The final words of my book are simple. 

“It was meant to happen.” 

I did not choose them because everything in my life was easy or because every painful event was somehow good. 

Some things were not good. 

The deaths of my brothers Sam and George during the Lebanese Civil War caused pain that never completely left our family. My parents were never the same after losing them. No phrase can make that loss acceptable. 

There were business setbacks, separations from family, mistakes, illnesses, and decisions I would have preferred not to face. 

When I say something was meant to happen, I am not saying every tragedy was deserved or arranged for my comfort. 

I am saying that, when I look backward, I can see connections that were invisible while I was living through them. 

My first memory of that feeling began when I was five years old. 

I was riding in the back seat of my parents’ car wearing new shoes. I saw two shiny handles and pulled the wrong one. The door opened, and I was pulled from the moving car into a ditch. 

I survived with scratches and no broken bones. 

Truth be told, I cried more about losing one of my new shoes than about what had happened to me. 

At five years old, I did not understand how close I might have come to a different outcome. 

Not long afterward, I awoke during the night and saw what appeared to be Jesus kneeling beside my bed. No words were spoken. I told my mother the next morning, and she immediately began to pray. 

Those moments remained with me. 

As I grew older, I began believing that my life had been spared for a reason, though I could not explain what the reason was. 

Then there was the Marine in Beirut. 

He knelt beside me, called Michel by the name Mike, and handed me a KitKat. It lasted only a few minutes. 

Years later, I moved to the United States, became an American citizen, formed friendships with veterans, and wrote about the respect I had carried for Marines since childhood. 

How could that Marine have known what his small kindness would become? 

He could not. 

Neither could I. 

The same is true of learning English at the American Library. At the time, I was a boy interested in another language. Mrs. Wilson corrected my sentences, gave me a library card, and helped me practice. 

I did not know that English would later help me work, manage businesses, raise a family in America, and write an entire book. 

The lesson came before I knew why I needed it. 

Meeting Nadine also felt that way. 

I went to a place called The Library without knowing I would meet the only girlfriend I would ever have. Our conversation became a relationship, then a marriage, then the center of the family we built. 

A different decision that evening could have changed everything. 

There were other moments that made little sense at first. 

Sleeping in my Mustang was not part of any plan. Being discovered there by my manager was embarrassing. Yet that discovery led me to a room and ended the problem I had been trying to hide. 

Years later, after losing our business and moving to Las Vegas, I stood confused in a grocery store looking for cookie ingredients. The man who helped me happened to be a district manager for McDonald’s and told me about the company’s expansion. 

At the time, I was not ready to hear that returning to work for someone else could become part of my recovery. 

But the conversation came when I needed another direction. 

This happened more than once in my life. A person appeared. A job became available. A move that felt like an ending opened another part of the future. 

Not every opportunity arrived wearing a sign. 

Sometimes it looked like a candy bar, a library card, a rented room, a grocery aisle, or a conversation with a stranger. 

Can you imagine trying to understand all of that while it is happening? 

You cannot. 

You make the decision in front of you and continue. 

Only later do some of the pieces begin to line up. 

That is also how I came to see my return to Lebanon after fifty-three years. I had carried the country inside me for decades. Returning did not restore the past, and it did not give back the people we had lost. 

But it allowed me to stand again near the places that had formed me and understand how far the road had taken me. 

Near the end of the book, the old fanning mill also returned to my life in an unexpected way. A machine connected to my grandfather and the lessons of Anjar became part of the full circle I had been trying to understand. 

As a boy, I learned that if I rushed the mill, I spoiled the work. 

As an older man, I finally understood that a life also takes time before its pattern becomes visible. 

I ended the book with “It was meant to happen” because that was the most honest way I could describe what I saw when I looked back. 

Not a perfect plan. 

Not a life without grief. 

A series of people, choices, accidents, losses, and second chances whose connections became clearer only after many years. 

At the time, I was simply living them. 

Now I can see where they led.