The Story Isn't Finished Yet

This is where I am right now.

Not at the end of something. At the middle of several things simultaneously. That's where creative people almost always are if they're honest about it. A novel in progress. A blog finding its rhythm again after too long away. A speaking calendar taking shape. A brand that is still becoming what it's meant to be. A homeschool year about to begin. A life that is fuller and more complicated and more alive with possibility than I could have predicted when the long quiet season finally ended.

The story isn't finished. Not even close.

I think about this when I'm tempted to measure the present moment against some imagined finished version of things. You know, with the novel completed, the platform established, the work fully recognized, the life tidily resolved into something that makes obvious sense from the outside.

That imagined finished version is a fiction, and not the useful kind. Real stories don't resolve into tidy conclusions. They keep going. They open into the next thing.

What I've learned, slowly and with significant resistance, is the middle is where all the living actually happens. Not the beginning, where it brims with potential, and not the end, with its satisfying conclusion or retrospective clarity. But the middle. Complicated and unresolved and full of loose threads, and where the story is most alive.

I'm in the middle. You probably are too.

And we need to keep telling our story. Thank you for being here for this part of it.

Where are you in your story right now? Beginning, middle, or somewhere you can't quite name yet? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

When the Work Feels Like Worship

There are mornings when I sit down to write and I feel different.

Not every morning, mind you. I want to be honest about that. Most mornings the work is work. It requires effort and attention and the willingness to push through resistance, and it produces something useful if I'm fortunate. It also produces something that needs significant revision if I'm not. That's the ordinary version, and it's the one that shows up most often.

But occasionally something different happens. The resistance falls away. The words arrive with a clarity and an ease that seems to truly be going somewhere. The work stops feeling like something I'm making and starts feeling like something I'm participating in. Like something larger than the manuscript, larger than my own creative effort, moving through me rather than from me.

I don't know exactly what to call that experience, but I know what it feels like.

It feels like worship.

This isn't exactly easy to explain without sounding either mystical or religious, and I'm trying not to be either. But there is something in the act of creating, of taking the gifts and the calling and the unique perspective you've been given and using them fully, at full capacity, toward something true. That connects to the act of praise in a way I find impossible to deny.

We were made to create. When we do it wholeheartedly, something in us recognizes the rightness of it. Something settles. Something sings.

That makes showing up worthwhile, even on the ordinary mornings that don't feel like anything at all.

Have you ever experienced a creative moment that felt like more than just making something? A moment that touched a deeper place? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Small Acts of Creative Faithfulness

Not every creative act is a grand gesture.

Most of them aren't. Most of them are small.

• A paragraph written before the house wakes up
• A sketch made on the back of an envelope
• A melody hummed into a voice memo while driving somewhere ordinary

Small, unglamorous, unremarkable in the moment. Accumulated over time into something that matters.

I've been thinking lately about the phrase creative faithfulness. It's the practice of showing up consistently for the work, in whatever form that showing up is available to you in a given season. Not the heroic version where you sacrifice everything for the art. The quiet version where you carve out fifteen minutes because fifteen minutes is all you have, and you protect it with everything you have.

This reframing has helped me in the seasons when grand gestures weren't available. When the manuscript wasn't moving and the schedule was impossible and the conditions for serious creative work simply didn't exist. In those seasons, small acts of faithfulness kept something alive that might otherwise have gone quiet.

• a journal entry
• a voice memo
• a single scene written badly just to prove the words were still there

Small doesn't mean insignificant.

In creative work, small and consistent almost always outperforms grand and sporadic. The daily paragraph outlasts the occasional marathon session. The sketch made every morning becomes the body of work that the weekly large-scale effort never quite produces.

Be faithful in the small things. The small things are doing more than they look like they're doing.

What does a small act of creative faithfulness look like in your daily life? The tiny practice that keeps something alive? I'd love to hear in the comments.

