An excerpt from the forthcoming book Gravity and Grace
What happens when doing the right thing feels dangerous—and stopping feels like failure?
In this opening chapter of Gravity and Grace, I take you beneath two feet of ice during a real-world rescue mission where visibility was zero, pressure was immense, and pride nearly drowned out revelation. With air bleeding from my regulator and every voice above the surface urging me forward, a quiet, unmistakable warning cut through the darkness:
Get out.
This chapter isn’t about heroism. It’s about the moment we don’t want to talk about—the instant when identity, expectation, and stubbornness collide with obedience. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves under pressure, and how those stories can either save us… or destroy us.
Under the Ice introduces the book's central theme: mortality has gravity. Life presses down on us—through fear, noise, urgency, and responsibility. But it also introduces the counterforce that has saved my life more than once: grace—quiet, clear, and present when we are willing to listen.
This chapter lays the foundation for the four principles that guide the entire book:
Seek.Hear.Do.Share.
These aren’t slogans. They are survival—spiritual, emotional, and sometimes physical.
Whether you are facing a decision, carrying unseen weight, or struggling to discern the voice of God amid the chaos of modern life, this chapter is an invitation to pause, listen, and recognize the difference between courage and pride.
Because sometimes the bravest thing you will ever do…is to turn around and come back alive.
Full Written Story:
Mortality has gravity.
Not the cute, metaphorical gravity we use in talks because it sounds poetic. I mean the real kind—the weight that presses on your chest when the world gets loud, when the future gets foggy, when you’re trying to be brave but your body is already acting like it knows something your pride won’t admit yet.
Sometimes that weight shows up as anxiety. Sometimes it shows up as anger. Sometimes it shows up as that steady, private exhaustion no one sees because you’re still smiling and still showing up and still saying, “I’m fine.”
And sometimes… it shows up as two feet of ice between you and air.
I learned something about resilience under the ice in South Dakota—something I’ve never forgotten—because that day I wasn’t the hero people imagine when they hear “rescue diver.” I wasn’t standing tall on a podium collecting praise. I was just a man with a mission, trapped inside a moment of pressure, trying to decide whether I was going to obey the Spirit or obey the story I was telling myself.
The call
It was April at Sheridan Lake outside Rapid City. The ice was thick—about two feet—but it wasn’t trustworthy ice. You could feel that when you walked in. The kind of ice that looks solid until it decides it isn’t.
Two twin brothers—eighteen or nineteen years old—were out there with a dune buggy rail, jumping pressure ridges like the lake was a playground.
And then the lake swallowed them.
I was on a trail when my radio and my pager went off. I was dehydrated, tired, and not expecting a life-and-death decision before the day was over. Half our dive team was out of town. I was an instructor for Dive Rescue International and vice president of the local team, which sounds impressive until you realize it means: when things go sideways, people look at you.
By the time I got to the scene, I watched a Boy Scout troop forming a human chain from solid ice to the hole in the ice, grabbing one of the brothers who had surfaced after about four minutes. That brother lived.
The other one didn’t come up.
And time was doing what time always does in emergencies—moving too fast and too slow at once.
The dive team didn’t get rolling until almost fifty-five minutes into the incident. In the old days, an hour was when rescue often shifted into recovery. But the medical direction that day pushed us longer. We stayed in rescue mode. More urgency. More pressure. More risk.
And then came my decision: do I stay on the surface and manage divers, or do I go under?
With senior divers out of town and only a few operational people available, I chose to dive.
That choice wasn’t just tactical. It was personal. It was identity. It was the story: I’m the leader. I’m the instructor. I’m the one who goes.
And that story, if you’re not careful, will get you killed.
Black water
Under-ice diving is called overhead diving. It’s not recreational. It’s not a fun story to tell later. It’s the abyss, even at sixty feet, because it doesn’t take much for your mind to understand this truth:
If something goes wrong, you don’t get to swim straight up to the air.
