1997–2017: Love, Loss, and the Call to Write

In April 1997, I answered a personal ad in the Washington Blade.

When Mike and I met, I was immediately attracted to him. But everything changed when we both reached for the same chip.

Our hands moved toward it at the same time, and something passed between us. It was small, almost ordinary, and unmistakable.

We began talking intensely. Before long, Mike suggested that we walk to a coffee shop down the street. As we made our way toward it, I noticed an alley. I pulled him into it and kissed him as he had never been kissed before.

It was love.

I knew.

He knew.

After that, we were together as often as possible.

My life was complicated. I lived with my parents and was raising two young boys. I needed to be careful about introducing someone new into their lives, so I brought Mike into our world gradually.

The boys liked him, although they were cautious at first. That was understandable. This was not only about Mike and me. Whatever we were becoming would affect them, too.

As the months passed, the four of us began becoming a family. Mike and I talked about finding a home large enough for all of us. What had begun with a shared chip and a kiss in an alley was becoming something we could imagine building a life around.

Then something happened.

Mistakes were made. Words and actions were misunderstood, and Mike and I separated. We both contributed to what happened, yet neither of us understood it in quite the same way. Love was still there, but we couldn't find our way through the hurt.

My love for him never ceased. I wanted to call him every day, but I waited for him to call me.

Eventually, he did.

Mike asked me to take him back. I told him I needed the weekend to think. That same weekend, he received a job offer in California that he felt he couldn't refuse.

Just as reconciliation had become possible, distance entered the story.

We continued to talk and catch up, but things were no longer the same. My own life was moving at full speed. I had two active boys who needed me, and some days my life barely felt like my own.

I visited Mike in California once. Although he kept some distance between us, he told me that no matter how long he lived, I would be the love of his life.

After that visit, I pulled away.

In 2003, Mike returned to the area, and I saw him at an event. I promised to call him, but I did not. Perhaps I thought there would be more time. Perhaps I was still waiting for the circumstances to be right.

Several months later, in 2004, I learned that Mike had been killed in an automobile accident.

I was devastated.

The possibility that we might find our way back to one another was gone.

Months later, one of Mike’s friends called me. He told me something I have never forgotten:

“Of all the men Mike had known, Kyle, he loved you the most. He loved you until his dying day.”

I have carried those words with me ever since.

They could not restore the years we lost or give us the future we never had. But they answered the question that had remained between us.

The love was real.

What death interrupted, love did not erase.

For a long time, Mike’s death seemed to take my desire to create with it. The part of me that imagined new possibilities collapsed beneath the grief. What might have become a shared life was gone, and I did not know how to build something from its absence.

I did not yet know how I would carry his love forward. For a time, I only knew that I had to keep living.

After Mike died, I continued doing what I had always done. I went to work, met my responsibilities, and kept moving. But the future I had once imagined was gone, and the life that remained no longer felt complete.

By then, my sons were grown. The years of making every decision around their security were changing. I had a federal job, a two-bedroom condo, a new car, and the kind of stability I had been taught to value. I was grateful for it. I was also deeply unfulfilled.

The call to write had never left. God had given me the title God Speaks at Lake Accotink in 1992, and I had spent more than a decade postponing the book.

In November 2005, I traveled to California to visit family and attend a leadership conference. During the first week, my supervisor called. A coworker had been laid off, and she wanted me to return a week early. I said no. When she told me I would be placed on absent without leave, I knew something had to change. I could no longer allow fear of losing security to make every decision for me.

During my second week in California, I drove along the Pacific Coast Highway and fell in love with Malibu. At first, I thought California was the answer. I returned to Virginia and began telling people I was moving there.

Around Thanksgiving, I was discussing the plan with my friend Natalie when I heard myself say, "I want to live with the top down."

The words began with a picture of driving a convertible beside the ocean, but they quickly became something larger. I wanted to stop treating life as something to be endured safely. I wanted to meet it with openness, movement, and trust.

California eventually fell away. My cousins were considering leaving, and the jobs I found there looked too much like the life I was trying to leave. I realized that Malibu was not the heart of the dream. The beach was.

I considered the Outer Banks, but it felt too isolated during the winter. Then Wilmington, North Carolina, began appearing repeatedly in conversations and intuitive readings. I paid attention.