The Project That Scares Me

Do you have a project sitting in the back of your mind that you haven't started yet? I do!

I'm not going to tell you what it is, partly because it's not ready to be spoken out loud, and partly because I think most creative people know exactly the project I'm talking about without me having to name mine. I'm sure you have one too. The idea that keeps returning no matter how many times you set it aside. The one that feels more personal than anything else you've made, more exposed, more likely to fail in a way that would cost you in a significant way.

You think you're not ready for it, but you might be more ready than you think.

Fear is a reliable indicator in creative work, but it points in two directions, and you have to learn to read which one it's signaling. Sometimes fear means stop. The project isn't right, the timing isn't right, something needs more development before it's ready to be made.

But sometimes fear means go.

It means you're standing at the edge of something that matters enough to be a bit scary and uncertain, something that has the potential to be the most significant work you've done, if you can find the courage to begin it.

The project that scares you most is usually the one that has the most of you in it. Which means it's the one that has the most to give.

I'm working up to it. Maybe you are too.

Maybe we both just need permission to admit it's there to muster the courage to take that first step.

Is there a creative project you've been afraid to start? One that keeps coming back no matter how many times you set it aside? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

What I Create When No One's Watching

Some creative work exists entirely for an audience.

The polished post. The carefully considered release. The project shaped from the beginning with publication or performance or presentation in mind. That work has its place. Sharing creative work with the world is quite meaningful, and I take it seriously.

But there's another kind of work that happens when nobody's watching. That's where integrity and dedication come into play.

The journal entry that will never be read by anyone else. The scene written just to understand a character better, with no intention of putting it in the manuscript. The creative experiment that exists purely to find out what happens if... No audience, no stakes, no outcome required beyond the learning.

It's where you find out what you actually think, what you're genuinely drawn to, or what energizes you when external validation is removed from the equation entirely. The work you do when nobody's watching tells you things about yourself that the public work can't, because the public work is partially shaped by awareness of how it will be received.

But the private work feeds everything else.

It's also where the most genuinely surprising creative discoveries happen. The ones that eventually find their way into the public work in forms you couldn't have planned. The unseen work over time becomes the foundation of the seen work.

Create something today that no one will ever see. Then, take a moment to discover what it tells you.

Do you have a creative practice that exists just for you? Something that never gets shared? What does it give you? I'd love to hear in the comments.

The Discipline Needed to Produce Greatness

In the world of writing, everyone wants to talk about inspiration.

The moment the idea arrives. Getting into the flow where the words come easily, the work feels effortless, and the creative output exceeds expectations. Don't get me wrong. Those moments do happen. But they're also not where most of the work gets done.

Most of the work gets done in the mundane, ordinary sessions. The ones where you sit down solely because it's Wednesday morning, and mornings are when you write. The ones where the words come slowly and require hard-fought excavation. The ones that don't feel like anything in particular is happening, but as they accumulate over weeks and months, they turn into something worthwhile.

That's the discipline and the more boring aspect of the writing life. It's not always about the dramatic public declaration, the meaningful pivot, or the inspiring story of deciding to take the work seriously. Sometimes, it's just the quiet, unglamorous practice of showing up when nothing in you particularly wants to do the work.

Inspiration is a visitor. Discipline is a resident.

The creative people I most admire are not the ones who wait for the right conditions. They're the ones who create the conditions. Who protect the time, sit in the chair, open the document or the sketchbook or the instrument, and begin. Not because it always produces great work. But because it produces work, and work is the only raw material that can produce greatness.

Show up. Do the thing. Let inspiration find you already working.

What does your creative discipline look like on the days when you don't feel like showing up? I'd love to hear what gets you to the chair in the comments.

Is Creativity a Gift or a Calling? Yes

People ask this as if it has to be one or the other.

Either creativity is something you were given or it's something you were called to do. Like it has to be either a natural aptitude, a talent distributed at birth like eye color or height or a vocation with weight and purpose and intentional direction. The debate implies a choice, as if the answer changes what you do with it.