The first diver went down. His name was Jerry. He surfaced after about five minutes, eyes rolling back, unconscious—no words, no explanation. We loaded him on a gurney, then a four-wheeler, and hauled him across the ice to an ambulance waiting two miles away.
Jerry never dove again.
The second diver—Rob—was one of the bravest men I’ve ever worked with. He had issues with his mouthpiece fitting. We would modify his gear so he could dive anyway. He was tough like that—quiet courage.
But when Rob came up, he said only this: “It’s no good. It’s no good. It’s no good.” Then he terminated his dive and wouldn’t talk about it.
Two divers. Two aborts. Two messages my pride didn’t want to hear.
So now it was me.
I stood at the edge of a new hole we had cut, thirty feet from the original breakthrough. We don’t use the same hole. The original hole is chaos—broken ice, bad edges, panic energy. We cut a clean hole and run search patterns toward the problem. That’s doctrine. That’s survival.
I started my descent and looked up at the surface one last time. I saw the scout troop. I saw surface personnel. I saw the media. And I felt something ugly rise in me. I got mad at those boys.
Not righteous, protective anger. Just raw frustration. Why would you do this? I had five kids. I had a wife. Why did you decide to be dumb on the ice today? Why do I have to risk my life because you treated the lake like a stunt ramp?
That thought was the opposite of grace.
And it’s important I tell you that, because resilience doesn’t begin with pretending you don’t have darkness. It begins with admitting you do—and then choosing what to do with it.
Then my mind shifted. The mission came forward. There was still a chance. A slim one. But a chance. So I went down.
When your senses fail
The moment my face mask passed the ice shelf, the world changed.
There was no light. No reference. No comfort. No “up” that felt real. Just blackness so complete it made your imagination start working overtime.
I tried to check my gauges. I brought them up to my mask. I took my light and pressed it to the faceplate—right onto the gauges. I couldn’t see a thing. No air reading. No depth. No time. Three pieces of data we track so we don’t die—gone.
I heard surface yelling over the communications in my helmet: “Keep going, keep going.” We were in rescue mode. Everyone wanted the miracle.
But I was having a moment under the ice. The kind you don’t admit in a highlight reel.
Two divers had just quit forever. I didn’t know exactly why yet, but my body knew. The feeling down there wasn’t fear. It was something deeper.
A sense of impending doom.
And in our doctrine—yes, actual doctrine we teach divers—when you have that feeling, you don’t dive. You don’t press it. You don’t negotiate with it. You don’t try to be brave in a way that makes you stupid.
Because sometimes that “doom” feeling is your brain’s way of noticing danger. And sometimes it’s the Spirit.
Then it got worse.
My regulator started to free-flow. Ice crystals built up, and my air began pouring out—hissing like a warning I couldn’t ignore. Positive pressure gear doesn’t just shut off; it dumps. Which sounds better until you realize it means your air is leaving you like a faucet you can’t turn off.
Under the ice, you come up with a thousand pounds of air. You go down with three thousand. That’s the rule.
But I couldn’t read my gauges. I couldn’t see. And now I was losing air.
I did what you do in that situation: I tried to clear it—banging the mask, breaking up ice crystals, trying to get the flow under control.
Surface kept pushing me: keep going.
And then something happened that changed the entire moment. I stopped being angry at those boys. I thought about the one who didn’t come up. And my feelings changed from frustration to sorrow. Then I thought of my family.
And I realized something about missions: a mission isn’t just a task. It’s a stewardship. And stewardship doesn’t mean you throw your life away to prove you’re tough. It means you’re responsible to God for the life you’ve been given.
That’s when the Spirit came. Clear. Soft. Penetrating.
Get out.
Not loud like my voice. Not dramatic. Just unmistakable.
Get out.
And I ignored it.
I didn’t ignore it because I didn’t believe. I ignored it because the story in my head was louder than the Spirit in my soul.
I’m the instructor. I’m the vice president. I’m the guy who goes. Everyone’s watching. We’re in rescue mode. Don’t quit. Don’t let them down.