My search led me to Oak Island and a reasonably priced condominium four blocks from the beach. In March 2006, I gave notice at my federal job. That June, I left Northern Virginia and moved to the North Carolina coast.

I did not know exactly what I would build there. I only knew that I had finally chosen possibility over predictability.

I walked along the beach, began writing again, and opened myself to the life I had been postponing.

Fourteen years after God first gave me its name, God Speaks was still waiting to be written. For years, I treated being gay as a truth that could be managed if I kept it separated from the rest of my life. I could be a father. I could be a Christian. I could be a good son. I didn't know how to let myself be all of those things openly.

The book followed me to Oak Island.

Since my conversation with God at Lake Accotink in 1992, I had known I was supposed to write a book called God Speaks. I had been given the title and believed I had one year to complete it.

Fourteen years had passed.

I dedicated 2006 to writing the book. By the end of August, I had completed twenty-six pages. I was proud of them, but writing each one had been a struggle. The words felt heavy. I kept forcing myself forward because I was determined to finish what I had been called to do.

On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that I would complete the book that day.

At about ten-thirty that morning, I picked up my laptop and began reading the pages I had written. When I reached the final word, I heard the Voice clearly:

“Nice book. It’s not Mine. Erase it.”

I looked at the screen. I knew immediately that He was right. The pages contained my thoughts about what God might say. They weren’t the conversation I had been asked to receive.

With three keystrokes, I erased them.

I sat before the blank screen and surrendered. I stopped trying to write a book for God and allowed the words to come.

They came quickly.

For the rest of that day, I wrote the conversation as I received it. When I finished, I looked at the clock. It was 11:51 that night.

I put on my flip-flops and walked the two blocks to the beach. The night was quiet. I stepped onto the sand, removed my shoes, and walked to the edge of the ocean.

Looking into the sky, I asked, “Is that what You wanted?”

Within seconds, I watched two points of light race across the sky.

I received them as my answer.

The next day, I read the book from beginning to end. I was astonished by how complete it felt. After years of resistance, the book I had struggled to write had arrived when I finally stopped trying to control it.

I investigated traditional publishers, but God Speaks: A Dialogue did not fit an ordinary format. I believed I was meant to publish it myself, so I created Oak Island Publications.

On February 6, 2007, the printed books arrived.

I held the conversation in my hands. Nearly fifteen years after God had given me its name, I had finally answered the call.

I believed completing the book was the hard part.

I had not yet learned that receiving something from God and knowing what to do with it afterward could require two very different kinds of surrender.

Holding God Speaks: A Dialogue in my hands felt like the completion of a fifteen-year journey. I soon discovered that writing the book and knowing how to place it into the world were very different things.

I spent nearly a year pursuing distribution. I sent copies to Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey, issued a press release, contacted local stores, and hired someone to help sell the books.

Nothing took hold.

I had asked God to guide the writing, but once the books arrived, I became consumed with making something happen. I created plans, pursued attention, and measured success by how many copies I could sell.

In all that effort, I stopped asking God what He wanted me to do next.

When the results did not come, I became discouraged. Boxes of books were placed in storage, and Oak Island Publications did not become what I had imagined. Eventually, I stopped trying.

For a time, I treated that silence as failure. I wondered whether I had misunderstood the purpose of the book or whether I had once again fallen short of what God had asked of me.

The book had not failed. I had simply expected it to open doors that God had never promised would open.

I had surrendered control long enough to receive the words. Now I had to learn that surrender did not end when the writing was finished.

The books went into storage.

The call did not.

When Kellee first came home from the hospital as a baby, my mother placed her in my arms.

I loved her immediately.

As the oldest child, I naturally looked after my younger brother and sister. But my connection with Kellee was different. As we grew older, she trusted me with things she did not tell other people. I knew her joys, the people she loved, and many of the fears she carried.

Kellee lived with health problems and daily pain. Still, nothing prepared us for August 7, 2010.

Kellee Dawn Sutton-Goldstein died that day.

There was no autopsy, and we never received a clear medical explanation for her death. The unanswered questions became part of our grief.