I think it's both, and I think them working in tandem makes a huge difference.

A gift without a calling can stay perpetually potential. Admired, occasionally exercised, but never fully inhabited. You have the ability but not the orientation, the talent but not the direction. The gift sits in you like an instrument no one plays, capable of music that never gets made.

A calling without a gift is its own kind of frustration. The deep sense of purpose unmatched by the capacity to execute it, the vision outrunning the ability to bring it into being.

When both are present, thought, and when the gift and the calling align, the possibilities become nearly endless. The creativity stops being just a thing you do and starts being a thing you are. It becomes the lens through which you see everything else, the mode through which you process experience and make meaning and contribute something to the world that only you, with your particular combination of wiring and history and perspective, could have made.

But the most important part? It's something you shouldn't take for granted. Something you should steward well.

Whether it arrived as gift, calling, or both, it showed up in you for a reason. The question is what you'll do with it.

Do you think of your creativity as a gift, a calling, or something else entirely? I'd love to hear how you understand it in the comments.

What Grows in the Waiting

Waiting is not nothing.

It feels like nothing, which is part of what makes it hard. But when you're in a season of waiting for a door to open, for clarity to arrive, or for the next chapter to make itself known, the absence of obvious progress reads as absence of movement altogether. Nothing is happening. Nothing is growing. You are simply standing still while life moves around you.

But that's not what's actually happening.

Seeds do their most important work underground, invisible, in the waiting period before anything breaks the surface. The gardener who digs them up to check on the progress interrupts the very process trying to be confirmed. Sometimes the most faithful thing is to leave the ground alone and trust that something is happening in the dark that doesn't need your intervention to succeed.

I've spent a lot of time in waiting seasons. More than I would have chosen. And I've had to learn, imperfectly and repeatedly, the discipline of treating the waiting as part of the work rather than as time lost from it.

What grows in the waiting is often exactly what the next season requires. Patience that couldn't have been developed any other way. Clarity that only comes when the noise of activity quiets down enough to hear it. A deeper understanding of what you actually want, as opposed to what you thought you wanted before the waiting stripped away the less essential things.

The waiting is not wasted. It is actually, in its own quiet and unglamorous way, quite productive.

What you're growing in the dark will matter a great deal when the light comes. Just wait for it.

What has a season of waiting produced in you that you couldn't have grown any other way? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

How to Stand Firm When the Ground Shifts Under You

Nobody gets to choose whether the ground shifts. Only what they do when it does.

I've had seasons where the plan, certainty, or version of the future I'd been building changed in ways I didn't see coming and couldn't have controlled. Most people have. It's one of the more leveling facts of human experience. No amount of preparation, faithfulness, or good intention makes you immune to the ground shifting underneath you.

Where you're rooted when it happens is what matters.

If your stability lives in the circumstances, in the plan going according to plan, in the people around you staying who you need them to be, or in the external markers of a life that's working, then a shift in circumstances is a shift in everything. There's nothing underneath to hold when the surface gives way.

If your stability lives somewhere deeper, the shift is still real. Still painful, still disorienting, still requiring grief and adjustment and the slow work of finding your footing in a new landscape. We all go through real struggle that can sometimes cripple us. But it's not everything. Especially when you have your roots planted in the right place. Those roots underneath the thing that moved mean you have a foundation that didn't move with it.

That's what I write about when I write about faith. Not the absence of difficulty but the presence of strength to weather the storm. Not immunity from the ground shifting but the experience of being held when it does.

I write toward that truth because I've needed it myself. And because every reader who has ever had the ground shift needs to know it's possible to find your footing again.

It is. I promise.

Has the ground ever shifted under you in a way you didn't see coming? What did you find underneath when it did? I'd love to hear in the comments.

Rooted Doesn't Mean Stationary

Being rooted sounds like staying put.