Those are the stories we tell ourselves. And sometimes they sound like virtue. Sometimes they sound like courage. Sometimes they’re just pride wearing a uniform.
The Spirit came again.
Get out.
And again, I resisted.
Because obedience is easy when it matches what you already want to do.
Obedience is harder when it costs you something—reputation, confidence, the image of being “the strong one.”
And then my mind did something I didn’t expect. I started apologizing to my family. I truly believed I was going to die.
Not because I was in combat. Not because I was being attacked. But because my own stubbornness was keeping me in a place the Lord was trying to pull me out of.
Then the Spirit came a third time—closer, sharper—not louder, but final.
I will not come and tell you a third time.
That stopped me cold.
I called the surface and tried to make it sound less personal.
“Recover the diver.”
Third-person language. A little pride is left in me, still trying to save face. They pushed back. What? Why? We’re in rescue mode.
But here’s what you need to understand about resilience: Sometimes the most courageous thing you will ever do is abort the mission you wanted… because God is calling you to a different one.
I insisted. And they hauled me out.
Grace in the decision
After I surfaced, my friend Mark went down.
Mark found the boy. He was upside down, belted in, tangled near a tree, in zero visibility water. The boy was gone. We couldn’t bring him back alive.
Mark also made mistakes under the ice—errors that could have killed him. And when he came out, he was rattled. Shaken. The kind of shaken that doesn’t show on the outside until you’re alone later, and it hits you.
When he finally surfaced, I was the first face he saw. That mattered to me because when I came out of the ice, I didn’t get what I needed. I got pressure, noise, and impatience. I got people pushing me to be the version of myself they wanted, instead of honoring who I knew I was and my decision to listen to that final voice.
So I knelt there on the ice for Mark. Not as a hero. As a brother. And I learned something that day I’ve carried for years: Grace isn’t just what God gives you when you fail. Grace is what God gives you to obey. Grace is what shows up when your senses are overloaded, and your pride is loud, and your mission feels urgent, and the world is watching—yet the Spirit says, quietly, this is not the way. And you listen.
That day under the ice became one of the clearest lessons of my life in the pattern I’m going to share with you in this book: Seek. Hear. Do. Share.
I was seeking, even under stress, even without perfect clarity. I heard—three times, and I finally obeyed.
And now I’m sharing, because someone you love—maybe you—may someday be under a different kind of ice. Not literal ice. Emotional ice. Depression. Anxiety. Temptation. Pressure. The kind of darkness where you can’t read your gauges, and you can’t see the surface, and you don’t know how long you’ve been down.
And in that moment, you will need to know the difference between courage and pride. You will need to know what it feels like when the Spirit says, Get out.
And you will need to believe this truth: Mortality has gravity. But God has grace. And grace is stronger.
This chapter ends the same way the experience ended for me—not with answers shouted over the noise, but with an invitation to become still enough to listen. What saved my life under the ice wasn’t strength, experience, or rank; it was obedience born in quiet. That’s why I invite you to reflect and write—to slow down long enough to examine the story you are telling yourself right now. That story, whether shaped by pride, fear, expectation, or pressure, has real power. It can either soften your heart toward trust and change, or harden it against the very grace meant to guide you. As you write, consider where you have recently felt the Spirit prompt, warn, or nudge you. How you responded matters—not as a source of shame, but as a source of learning. Then ask where grace is most needed in your life right now, and what it would look like to choose humility, patience, or faith instead of reacting out of fear.
I also ask you to practice something simple this week, but profoundly instructive: ten minutes of intentional stillness each day. No phone. No music. No background noise. Begin with a plain, honest prayer—“Father, what do You want me to do?”—and then sit quietly. Write down what comes without judging it or trying to force clarity. Revelation rarely comes all at once; it comes quietly, line upon line, when we make room for it. As the Lord promised, “I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them” (1 Nephi 3:7). That way often begins in stillness—and ends in grace.
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