Kellee was the youngest child in our family and the youngest cousin on my mother’s side. Her absence reached far beyond our immediate household. Her sons, Seth and Nathan, lost their mother. My parents faced the death of their only daughter. Kirby and I were left without our sister.

We continued because life required it.

But we were not the same family we had been before August 7.

Two days after Kellee died, I wrote the following poem. It holds what I knew about my little sister when the loss was still too new for me to explain any other way.

MY LITTLE SISTER

Kellee Dawn Sutton-Goldstein

As the oldest of the Sutton kids, I saw the others grow.
My brother, Kirb, and sister, Kel, our lives did ebb and flow.

’Twas Kellee whom I knew so well, through all her younger years.
She told me things that no one knew, her joy, her loves, her fears.

Kellee’s goal was love’s true wish, that it would pierce her heart.
She had a well of love to give right from the very start.

A special bond she had with Steve, her ex and still her friend.
We knew his love for Kellee stood from beginning to the end.

For Kellee loved two special men, her sons, her loving pride.
Seth and Nathan bolstered her to take her life in stride.

Kellee struggled with health and ails; the pain met her each day.
With difficulty, she lifted up to live beyond the fray.

In life we meet some special folks who change us to the core.
My sister, Kellee, changed my life. I’ll miss her ever more.

August 9, 2010

Between 2010 and 2012, even as my family was changed by Kellee’s death, my writing began moving again.

I was also releasing much of what I owned in preparation for another move. As I sorted through my possessions, I realized how many things I had carried from place to place simply because someone else had given them to me.

It struck me that I had spent years caring for and moving other people’s belongings.

Letting go became about more than preparing to move. I was releasing old expectations and versions of myself that no longer fit the life I was trying to create.

During that unsettled period, I was living in a hotel room when three words came to me:

“Shepherd’s Way Ministries.”

I did not know what they meant.

There was no building, congregation, or developed plan. I only felt that the name belonged to work I had not yet begun. As I spoke about it, people became interested and wanted to help. I took another step toward accepting the call by becoming a licensed minister.

At the same time, Oak Island Publications was giving way to Mauldin Books. The name Mauldin was my middle name and came from my mother’s family. It felt personal and rooted, with room for the different kinds of writing that were beginning to emerge.

During these years, I wrote and published two more books.

Family Tree was my first novel and the beginning of a planned trio. Because the story contained intimate scenes, my mother did not want my name associated with it. I understood her concern and complied. The book was published under the pseudonym Gregory Allen.

My name was absent from the cover, but the book was still mine.

In a Few Words gathered poetry I had written across many years. The poems came from faith, family, love, grief, and the questions I was still trying to understand. “My Little Sister,” written two days after Kellee died, became part of that collection.

Publishing these books changed how I saw myself. God Speaks: A Dialogue was no longer a single book I had somehow managed to complete. Writing had become the way I processed my life and answered what continued to rise within me.

Mauldin Books was no longer merely an idea. It had books to carry.

Shepherd’s Way Ministries was still waiting for its full purpose to become clear, but the name had been given and the first steps had been taken.

I did not yet have the complete plan.

But I had begun building.

After 2012, I moved farther south and settled near the South Carolina coast. I hoped the move would give me room to build a different life. I tried several kinds of work and searched for something steady, but money continued to pass through my hands almost as quickly as it came.

At the same time, something I had questioned for years became harder to dismiss. I sometimes knew what people were carrying before they told me. Images, words, and understanding came without the ordinary steps of learning them. I began teaching self-awareness classes and helping people recognize patterns in their lives.

For a long time, I was afraid to name these experiences. I had been taught to distrust anything that did not fit neatly within the faith I knew. Yet prayer kept leading me back to the same truth: if a gift comes from God, it should draw me closer to Him and make me more useful to others.

I did not always understand that distinction. At times, I tried to turn those gifts into a way to make a living. The harder I tried to make them serve my plans, the less anything seemed to hold together. I came to see that what had been given to me was not meant to build my fortune. It was meant to help me notice where someone was hurting, listen for what God might be asking of me, and offer what I could.

By the end of 2017, circumstances brought me back to Virginia and to the house where I had spent my teenage years. I thought I was returning because life had left me few other choices.

I did not yet know that family would soon need me there.