Like settling in, planting yourself, refusing to move. And for some people in some seasons, that's exactly what it looks like. A deliberate, courageous stillness in the face of pressure to drift.

But a tree's roots don't make it stationary. They make it mobile in a different way. They allow the branches to move dramatically, freely, in ways that would be dangerous without the underground stability holding everything in place. The deeper the roots, the more the tree can bend without breaking.

Rootedness in faith and purpose works the same way.

Some of the biggest moves of my life were only possible because of what was anchored underneath. These were decisions that looked from the outside like significant risk, like leaving the familiar for something uncertain. I couldn't have made them without that anchor. The faith that had been built slowly in the quiet seasons. The clarity about what mattered that had come through the difficult ones. The community that held me in place even as the circumstances shifted.

I couldn't have moved without the roots. The roots are what made the movement safe.

I think creative people especially can feel a false tension between being grounded and being adventurous. As if stability and risk are opposites. They're not. The most grounded people I know are often the bravest. And it's all because they're solidly rooted.

You don't have to choose between being anchored and being alive to possibility. The anchor is what makes the possibility survivable.

Has being grounded in faith, community, or purpose ever made it possible for you to take a risk you couldn't have taken otherwise? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Season That Felt Like Drought

There are seasons that feel like nothing is growing.

The creative well runs dry. The words don't come. The projects that used to energize you sit untouched while life makes demands that feel more urgent and leave nothing over for the work you love. The silence stretches, and somewhere in the stretching it starts to feel permanent. Like this might be who you are now, someone who used to create, past tense.

I lived in that season. Longer than I expected to, longer than I would have chosen.

What I know now that I didn't know then is that drought seasons are not dead seasons, even when they feel exactly like dying. A tree in drought is doing something underground that it can't do when water is plentiful. It's sending roots deeper, searching further, finding sources of sustenance it never would have reached in the comfortable seasons.

That isn't necessarily what you want to hear when you're in the middle of it. I know I didn't. Regardless of what you know, the drought feels like drought. Dry and depleting and resistant to easy recovery.

But looking back from the other side, I can see what grew in me during that season that couldn't have grown any other way. A clarity about what the work actually means to me, stripped of the external validation that had been quietly propping up my sense of purpose without my realizing it. A deeper understanding of why I write, when writing itself was unavailable to answer the question.

The drought didn't end my story. It deepened it.

I would have never discovered or learned that from inside it. But I'm grateful to know it now.

Have you lived through a drought season (creative, spiritual, or otherwise) and found something after surviving that season that surprised you? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

What It Means to Be Rooted

The word rooted gets used a lot.

Rooted in faith. Rooted in community. Rooted in purpose. It shows up on home décor and inspirational graphics and the kind of quotes that circulate endlessly on social media until the meaning gets worn smooth from overuse.

But the actual experience of being genuinely rooted is far different from the decorative version.

A tree with deep roots doesn't look different from the outside on a calm day. You can't see what's happening underground. The depth only becomes visible when the wind comes, when the storm hits and the tree that looked identical to every other tree on the block is the one still standing after the storm passes.

That's what rootedness actually is. Not the absence of difficulty or uncertainty or seasons that strip everything back to bare branches. It's the underground work. The slow, unglamorous, invisible growth that determines what stays standing when the pressure comes.

For me, rootedness is inseparable from faith. It's the daily return to what I know to be true when circumstances are doing their best to convince me otherwise. It's the practice of going back to the source in prayer, in Scripture, and in the stories that have carried truth across centuries, when everything above ground feels uncertain.

It's also inseparable from story. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we're doing and why it matters are part of the root system. They hold us in place when the ground shifts. And if you're alive in this world? That ground is going to shift.

Being rooted doesn't mean being unmoved. It means you won't get uprooted. And that's the big difference.

What does being rooted look like in your own life? What anchors you when things get uncertain? I'd love to hear in the comments.

