When Everything You Own Gets Taken Away, Grace Begins

A pulse reading in London derailed Christopher Lowman’s entire life plan—and it was exactly what he needed.

At twenty years old, Lowman sat across from an Ayurvedic doctor who didn’t examine him in any conventional sense. The doctor simply listened to his pulse, then described his inner world with an uncanny precision that shattered something fundamental in Lowman. His near-perfect GPA, his trajectory toward law school, his whole mapped-out future—all of it dissolved in that moment of recognition that there was more to life than the path he’d been walking.

What followed wasn’t a master plan. It was a series of open doors that led him across continents and into some of the world’s most difficult places. Healing arts on the Upper West Side. Genocide survivors in Rwanda. Leprosy communities in Ahmedabad. A school in one of Nairobi’s harshest slums that has now educated more than 20,000 children. Each step seemed to find him; each experience expanded what he thought possible.

Then came the crushing part. Seven years of severe systemic Lyme disease stripped away his strength and independence—the very qualities that had defined him and fueled his work. Everything he’d built, everything he’d accomplished, suddenly felt fragile and borrowed. In that crucible, Lowman arrived at a realization that reframes how we think about grace itself: it isn’t just the good things that happen to you. Grace is everything that shapes you into a higher version of yourself—including the losses.

The distinction matters. We’re comfortable calling fortune grace. But the illness that humbles us, the failure that redirects us, the limitation that teaches us what we can’t control—these are grace too. They’re just the kind that arrives without warning and demands something of us first. What Lowman discovered is that none of his gifts, strength, or abilities were ever possessions. They were always loans. And sometimes grace means learning that difference the hard way.

The work he did in Rwanda, in Nairobi, in Ahmedabad—that came from responding to open doors. But the grace that made him capable of walking through them came from everything that had happened before, including what was taken from him. That’s the two sides nobody warns you about when you’re twenty and certain of your path.