Truth is too much to bear without goodness and beauty.

A book update and a word about trying to control life

When I started writing my book in 2019, it was a collection of essays for moms. I was writing from the middle, still parenting kids at home and still homeschooling, but with 20 years under my belt. The hindsight I had back then was about how, in my early years as a Christian, I was very focused on practicality and efficiency and doing things right. Answers were black and white. Schedules were posted, lists made, charts adjusted as frequently as needed for a household of growing people. God had a plan for my life and it involved carefully calculated steps and staying on schedule.

If it sounds like I was a real joy to be around back then, I think the important thing to note is that I was in a constant internal struggle between doing what I thought I ought to do, and doing what felt lifegiving to me. This need to control an out of control life was fed by the homeschooling circles I immersed myself in online and through books, but it was also an attempt to manage life after giving birth to three children in three years.¹ I was homeschooling my 12 year old stepson. My husband was self-employed in a very seasonal industry. Then we adopted our youngest son from India. Then we sold our home and moved into a camp trailer.²

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone fell in line with the schedule I made? Wouldn’t life run so smoothly?

On paper I was a Master Planner. In reality, I was always just trying to get everything checked off the list so I could relax and do the things I really wanted to do: read a good book, take my kids on a walk, learn to sketch and paint, make more with my hands than just our necessary food.

My kids grew. They took on more of their own tasks.³ I spent less time organizing them and more time enjoying life alongside them. We went for walks, sketched in our nature journals, and I even started to decorate my house a little. When you are hell-bent on utilitarianism and correctness and you know nothing about decorating, you can call your style “minimalism” but you are really just scared to do stuff. I painted walls red and left artsy little messes out and started to collect old books just because I love them.

As I focused on the life and the education I wanted for my children—one that involved a lot of time outdoors, a lot of good and rigorous reading, time making messes, exploring interests, and marvelling at all God was doing in the world—I began to see the hypocrisy of the life I was living. I had to be more than the planner who was diligently making a life of goodness and beauty and truth for my children. I needed to participate in this education towards beauty for myself.

I became more me, and less a version of the perfect me. My journals filled with vignettes and poems that eventually ended up on a blog I started in 2012, and I kind of embraced my quirks instead of straightening them all out. I won’t say I stopped trying to control everything because I still would like nothing more than to control life, but circumstances changed and kept changing, and my grip slipped more and more.

And in 2020 I realized just how little I could actually control. I realized that even the good things I desired were not guaranteed, even if God agreed they were good, even if I prayed everyday. When my dad died in August I lost control. Truth was too much to bear without beauty and goodness, and for too long I had neglected them in pursuit of the guarantees I couldn’t have.

So the book changed direction. Just like my life naturally shifted as my children aged, grief changed everything and my writing reflected that. I was three or four essays into the project by that time, and I had to set the essays aside and just write the grief for a while, just for me.

Through that writing I found a beauty that was beyond what was necessary. Excessive. Extravagant. Excruciatingly hard. Grief worked its way into the book and the essays became chapters in a story of changing my mind, because keeping my faith meant falling on the solid rock again and again and finding those blows do, indeed, change my perspective.

Beauty is not soft focus and radiant light and tranquil cottages, and it’s not a frivolity we can live without. It is in the darkness where you are never alone, where much of life is actually lived. God knows we need a Companion. We need light in the tunnel and not just a hope at the end of it.⁴

The Monk by the Sea, 1808-1810, Caspar David Friedrich

My last book update was in June 2025, and I thought maybe the book would be available by winter. Good friends read it and offered valuable feedback and encouraging words. I shifted the order around a bit, added some clarity, and had a pretty solid manuscript by November. I am happy with the book, and that in itself is success.

For the last few years as I’ve toiled away on it, I have thumbed my nose at the need for platform and followers, content to write the best story I can, self-publish my book, and not play the numbers game.⁵ I will not dance for you. But I want this book to feel and look a certain way, and I don’t want to cut her legs out from under her before she’s even taken a step, so I spent November and December putting together a book proposal and making a list of agents to query. I will not dance for you but I will nauseate myself with a third person autobiography and positive hopes for the market on this book. I will not dance for you, but I will put myself out there on behalf of a message I love.

I will not dance for you but I can be a fool in other ways.

The proposal and/or full manuscript is in the inboxes of several agents right now. I have heard positive things about my writing and the book’s premise from two agents so far, but the truth of the matter is the same: unknown authors without a large following do not sell books, and publishers are not in the business of taking obvious risks. We own two businesses, so I get it. I will give this querying process more time but I won’t let it discourage me or keep me from getting the book out, somehow.

I wanted you to know some of this because many of you have cheered me on in this project. A writer without readers is as good as a meal eaten alone, in a cave, when you are lonely and just wish someone could be blessed by the lovely salad you put together. I do the work of putting sentences together and presenting them here because you tell me it means something to you, and that means something to me.

This slow work is the best I can do, and it is what feels lifegiving to me. The old struggle of what I ought to do will always be with me and some of it is good—I need pushed and challenged. But, in large part because of my years spent writing, I have a better understanding of what is mine to do. I hope something in my process encourages you in yours, and thank you for walking this slow way with me.

1. I am so happy to see my daughters getting better help after childbirth. I never had any postpartum depression but my hormones and joints and ligaments were completely whack after that marathon of having kids, and I am finally (28 years after my first child was born) getting some medical help. I had a great OBGYN, but the times were just different I guess.

2. These were all choices we willingly and gladly made, but good grief it was a lot! Youthful zeal and energy and all that.

3. LISTEN: Most 10 year olds can do their own laundry and it won’t be perfectly folded but it will be DONE and you don’t have to do it. Let them stuff it in drawers. No one will die from a wrinkled shirt and it’s good for your humility anyway.

4. An interesting rabbit hole into “The Painter of Light”.

5. If you are interested in the platform discussion, especially in regards to Christian publishing, Tabitha McDuffee started her series on it this week and the first post has already stirred up a lot of thoughts and feelings.

Is Christian Publishing Bad For the Church?