The Question Every Audience Eventually Asks

It comes in different forms, but it's always the same question.

Sometimes it arrives directly: How do you find the courage to keep creating when you don't know if it matters? Sometimes it's more specific: How do you keep writing when no one seems to be reading? Sometimes it's quieter than that. It might not be a question at all but a look, a hesitation, the way someone lingers after a talk with something they can't quite bring themselves to say.

But it's always the same question underneath. Does this work mean anything? Am I making something that matters, or am I just making noise?

I've asked it myself more times than I can count. Every honest creative person has.

And I can't resolve the uncertainty. I still feel it nearly every day. However, one thing I've learned is you are almost never the right judge of your own work's impact. The piece you labored over and doubted and almost didn't finish is often the one that reaches someone in a way you'll never fully know. The moment you almost cut is often the moment someone else underlines, highlights, or marks with a dog-eared page.

You don't get to see most of what your work does in the world. You have to make it faithfully and release it and trust that it finds who it's meant to find.

That's not a comfortable answer. But it's the honest one. And every time I give it, I watch the person who asked the question visibly relax, as if permission to not know was exactly what they needed.

Create faithfully. Release bravely. Trust the rest.

Have you ever doubted whether your creative work matters? What brought you back to it anyway? I'd love to hear your story in the comments.

What Speaking Taught Me About Writing

I became a better writer the day I started speaking.

That's not the direction the influence is supposed to run. Writers write; speakers speak. The skills feel adjacent but separate. But standing in front of a live audience and watching in real time how people respond to language has taught me things about writing that I'd never have learned from years at a desk alone and isolated.

An audience gives you immediate feedback that a manuscript never can.

You feel the moment a story resonates with your audience. The quality of the attention shifts, the room leans in. You also feel the moment it doesn't. The restlessness that returns, the slight drift of focus. You learn quickly which words carry weight and which ones dissipate into the air without leaving a mark. You discover that sentences which read beautifully on a page sometimes collapse when spoken aloud, and that the clearest, simplest construction almost always wins.

I brought all of that back to my writing.

I am becoming increasingly more aware of rhythm. The way a sentence sounds as well as how it reads. More ruthless about clarity. More attentive to the moment when I was holding a reader's attention and the moment I was losing it, even without a live audience in the room. Speaking has taught me to feel those things in my body, and once you can feel them, you can't unfeel them.

These two disciplines have made each other stronger. Writing gave me better material to use when speaking. Speaking gave me a more calibrated ear to utilize when I write.

That isn't something I expected, but I'm grateful for it.

Have you ever found that one skill you developed in one area unexpectedly improved something completely different? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Talk I Was Most Afraid to Give

The talks that scare you most are usually the ones that matter most.

I've spoken on craft, on publishing, on the intersection of faith and fiction, on the writing life in all its unglamorous reality. Most of those talks live in territory I know well. I've inhabited it for years, and while preparation still matters, there's a foundation of familiarity underneath it.

The talk I was most afraid to give was different.

It required me to speak from a place I hadn't finished processing. To stand in front of people and talk honestly about a season of my life that still felt raw. The long hiatus from writing, the complicated tangle of reasons behind it, what it cost and what it eventually produced. It required me to be a person telling her own story rather than an author talking about craft, and those hold two distinctly different kinds of pressure.

What I discovered is that the talks that cost you something personally are the ones that give the most back to an audience. They're not looking to delight in your suffering. That's not what impresses them. And while I've been burned multiple times by those who sought to gain from exposing my weaknesses or struggles, I've tried hard to not let that stop me. 

Because honesty is disarming.

When a speaker is willing to be genuinely vulnerable, a room responds with a generosity that is almost overwhelming. This isn't the performed vulnerability, where a false reality is presented with the intent to manipulate. This is the real kind, the kind that still has some uncertainty in it because the speaker hasn't worked out everything yet.

People don't connect with polished. They connect with true.

