What if your midlife crisis boarded a train—and refused to let you get off until you told the truth about your heart? The Mirror Line: Book One – The Silent Erosion is a lyrical, parable-like journey through the inner life of Adam, a burned-out pastor whose faith, marriage, and ministry are quietly coming apart. By day, Adam looks like a success: sermons prepared, hospital visits made, community projects launched. By night, he’s a man hitting golf balls into a cemetery behind his church, numbing the ache of a marriage gone quiet and a calling that feels more like a sentence than a gift. Then, one evening—with a half-finished glass of wine beside him and an old Dan Fogelberg song still hanging in the air—Adam nods off in his favorite chair and wakes up somewhere else: On the Mirror Line —a strange, almost holy train that runs not on tracks, but through memory, desire, and the loves that have shaped his life. Car by car, Adam is confronted with: A Gardener–Conductor who remembers Eden better than any theology textbook. - Jack (a wry, Oxford-soul mentor) singing about C.S. Lewis’s Four Loves and exposing how “church work” can become a very pious way to hide. - Augustine offering bread, wine, and hard-won wisdom about cupiditas (grasping love) and caritas (self-giving love). - A mysterious woman in a red scarf and a wounded girl with a daisy chain, each holding up a mirror to Adam’s unhealed ache. - A rat on the luggage rack who always seems to appear when something is about to begin—or fall apart. As the train stops at St. Orge Crossing —a station built from childhood memories, unpainted nurseries, and quiet father-wounds—Adam begins to see his “holy exhaustion” for what it really is: misplaced storgē , affection turned into survival strategy, a bridge he’s been breaking himself to hold up. This first book in The Mirror Line series is for: Pastors, ministry leaders, and caregivers who feel burned out but can’t admit it. - Anyone who’s ever confused being needed with being loved . - Readers who love C.S. Lewis, Augustine, and quietly supernatural stories that speak in whispers, not slogans. By the final whistle of Book One, Adam hasn’t “fixed” his life. But he has taken one crucial step: he has stopped mistaking his collapsing bridge for the Cross—and, far off in the night, he can see a new city on the horizon. Its name is Philadelphia . The journey isn’t over. It’s finally begun.