God Sees Around the Corner

A Story of Faith, Family, Loss, Healing, and Purpose

When Arien Williams was eight years old, he found his grandmother gone. Bay Bay had helped raise him - she was the warmth in a house that didn't always have enough of it. The day after she died, he had his first seizure. The day after that, the life he had known was over.

God Sees Around the Corner is the memoir of the road that began there - a road no one would have chosen, and one that Arien could never see more than a step ahead of. Diagnosed with epilepsy as a child. Raised through his mother's addiction, in a home where love and struggle lived side by side. Shaped by a father he would not truly meet until he was a grown man. Marked by losses that came faster than a boy should have to bury them - including the sister he called Coco, whose death he carried long after.

By every reasonable measure, it was a life set up to be defined by what it survived. Instead, it became a witness.

Across thirty chapters and four movements - Beginnings, Becoming, Called, and Looking Back - Arien traces how a frightened, sick, grieving boy grew into a husband, a father, a minister, and finally a chaplain: the man who now sits at the bedsides of the dying and the devastated, holding the hands of strangers in the exact kind of room where he once sat holding his grandmother's. He did not arrive there by escaping his past. He arrived there because of it.

This is not a book that rushes past pain to reach the lesson. It sits in the hard places - the hospital rooms, the funerals, the relapses, the long silences with God - and tells the truth about them. It refuses to turn the people who hurt him into villains or the people who loved him into saints. His mother is allowed to be both a woman who struggled and a woman who loved him. His father is allowed to be both absent and, eventually, known. The God of these pages is not a vending machine who fixes everything; He is the One who was present in the room the whole time, seeing what Arien could not.

The title is not a slogan. It is the conclusion of a life lived forward and understood backward. Again and again, standing at a corner he could not see around - another diagnosis, another grave, another door that seemed to close - Arien could not know what was waiting on the other side. But God could. Always had. Always would.

Written first for his two sons, AJ and Aiden - so they would know the road their father walked and the One who walked it beside him - God Sees Around the Corner is finally a book for anyone standing at a corner of their own. For the person carrying more than seems possible. For the son or daughter trying to break a cycle they were born into. For the grandchild who still feels the love of someone now gone. And for everyone who has ever needed to be reminded that the God who set them on the path can already see what's coming.

It is a story about grief that does not have the last word. About faith that is not the absence of fear but the decision to keep walking through it. And about the quiet, stubborn grace that meets us - not at the destination, but at every corner along the way.