I’m writing this sentence as I sit in the dark next to a trembling old chihuahua, listening to a background track of thunder rolling and raindrops pelting the windows of the house where I’m staying. The way my chihuahua friend feels about this storm is the same way that I felt about thunderstorms (and loud noises in general) as a child, all the way up through my early adult years.

 

If I’m honest, I still don’t love them. I still find myself cupping my hands over my ears after a particularly bright flash of lightning, waiting for the crack of thunder to follow. I still comfort myself with the imagery of angels bowling strikes in heaven, a light-hearted metaphor my aunt shared with me years ago that has stuck with me to this day.

 

But I am years away from the twelve-year-old girl who curled up on a bench beneath a pavilion at Dorney Park, mashing my hands against the sides of my head and sobbing into my mom’s lap as a storm roared around us. I am the one attempting to comfort the shaking creature next to me the way my parents did with me so many stormy nights.

 

While anxiety is still very much a part of my life – any of my inner circle friends who have spoken to me within the past three weeks can attest to that – it does not hold me in a death grip the way it used to.

 

The difference between who I was then and who I am now is almost miraculous. I am not shaken by storms the way I used to be. I know the One who holds me through them. I can speak truth over my beating heart when the winds begin to rise.

 

So instead of cowering in a corner and waiting for the scary thing to pass, I picked up my laptop and began to do the thing God has been asking me to do for a while — a thing that, if I’m honest, feels much scarier than a summer storm. Even scarier than the other scary things He’s been asking me to do, like going part-time at a job when I was already living paycheck to paycheck so I could pursue the dreams I’ve held close to my chest because that’s where they felt safe.

 

Let me tell you about it.

 

And it was an accident.

 

I started writing this book in March of 2021, about two months after the three weeks that changed my life. If it sounds dramatic, that’s because it is. I am not the same person I was before that course of events. I never will be again. And I am so unbelievably thankful for that.

 

If you haven’t read it already, I shared a glimpse of this story in I’ll Go First: When Sexual Shame Meets the Love of Jesus. (link)

 

Key word: glimpse.

 

The book I wrote is more than a glimpse.

 

It is a front row view with backstage passes.

 

It is a panorama seen through a microscope lens.

 

It is a very real, very raw, very vulnerable look at how God did some pretty miraculous things in my life in an unexpected way.

 

And I am terrified to share it.

I never intended to write this book. When I first started putting my story on paper — much like I’m doing now, on an empty Microsoft Word document — I thought it was going to be a few pages. I was going to share it with one person, total. I had a specific reason for sharing it with this person, and she was the only one who was ever going to read it. “The Real Reason,” I called it, because the essay was an explanation of the reason I got my first tattoo.

 

Well…that “essay” grew from five pages into ten, then twenty, then fifty. I went from typing on Word to scrawling in notebooks until my hand throbbed, then re-typing those words into a Google document. I claimed a corner of the couch in our basement and stayed up late into the night, listening to a specific soundtrack from the movie Brother Bear on repeat while my fingers flew over the keys, our Christmas tree glowing warmly in the background even though it was July. Sometimes I brought a pillow with me because I knew I would fall asleep on that couch.

 

And then early in the morning on March twenty-second, 2022, while sitting at a dimly lit desk in a small bungalow on a rocky shore of the Chesapeake Bay, I typed the final words of The Real Reason.

 

It was one hundred and five pages. Single spaced.

 

I pressed save and shut my laptop. I walked to the pier where my best friend sat doing her morning Bible study and waiting for me to break the news that I’d finished. (I’d told her about the existence of this book two days before, the night we’d arrived at this little house together and she’d asked me what my goals for our weekend away were. I told her my goal was to finish the book, to which she asked, “What book?”)

 

 

I laid down on the warm planks of that pier and turned my face up to the sun. I whispered “thank you” over and over to the God who’d written my story. Who turn my crumpled leaf of shame into a bright and flourishing tree. Who carried me through the darkest dark and into a light that was almost blinding.

 

And I would have been happy to stay there forever. The fact that I’d poured hours of my life into this essay-turned-book for only one person to read it didn’t bother me. I’d written my story because I wanted to document what the Lord had done in my heart and how He’d done it, and that was good enough for me. I had my own, personal, 105-page Stone of Remembrance saved to my Google drive.

 

I was content to share my secret with just one friend. Maybe two. Three, at the very most.

 

But before long I started to feel a tug on my heart, a gentle nudge from the Friend who’d lived every word of my book with me. And I found myself beginning to ask Him a question that I never, ever thought I would.