The talk I was most afraid to give became one I'm most grateful I gave. The fear, it turned out, was pointing directly at the thing the audience most needed to hear.

Is there something you've been afraid to say or share because it felt too personal or too unfinished? What's held you back? I'd love to hear in the comments.

What Happens in a Room When a Story Is Told Well

There's a specific moment I watch for when I'm speaking.

It happens a few sentences into a story, and sometimes sooner. The quiet shifts. The restlessness that lives in any audience settles. Phones go face-down without anyone deciding to put them down. Eyes that were drifting come back to the front of the room. The collective attention of a group of separate individuals becomes, briefly and remarkably, a single thing.

It's neuroscience. But sometimes, it can feel like magic. It's the way human brains are wired to respond to narrative. To synchronize, to lean in, to follow a story the way they'll follow almost nothing else.

But story doesn't have to be dramatic to produce that magical reaction.

It doesn't require high stakes or unusual circumstances or a particularly remarkable outcome. What it requires is specificity and honesty. A real moment, rendered with enough detail that the listener can step inside it. A genuine emotion, named or implied, that creates recognition.

When those elements are present, the speaker doesn't have to forcibly manufacture or control the reaction. It just happens. The audience brings themselves into the story. They map their own experience onto it. They're no longer just listening. They're participating, finding themselves somewhere in the narrative.

It's why I recently branched out and landed on the Get Rooted platform. On the blog and inside every graphic that goes on a product, the power of words and story take center stage. Every single person has a story to tell, and we help make that happen at the Get Rooted blog, all while grounding everything in God's truth. Those simple stories change lives.

That's the moment I work toward every time I speak. I don't hope for any applause at the end. No, I strive to achieve that quiet shift, a few sentences in, when the room becomes one thing.

Have you ever felt that shift in a room? The moment when a speaker or storyteller captured everyone at once? What were they talking about? I'd love to hear in the comments.

Why I Speak About Story

I didn't set out to be a speaker.

In fact, the first time I was asked to share my story, a well-respected woman approached me just before, with her narrowed eyes and slight curl of one side of her mouth. She looked me up and down and said, "Who do you think you are coming here to talk to us women? You're barely out of school and not married or a mother, and you're just getting started in life. What could you possibly have to share that would help us?"

Ouch, right? That one hurt. A lot! And although I did get up in front of those women to share my story, I allowed that woman's words to haunt me for the next 15 years. Every time I thought I might have some insight or wisdom to share with someone else, either individually or in a group, that "imposter syndrome" would rear its ugly head, and I'd keep my mouth shut.

Instead, when the opportunity to write fell in my lap, I jumped right on that path. Writing has always held a special place in my heart, and I'd still consider it my primary calling. But for too long, I hid behind the protection of distance between what I wrote and my audience.

After I had a few books and a couple dozen articles under my belt, the opportunity to speak came my way again. Although a part of me wanted to run the other way, I chose to step forward. It took everything I'd learned about communicating truth through story to figure out how to do it standing in front of a room full of people instead of alone at a desk.

Once I stood at the front, the small audience looking at me, I realized something.

The principles are the same. A room full of people responds to story the same way a reader does. The defenses lower, the attention sharpens, the emotional access opens. A well-placed story in the middle of a talk does what a well-placed scene does in a novel. It makes the abstract concrete. It makes the distant personal. It makes the truth become real in a relatable way.

I speak about story because story is what I know most deeply. It's also because the longer I've worked with it in fiction, content, or conversation, the more convinced I've become that it's one of the most powerful tools available to anyone trying to communicate something that matters.

Not just writers. Anyone.

The business leader trying to inspire a team. The teacher trying to reach a struggling student. The parent trying to explain something important to a teenager who has stopped listening to direct instruction. Story reaches where argument can't. It always has.

That's why I speak about it. When you understand how story works, it changes how you communicate everything else.

