.

There’s this idea I heard once: “The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light.” That line has stayed with me because it feels so real. The light doesn’t erase the darkness. It doesn’t undo it or pretend it wasn’t there. It just shows up, cutting through the shadows, helping you take one step at a time.

I’ve been reflecting on how often I miss that light because I’m too caught up in what isn’t working. I want things to be clear and perfect before I move forward. But life isn’t like that. It’s messy, layered, and often confusing. That’s where art has taught me so much. When I paint, the first layers never look like much. They’re disconnected, chaotic, and sometimes downright ugly. But as I keep going, the pieces start to connect. The beauty comes not from avoiding the mistakes, but from working through them.

I think about the time I spent in that house on the 2700 block, stuck in my own head, fixated on what wasn’t right. And I think about how, slowly but surely, the light broke through. It wasn’t immediate, and it wasn’t easy. But it happened.

Maybe that’s what grace looks like. It doesn’t fix everything all at once. It doesn’t erase the struggle. It meets you where you are, in the middle of the mess, and gives you just enough to keep going.

I don’t have all the answers, and I’m learning that I don’t need them. What I know is that the light is always there, even when it takes time to see it.

Maybe that’s enough. Actually, I think it’s more than enough.