That’s the book I need to write

You guys! You guys! I’m so excited and I just wanted to share with you all a bit about it.

Dear friends of ours were sharing in my mom’s group on Friday about calling and place and how to love a place, and suddenly, it all made sense. Talking together about where we live, about a theology of place, about the story of the Bible being about movement from the garden to our eternal home. Things all held in isolation as cool ideas before coalesced for me in a beautiful idea. Do you ever have one of those lightbulb moments?

You see, I wrote my Ph.D. on place. Specifically, it was about immigrants moving from Britain to America around the time of the War for Independence. But what really got me jazzed about the concept in the first place was my own experience living as a foreigner, since my husband and I were Americans living in Scotland. And the book I need to write is about place. It’s kind of like my Ph.D. but for normal people. It’s about how places sink into our souls, about how we learn to be a part of places, about how we resist and fall in love with locales. It’s about daily little liturgies of walking your kids to and from school, of bumping into friends at the supermarket and about feeling a sense of your own smallness in big places. It’s about all the things that Circling the Story is about — about how life is both mundane and glorious; and it’s about finding yourself again and again in the flesh and blood and meeting together as we come alongside one another, around each other’s tables, and ultimately, as we long for belonging in a Home that will satisfy all our longings.

So I’m going to go ahead and let you in on a little secret and I need your help.

I want to become an author. Not the academic variety right now (since I’m home with little kiddos at the moment) but I want to write; writing is something that brings life — not only to me as a write and process, but also as I share what I write. It’s life-giving in the best sense of the word. If anything I’ve said here at Circling the Story has resonated with you, would you consider sharing or inviting friends to like my Facebook page or subscribe to the blog*?

To get published these days (the traditional route anyway), I’m going to need to build myself a platform if anyone’s going to pick up my book idea. And a platform = people. We need more people to join this community we’re building here at Circling the Story. Could you imagine your life online focused on grace and truth and getting fuel to show up even when it’s hard? Instead of the relentless amount of noise and pictures and feeling so much like you just don’t measure up? So, if you’re passionate about seeing God show up in your hard, about being open and vulnerable about who you are and what you’re about, and are excited to see a community built on authenticity and struggle and hope, then please stick around. I want this little piece of the Internet to be about real, and to be about hope. And, please, invite others to join in!

It’s scary to write it down. To verbalize my goals. But there they are. I want to write. I want to do it not just for fun, on the side, not just to earn an income, but because I finally have a voice and there’s things that need saying and I think I’m the one to say it.

So join in the conversation. Let’s have this not just be an espresso shot to our day — where we read some words to get a quick jolt and go about our day. Let’s make it about change, about being real, and about supporting each other as we struggle towards faith, hope and love. And I hope you’ll trust me well enough to join with me here and do it.

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