What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it?

And in the end they robbed us, but they did let us go. But I think that that was a very useful lesson early in my journalism career, that things can go very badly wrong. At one moment you can be going down a road and things are perfect, and the next moment you’ve got some drunk soldiers who just may kill you. That fear that I felt when they were holding us for maybe 45 minutes or so in the jungle, that has never entirely left me.

Downstairs, the boys gaze at a screen on the old futon in the playroom. We will figure out what to do about them soon enough. They probably already know what’s up and are waiting for us to figure out how to say it. Their very existence is the one dark piece I cannot get right within all this. I can let go of a lot of things: plans, friends, career goals, places in the world I want to see, maybe even the love of my life. But I cannot figure out how to let go of mothering them.

So it affects my work in the sense that now I’ve been kidnapped twice. So now when I’m working in a place like Iraq — even if it’s northern Iraq and someone who hasn’t survived those two things would just drive on these roads and say, like, “Oh, this is great” — but of course, for me, all I see is ISIS around every corner. Or I envision the road filling up with insurgents because I’ve seen that, and I’ve been in that situation. So it affects my work in that sense, that I’m more paranoid than I ever was, certainly than I was in my 20s.

I think the turning point was when my daughter turned 17, and I drank 17 glasses of wine straight. ... But that was my escape from everything I had gone through from the movement — because even as we did the movement, there were traumas that were piling up.

God has never let me down. He’s a key factor in guiding my decisions and feeling safe within them. My wife and I suffered three miscarriages, one of them quite late in the pregnancy. Without faith, we would have retreated into our own corners to lick our wounds, but our love increased.