Has a speaker ever used a story that completely changed how you received what they were saying? What made it land? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Show Don't Tell: When a Story Preaches Unintentionally

It happens in the revision.

You're reading back through a scene you wrote weeks ago and you stop at a line of dialogue that feels a little too on-the-nose, a character observation that reads more like an essay than a thought, a moment where the story pauses and your intention becomes visible underneath it like a watermark.

The story is preaching. And you didn't mean for it to do that.

This is one of the more uncomfortable moments in the writing process, because you have to honestly face your own instincts. The impulse to make sure the reader understands the point is understandable. You care about the truth you're carrying in this story, and you don't want the reader to miss it. But caring too much, holding the message too tightly, has a way of working against itself. The reader feels the grip and pulls back.

The fix is almost always the same: trust the scene to do the work without the explanation. Cut the line that names what the scene is already showing. You know, the famous, "Show, don't tell," command. Let the character feel the thing without narrating why it matters. Return the story to experience and let the meaning live inside the experience rather than beside it.

This is easier to describe than to do. It takes a great deal of authorial restraint that goes against the instinct to make sure the reader gets it. But readers are rather perceptive. They get it. Give them the benefit of the doubt. They get it more fully, in fact, when the story trusts them to see it.

The best message is the one the reader finds without being shown where to look.

Have you ever noticed a story trying too hard to make its point? Did it pull you out of the experience? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Characters Who Don't Know They Have Faith

Some of my favorite characters to write are the ones who don't know what they believe.

They're not skeptics exactly. They don't carry a philosophical position against faith. They're just people who have been shaped by something they haven't yet examined, who operate from a set of values that have roots they haven't traced, who reach instinctively toward hope in dark moments without understanding the source of that instinct.

They have faith. They just haven't called it that yet.

Writing this kind of character takes quite a bit of patience. The temptation is to move him/her toward knowing too quickly. To engineer the moment of clarity and give the reader the satisfying resolution of a character who arrives at belief. Sometimes, that's the right story to tell.

But sometimes, the better story is the one where the character doesn't fully arrive. Where they move closer to something they can't quite name, where their actions increasingly reflect a faith they haven't yet claimed, where the reader can see what they can't see about themselves.

That story reflects the truth about how belief actually develops in real people. It rarely happens all at once. And rarely in a single illuminating moment. More often, it's gradually, quietly, in the accumulation of choices and experiences that slowly reorient a life without the person fully realizing it's happening.

You want to tell that story with care and without rushing. The unnamed faith is still faith. And the reader knows it, even when the character doesn't.

Have you ever seen yourself in a character who was finding their way toward something without quite knowing what it was? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Grace in the Difficult Scene

The easiest scenes to write are the ones where everything goes right.

The breakthrough moment. The reconciliation. The answer arriving after a long silence. Those scenes are satisfying to write because they're satisfying to read. They deliver what the story has promised and the reader receives them with relief and recognition.

But the hard scenes are something else entirely.

The betrayal. The loss that doesn't get explained away. The moment when a character does the wrong thing for understandable reasons and has to live with it. These are the scenes writers sometimes soften, pulling back from the full weight of what the story requires because it feels too dark, too painful, too much.

But grace doesn't live only in the bright scenes. It actually lives most powerfully in the hard ones.

A character who receives kindness she hasn't earned in the middle of her worst moment. A relationship that survives something it probably shouldn't have. A small, quiet act of mercy in a scene that could have gone a different direction entirely. These moments create a completely different landscape than the triumphant ones because they arrive where they're least expected. In the darkness, where grace is most itself.

Writing the hard scene honestly, without softening it into something easier, and then placing grace inside it rather than after it? Well, that's actually one of the most truthful things a writer of faith can do. It reflects how grace actually operates in the real world.

You don't find grace after the hard thing. You find grace inside it.

Has a difficult scene in a book ever moved you more deeply than a triumphant one? What made it stay with you? I'd love to hear in the comments.