Maybe you didn't leave on purpose. Maybe life just pulled you—one distraction, one compromise, one season of busyness at a time—until you looked up and realized you were a long way from where you meant to be. A long way from who you meant to be. A long way from God.

Beth and Brian Bower know that road. In 2009 they sold everything—two houses, the jet skis, the boats, the credit card debt they kept feeding—loaded a sixteen-foot cargo trailer, and drove 2,454 miles from North Georgia to Belize with a cat named Monkey and no real plan beyond let's try something different. They had been God's children since childhood. They had simply been too busy, too comfortable, and too distracted to notice how far they had drifted.

What followed was six years that looked like adventure from the outside and felt, from the inside, like a long and humbling education in the difference between what you need and what you want. A transmission blown south of Atlanta. Corrupt police in Tampico demanding three hundred dollars cash. A cargo trailer with 666 in the VIN fighting them through Mexican mountain ranges. A kidney cyst misdiagnosed by seven doctors across two countries. Surgery in Merida with a doctor named Jesus. An armed robbery at Christmas. A ballet school built from a folding table and a sign-up sheet that grew to twenty-eight students performing for packed houses in a Caribbean town that became home. And underneath all of it—quieter than any of the noise, more persistent than any of the obstacles—the slow, surprising work of a God who never once left the road.

The Prodigal Nomad: The Long Way Home is the first book in The Prodigal Nomad Chronicles—an honest, humorous, and deeply personal memoir series about faith, adventure, and the long road back to grace. This is not a tidy testimony. It is a true one. The road back to grace is longer than you hoped and shorter than you feared.