On October 9, 2015, I typed this:

“Today is the day I start writing Gravel Roads…”

I didn’t finish it that day. Or that year. Or the next 10. And I didn’t title it Gravel Roads.

This fall, my book finally caught its traction. Just Wait came together so fast it felt like it all hit me at once.

Only it wasn’t all at once. It’s been 11 years in the making.

Just Wait is a faith-based memoir about living fully in the middle of what hasn’t resolved yet.

Just Wait: the memoir I waited 11 years to write

I’ve saved every thought, every idea, and every honest move forward since that October morning. Journal entries. Blog posts. Notes typed into my phone in church parking lots. A chapter list I scribbled on a drive along the California coast with my husband, back when I thought the book would run in order, from the year I was born to wherever I landed.

11 is my favorite number. I have 3:11 tattooed on my wrist for Ecclesiastes 3:11: Everything is beautiful in its time. So of course the book took 11 years.

God has a sense of humor. I’m one of the most impatient people I know, and I’m writing a book about waiting.

Writing from the middle

For a long time, I told myself I couldn’t write this book yet.

I wanted to wait until the buildings we’ve been trying to sell finally sold. Until my purpose felt clearer. Until I could come back from the other side and tell you exactly what all of it meant. I wanted to carry every unfinished piece of my life safely across and then say, See? This is why that happened. This is where that road led. And this is how it all worked out.

I can’t do that.

There are things in my life right now that I still don’t understand. Things I want that haven’t happened. Things I’ve worked very hard for that haven’t worked. Some of the stories in this book still don’t have endings.

For a while, I thought that was the problem. Now I think it might be the point.

How do I tell you to trust the timing when I don’t know what I’m being timed for? That question kept me from writing for years. Then I realized I have proof from every other ending. I can look back at so much of my life and see what I never could have understood while I was living it. The disappointment. The detours. The things that didn’t happen when I desperately wanted them to. The things that arrived later, in ways I never could have planned.

I’ve spent years collecting that proof. Maybe that’s enough.

At every point in our lives, there’s something we can’t see yet. Another answer. Another decision unfolding. And another version of ourselves we haven’t met. If I decide I can’t fully live until I know how everything turns out, I’ll spend my whole life waiting.

I’ve learned there are 2 kinds of waiting.

The first kind keeps us from living. I’ll be happy when. I’ll take the trip when. And even I’ll write the book when. That kind of waiting can steal an entire life, and I let it steal years of this book.

The second kind asks me to show up fully for today and hand tomorrow over to God. Make the call. Write the page. Love the person. Tell the truth. Do whatever is actually mine to do, and then leave the rest alone.

This summer, a short passage I’d read stuck with me: if you pull a flower open before it’s ready, it doesn’t bloom faster. It dies. I saw myself doing exactly that. Prying at things whose time hadn’t come. Demanding endings from stories that were still being written. Deciding something must be wrong because it hadn’t happened yet.

I don’t want to sacrifice the days I have for the days I imagine are coming. I don’t want to spend my life standing at the window, watching for the next one.

So I’m writing Just Wait from exactly where I am. In the middle. Still waiting on some things. Still wondering about others. But all the while still living.

How do you like your eggs?

There’s a scene in Runaway Bride I’ve thought about for years. Every man Maggie almost marries asks her how she likes her eggs. Every time, she answers the way she thinks he wants her to. When she finally finds her person, she figures out how she actually likes them.

I’m 43, and some days I’m still not sure who I am.

Here’s one thing I’ve learned about the middle: it gets easier to live in when you know how you like your eggs. Over-easy 70% of the time; scrambled, the other 30%. When your sense of self comes from other people’s expectations, every unfinished thing feels like a threat. When you know who you are, you can stand in the not-knowing and stay yourself.

Grief is a different thing

My dad was diagnosed with colon cancer, and I watched him fade for about a year and a half before he died in 2019.

Since then, I’ve been waiting for the grief to end.

It took me years to see that grief and waiting are 2 different things. They live side by side. One of them ends. Grief stays. Some days it’s quiet, and some days it feels like a fresh wound. You learn to carry it. I’m writing about that too, because it’s true, and because I think a lot of you have been waiting for something that was never going to end on its own.

I grew up on gravel roads, and I’ve spent most of my life in the middle of something. Waiting for a baby. A prayer to be answered. Waiting for grief to end. Some of those waits ended, and when I look back, I can see that every unanswered prayer was answered in its right time.

Grief never ended. And some things are here for the time being, you just learn how to wait while carrying them.

I still don’t always know exactly who I am, and I don’t know how my own story ends. I do know the middle is where I live, and it’s where you live too. Everything is beautiful in its time, the dust included.

Come along

I can’t tell you how excited I am. After 11 years of saving scraps, this book is finally moving, and I want you here for it.

If you’re in the middle of something right now, I wrote this for you. Whether you’re waiting on the baby, the job, the diagnosis, the healing, the apology, or the answer, I want you to finish this book feeling seen.

Xox,

SKH