A friend recently asked me why I wrote Jesus and the Art of Scuba Diving. Without giving it too much thought, I simply replied, “because I couldn’t not write this book.” When I think now about that answer, it sounds a little smug to me…like I’m saying I would be doing some sort of disservice to humanity by holding back this epic novel. That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is I’ve been writing this book for quite some time and I needed to finish it for my own sanity.

While I do believe there is much truth in this book that could be helpful to others, I also have a high level of discomfort knowing this will be out there for other people to read. The whole process of writing this book has been so intensely personal that to imagine it now in other people’s hands feels very disconcerting. My hope then is whoever will gain by reading this book will somehow find it. The rest is really beyond my control.

Much of this novel is based on actual experiences in my life and the lives of people I know, and also many, many conversations I’ve had with hundreds of divers I’ve trained over the past 25 years. All of these interactions and stories began to come together for me nearly a decade ago through other teaching I’ve done on the process of transformation and how people move from one stage of their lives to another. But this process stopped for me in 2016, when my 23-year-old son drowned in the Pacific Ocean two weeks after he had graduated from college. In fact, most parts of my life stopped when my son drowned.

I tucked away the pain as best I could along with many other things in my life, including this book. On November 3, 2022, I was encouraged by someone I first met that evening. He simply said, “You need to write that book.” Like the lights coming back on after a power outage, I felt re-energized to pursue a publisher and attempt to get this book into print. Indigo River Publishing took on this project with me and asked me to consider turning the memoir I had written into a work of fiction. So, with a couple more years of rewriting, Jesus and the Art of Scuba Diving took on its final form.