I keep going back to the sunrise.

Most mornings, I’m at the pier a half hour before dawn. I bring a journal. I sit. I write. The river is still quiet, the sky still mostly dark, and the work that I show up for is happening before anything that looks like a sunrise. There’s a slow stirring of light. A glow I can’t name. A haze that holds me. By the time the sun finally breaks the horizon — the moment everyone shows up for, the moment that ends up on Instagram — most of the real work is already done.

That’s what I’m trying to learn lately. The real work happens in the rising action.

I taught my sixth-graders today about plot structure. We’re in the unit called The Human Spirit, which follows the Cultivating Resilience unit, and they have been using big words to talk about real problems. Today we talked about conflict. Without conflict, I told them, there is no story.

For about five minutes (between the pencil-throwing and the inevitable farting distruptions) they let me actually teach. We mapped exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. They told me, accurately, that we’re in the rising action right now. We don’t know yet what the climax will be. That’s the whole shape of the unfinished story.

I told them: stories are mirrors. The same shape that holds a novel holds a life. When we are inside our own conflict, we lose track of the curve. We forget that the rising action is part of the structure, not a malfunction. We forget that something is supposed to be hard. We forget that the very thing pressing against us is the engine that will move the plot. That the climax, falling action, and resolution are forthcoming.

Then I went home and wondered if I’d been preaching to myself.

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Last night, I went back to the local writers’ group at the library for the first time in months. After February, I had to be careful with my voice. I evaluated each conversation as a transaction worth making and made sure to spend the words I had on teaching, on family, on attorneys, on a recorded final project for graduate school. The writers’ group sat at the bottom of the list because it was the easiest one to skip without losing anything urgent.

Yesterday, I had to face the fact that wasn’t the whole reason. I had also been hiding. The writers in that room had heard me read drafts of chapters in real time. They had given me feedback on my book. They remembered me joyful, encouraging, generous with their drafts. I didn’t know how to walk back in and let them see who I am now. I was afraid they’d see right through me.

I went anyway. It was on my Google Calendar with speech therapy behind me. I drove there thinking about how I wouldn’t have to rush home to fix dinner anymore, and I tried to find a kind of peace in that.

When we did introductions, I said looking down with a hesitant smile, “I’m Laura Joy… and I am a published author.” I tried to pass the introduction along, but Amanda, the woman who leads our group, wouldn’t let it go. She held it open. I looked around the room and saw faces genuinely happy, the way only other writers can be happy for you because they know what it cost. They passed my book around and handled it like it was precious.

It has been three weeks since the book was published, and last night, in a conference room at the public library, I felt for the first time like I was actually celebrating. No food. No drinks. No pomp. Just the people who heard the early drafts holding the finished book in their hands.

What surprised me more than the celebration was that I wasn’t quiet, withdrawn, or hiding. I gave feedback. I answered publishing questions. I was participating. I didn’t know I had a well to draw from.

We went over time, and it didn’t matter because I don’t cook dinner for a family anymore. I hung back with Amanda. She asked where I’d been. It was the question I had been preparing for, had been preparing to answer. I told her, briefly. I’d reclaimed my voice and was reclaiming myself by coming back. She hugged me. I hugged her back.

Amanda lost her husband to stage 4 cancer in December. We both wear our wedding rings on the right hand now. I didn’t mention noticing. My loss is not her loss; her loss is permanent in a way mine isn’t. I suppose mine is also permanent, in its own way. I am no longer a wife, a mother. I no longer belong to anyone but God.

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What I keep returning to, in the sunrise and the classroom and the library, is this:

If God is the Author, then conflict is not a malfunction in the story. It is the engine. He does not shield us from the rising action… He uses it. He works it for our good and for His glory, even when we cannot see what He’s working toward. Especially when we cannot see.

I know my Reformed theology well enough to say this carefully. God is not the author of evil. He does not cause harm. He is, however, sovereign over the conflict in our stories, and what was meant to break us, He is at work to grow us through. The Hebrew word for meant for evil in Genesis 50:20 — what Joseph said to the brothers who had sold him — is the same Hebrew word for meant for good. Same word. Different intention. The conflict was real. The Author was working through it the whole time.

I would not have published this book if February 1 had not happened. I had been sitting on the manuscript for years. The thing that broke my old life apart was the same thing that finally pushed me to release the work I was meant to release. I did not choose the rising action. I would have chosen exposition forever if the Author had let me. He didn’t.

My current students have a band concert tonight at the middle school where I teach. They asked me to come. I’m not going. There are auditoriums I’m not ready for yet.. too many memories of who I used to sit beside and who I used to cheer on, too many rooms that belonged to a version of my family that no longer exists. Tonight I’m driving to Hampton to watch my nephew play soccer instead. A field. A child still safely in my life. Family I can still be near. The rising action is teaching me where I can stand, and where I can’t, yet.

That is the rising action. That is the place I am living from. It is not the climax. It is not the resolution. It is the long, slow build between something happened and something will be made of it. I do not yet know what the climax will be. I do not yet know what God is writing toward.

But I trust the Author.

I show up at the pier a half hour before dawn because the half hour before dawn is where the work happens. The light is changing. The fog is moving. The horizon is preparing itself for something I haven’t seen yet. By the time the sun breaks, the real story is already underway.

That is where I am living now. In the rising action. In the slow build. In the Author’s hands.

Last night Amanda hugged me. Tonight I’ll cheer for my nephew. The Author is writing a sunrise for tomorrow, another landscape painted for me to savor and cherish and believe for a resolution I was never responsible for writing myself.