An Early Mile Marker

Sometimes we think we’ve outgrown our old journals. Then one day they begin reading us.

Daisies are growing up through the cement all along Snake Hill—that’s what we used to call it. It’s steep and winding, risky to roller skate down, but we did. It’s always been a bit magical. Today, I saw more daisies growing right through the cement in the middle of the road. What a picture of hope in hard places. At the bottom, daisies cover the hillsides. It’s breathtaking.

I’ve been working on a story for two weeks, and I finally laid it to rest yesterday. Every time I thought I was done, there was more. Then it kept growing until I didn’t even know what it was about anymore.

That's discouraging. So much time, it seemed, wasted.

But the daisies said, “Keep going.”

While looking through old journals yesterday, I found a poem I wrote in 2014. I barely remembered it. I never thought much of it. But reading it now—after this year of revisions, endings, beginnings, and the strange dreams that have accompanied this season—it felt as though those old words had been waiting for me.

Maybe a little like using my mom’s china after twenty-seven years untouched in a cupboard. It felt magical, too, to set it on the table for my goddaughter’s bridal shower.

Perhaps it’s like our younger selves sometimes leaving us mile markers. Not to tell us where we should have gone, but to remind us how far we’ve traveled.

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A Dream

2014

I turn to face the window, the pleasure of a soft pillow under my head and a warm quilt over me.

How precious the moment. I open my eyes just as the sun is lifting its weight from its own bed.

“The Glory of God,” I think to myself, and pray thanks for the day.

Words ran through my head during the night—writing in my sleep, I call it.

“Remember that,” I think… I try, but it blurs and fades. All except one phrase remained: Search me, O God, and know my heart. —Psalm 139:23.

I dreamt I stole something. What—I can’t think. I don’t remember.

Someone’s joy?

How often have I done that? Yes, God was searching my heart.

My stories are long and weighty. I know. I’m sorry…

Yet I write with one purpose in mind:

To share the weight and depth of God’s love—His Light expressed through the weight of our lives.

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Reading this now, twelve years later, I hear something I couldn’t hear then.

I hear a writer apologizing for the very thing that would become her offering.

The stories are weighty because life is weighty. Love is weighty. Grace is weighty.

And light does not erase the weight.

It shines through it.

And twelve years later, here I’ve been—cutting nearly 18,000 words, wrestling with every chapter, trying to honor every character, every wound, every thread of grace. The very thing I apologized for became the work I spent years shaping.

It’s not the protagonist’s arc; it’s my own arc.

The woman who wrote the poem did not know then she was beginning a novel. She only knew she had words that would not leave her alone.

The woman who finished the novel did not know that letting go of one story would uncover an earlier voice waiting to be heard.

The road was already there.

The poem began with a dream.

My novel began, in a way, with a dream too.

A dream of telling a story that could hold beauty and trauma together. A story where brokenness was not the end of the sentence. A story where someone could find her way home.

And now, after all the revisions and all the carrying, here I am finding another kind of home—not in the outcome, not in everyone’s approval, but in the reason why I began.

That’s why “an early mile marker” feels so right.

I wasn’t wandering for these twelve years, hoping I might become a writer.

I was walking the road already there.

Maybe that is what we discover along the road home: the words we thought we had left behind were sometimes the words that were quietly leading us forward.

His Light expressed through the weight of our lives.

That is what I’ve been trying to do since the beginning.

Not remove the weight.

But illuminate it.

Not lose hope in hard places.

But to be a little bit more like the daisies.