February's featured sponsor is Any Day a Beautiful Change by Katherine Willis Pershey. I am delighted to host her here today as she shares from her heart a little about what inspired the book and what you'll find in its pages. I know you'll make her feel welcome here today!
So, I have this book coming out next month. My first book. It’s a dream come true.
Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. When I discerned a call into pastoral ministry – I am an associate minister at a Congregational church – I thought, for a brief interlude, that writing would become a hobby. But I soon learned that writing is a part of my ministry. In addition to writing countless sermons for my faith community, I publish a blog called any day a beautiful change, where I’ve written about everything from bad coffee to my favorite band to working for Jesus.
It was no surprise that I would write about motherhood after my older daughter was born in 2008. However, I discovered that many of my experiences as a new mother were too tender for my blog.
I posted cute pictures but I didn’t let on that I was struggling with crippling anxiety. I told sweet stories but didn’t confess that my family was in a state of crisis. Six months after my daughter was born, it didn’t look like my marriage would survive until her first birthday.
And then, by the grace of God and with a lot of help, we stopped fighting one another long enough to fight for our marriage. We worked so hard. And slowly, painfully, miraculously, we started to change.
Believe me when I say this: I love my husband every bit as fiercely as I love my dear daughters, Juliette and Genevieve. It horrifies me to think for even a moment that we might have missed out on the unexpected and unquenchable joy of a family redeemed.
I believe that stories are transformative.
I believe that being honest about the hard stuff is one way we help one another through it. If St. John of the Cross hadn’t confessed his “dark night of the soul,” would we still be stumbling around blindly, believing we are the only ones to experience a fallow season in the life of faith? And the other reason I knew I could do this was because, before I even committed a single word to the page, my husband said to me one night: “You should write about us.” His trust that I could honor our story and tell it well meant everything to me.
And now, next month, our story will be a book, the title borrowed from my blog: Any Day a Beautiful Change: A Story of Faith and Family. Like I said, a dream come true, right? But since I’m committed to practicing honesty, here’s the truth: I am terrified. I have rarely felt so vulnerable in my life. Strangers will read my book. Church members will read my book. My mother will read my book. I feel so vulnerable I might have to watch Brene Brown’s amazing TED Talk on vulnerability once a day for the next year. But I have to lean into my vulnerability because just as I am called to be a minister and writer, a wife and mother, I am called to tell this story.
The following is the first paragraph of one of the hardest chapters. I think by posting it here I’m symbolically ripping the bandage off quickly. Though it hurts like the dickens, it’s wonderful to discover that the wound beneath has healed.
I found it while sorting through a box of pictures on a Sunday afternoon. The pictures were disorganized, just the way I like them: a jumble of images that roughly mimics the way memories drift through one’s mind. I snatched it from the pile, a chill creeping down my spine. Who the hell took this? In the picture, I am sitting at the kitchen table in our seminary campus apartment. My shoulders are hunched, my hands partially obscuring my anguished face. Benjamin is standing nearby, his face contorted with anger, his hands raised into the air in a posture of pure fury. I stared at it, stupidly, for a full minute before I remembered. We had not been in the throes of a fight. We were pretending. My best friend from Ohio had taken the photograph. She was visiting for the weekend, and that morning we’d taken her to the J. Paul Getty Museum perched in the hills north of Los Angeles. We were all drawn to the special exhibit, Bill Viola: The Passions. In the digital portraits – some moving, thanks to newfangled flat-screen technology – actors embodied a range of emotions: joy, sadness, grief, anger. After dinner, between bursts of hysterical laughter, we recreated the scenes. There is no better icon for our marriage than the image Lisa captured: the rousing good time all but obscured by the all too familiar anguish and anger. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to tear it up or frame it.
I pray that Any Day a Beautiful Change: A Story of Faith and Family finds its way onto the nightstands of people who need a true story, a hard story, a hopeful story.
