There are times in life when I knew exactly where I was going.
This was not one of them.
I had fallen into one of the deepest periods of my life. Depression had made the world feel smaller. I did not know what to do with myself, and some days the only thing that made sense was to get in the car and move.
So I drove.
Not toward a plan. Not toward an appointment. Not toward some great spiritual destination.
I just drove.
THE ROAD WITHOUT A DESTINATION
I was moving through the quiet roads around Bonsall, just outside Fallbrook, when something caught my attention.
A gate.
Beyond it, a road climbed steeply into the hills.
There was something up there I had never expected to find so close to home: a Buddhist monastery.
The place was Thiền Viện Trúc Lâm Đại Đăng — Dai Dang Meditation Center, a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery in Bonsall.
I remember looking up that road with the kind of curiosity that makes you stop asking whether something was part of the plan.
Something about it pulled me in.
So I went through the gate.
UP THE HILL
The road climbed sharply.
And then the monastery appeared.
It was beautiful — the kind of place I associated with photographs of Asia, not with a quiet hillside near the roads I had known around home.
I remember thinking how strange and extraordinary it felt to discover something like that so close to where I had lived.
I had been driving because I did not know what to do with myself.
Now I was standing in front of a place I did not know existed.
Sometimes the direction of a life changes without announcing itself.
THE MONK IN ORANGE
As I started to park, a Buddhist monk in an orange robe came toward me.
I did not know him.
He did not know me.
But he was warm, friendly, and open in a way I still remember.
He began talking with me. He invited me inside. He showed me around the monastery. He invited me to eat. He told me about the history of the place, about Buddha, about Buddhism, and about the practice.
He introduced me to other monks.
What was supposed to be a curious stop became hours.
What struck me first was not doctrine.
It was kindness.
It was compassion.
It was the feeling that I had arrived as a stranger and nobody treated me like one.
Before anybody asked me to understand Buddhism, they showed me kindness.
That mattered to me more than I knew at the time.
I KEPT COMING BACK
One visit became another.
Somewhere along the way, Buddhism stopped being something I was simply observing from the outside.
I became Buddhist.
For years, it became part of my life and part of the way I tried to understand what was happening inside me.
I learned meditation.
I learned to pay attention to my breathing.
I learned to watch thoughts rather than automatically become whatever thought happened to pass through my mind.
I learned about attachment, suffering, compassion, the present moment, and letting go.
At a time when my mind could feel like a place I could not escape, those practices gave me another way to relate to it.
They gave me moments of quiet.
They gave me language for things I had been carrying without language.
They gave me practice.
WHAT BUDDHISM GAVE ME
I do not need to rewrite that part of my life because I am Christian now.
Buddhism gave me something real.
It taught me to become more conscious of the mind.
It taught me to sit with discomfort instead of always running from it.
It taught me that clinging can become its own form of suffering.
It taught me the value of compassion.
It taught me that peace is not always the absence of pain. Sometimes it is the ability to stop feeding the pain with every thought that comes after it.
And it taught me to become still.
That stillness would matter later.
THE AWAKENING
Eventually, something changed again.
The word awakening is important in Buddhism, and in my own life the word came to mean something I did not expect.
The more I searched, the more I questioned.
The more I became willing to look inward, the less interested I became in carrying a label simply because I had carried it for years.
I was searching for truth, not membership.
And somewhere in that search, I found myself moving toward Christ.
Not because I needed to pretend the Buddhist chapter had been meaningless.
The opposite.
It had done something important inside me.
It had trained me to sit still long enough to listen.
THE ROAD TO CHRIST
This may sound strange to some people, but it is one of the clearest spiritual truths of my life:
The teachings of Buddha helped lead me to Christ.
I do not experience those years as a detour that has to be erased.
I experience them as part of the road.
Meditation taught me stillness.
Letting go taught me how tightly I could hold things that were hurting me.
Compassion taught me to pay attention to what happens inside the human heart.
And eventually, that search brought me to the heart of Christ.
I became Christian.
For me, that was not the destruction of everything that came before it.
It was an awakening into something deeper.
Buddhism taught me to become still enough to listen. In that stillness, I found myself turning toward Christ.
GRATITUDE, NOT ERASURE
I am forever grateful for that monastery.
I am grateful for the monk who walked toward a stranger in a parking area and chose kindness.
I am grateful for the food.
I am grateful for the conversations.
I am grateful for the monks who welcomed me.
I am grateful for the teachings that helped me understand my own mind during a time when I desperately needed another way to live inside it.
And I am grateful that the road did not stop there.
My Christian faith does not require me to insult the people who showed me compassion before I knew where my spiritual life was going.
I do not have to erase one chapter to honor the next.
For me, gratitude is part of the truth.
WHAT I WILL NOT INVENT
I do not remember the exact calendar date of that first drive well enough to publish it as fact.
I also remember my Buddhist period as lasting many years, but the exact duration still needs to be reconciled with surviving records before this site prints a precise number.
I will not invent the monk's name if I cannot verify it.
I will not manufacture dialogue I did not record.
I will not turn the monastery into a prop for a cleaner story.
What I can say with confidence is what the experience meant to me.
I was in a dark place.
I drove without a destination.
I found a gate.
I went up the hill.
I was welcomed.
I learned.
I practiced.
And years later, I understood that the road had been carrying me toward Christ.
LOOKING BACK
I sometimes think about how ordinary the beginning was.
No ceremony.
No dramatic announcement.
No voice telling me what would happen next.
Just a man in pain, driving around because he did not know what else to do.
Then a gate.
A steep road.
A beautiful temple on a hill.
A monk in an orange robe walking toward me.
A meal.
A conversation.
Kindness.
And a spiritual journey I could not have predicted when I turned the car up that road.
At one of the lowest points of my life, I drove without knowing where I was going. Years later, I could see that the road was taking me somewhere.