There is a white wicker loveseat on the sand.

It does not belong there. It belongs on a front porch, the way it did spanning eleven years of Tuesday nights… rain or shine, sleet or snow, frigid or scorching, a writer curled into its cushions with a laptop and a glass of red wine, writing herself back to life one week at a time. This weekend, however, it sat at the edge of the York River, barefoot company beneath a sky going gold, and I savored the sweetness.

I set up my sunrise spot at sunset. I went to the place of beginnings at the hour we have always reserved for endings.

It felt like adopting an alternate perspective of my own life.

Because I am living in three pasts at once right now, and the writer’s vigil has been there for all of them.

I am marketing a book about a season when my life was steady and good, when sanctuary was something I had instead of something I was fighting for. Each week, I read passages of Fearfully, Wonderfully, and Bipolar-ly Made: From Shame to Sanctuary aloud, and for a few minutes I am living a life that no longer exists. It was real. There was joy in it. I can see the joy in old photographs, in the smiles a photo app surfaces from two years ago, and the strange thing about those pictures is that the joy and the ache arrive together now, holding hands.

I am preparing to publish another book, a decade further back, about an earlier ending and the slow work of writing my way out of it on this very loveseat. Two-Hour Tuesdays is my blog-turned-book. Those memories have aged into something gentler. The further I get from a season, the more I can hold the feeling of the moment itself — the wonder, the awe — without the heavier things that attached themselves later. A love story that ended before its happily ever after did not erase the chapters we wrote. We once prayed God would do a new thing. He did. The new thing was a diagnosis, and a woman learning to live well inside her own wiring.

And I am dipping one toe into a third book, the hardest one, about a more recent past I would not relive if writing were not the only way I know to survive it. That book is not researched or taught. It is not the tender honesty of personal growth. It is text messages and transcripts and doctor’s records. It is returning to the worst days of my life with a pen because a pen is the only tool I have ever fully trusted.

Three pasts. One loveseat. One woman, bounced from two years ago to ten years ago to four months ago by nothing more than checking items off an author’s to-do list.

A sunrise, we equate with beginnings. A sunset, with endings. Somehow, sitting in my sunrise spot at sunset this weekend, I understood something I have known in my body for a long time without saying it.

The sun rises and sets on an author.

The family ended. An earlier marriage ended. The sanctuary was tested and, for a while, lost. Still, through every beginning and every ending, in the gold light and the gray, there has been a writer on the loveseat turning what happened into words so that she could understand it, and so that you might find yourself somewhere in it. That is the thing that rose. It wasn’t the plan or the future I’d assumed. The writer rose.

I should be able to end there. It is a good ending. It is even true.

However, I have to tell you the harder thing because circling it would betray the whole point of why I write.

I have been so busy surviving, and so deep in telling the story of God — finding Him at the sunrise, narrating Him through my recovery, documenting Him through the testing —I have nearly stopped meeting Him. I have written so many words about the One who steadies me that I forgot He did not make me to be useful to Him. He made me to delight in Him. And if I am honest, I do not delight in much these days. I have been counting it a victory simply to stand.

I named my first book after the truth that I was fearfully and wonderfully made. I believe that He delights in the making. I am the one who forgot her half of it.

So, this is not a tidy ending because I am not at a tidy place. I have not rediscovered delight. I have only noticed its absence, which is the first turning of the body back toward the light… the same small obedience as showing up to the rocks at dawn when I can barely stand.

The loveseat is back on my front porch in Yorktown. It will hold a writer because it always has. And the woman in it is going to try to do more than survive the sunrise. She is going to try, again, to delight in the One who keeps making it.

The sun rises and sets on an author. I would like to remember, before it sets, the One it was always rising for.

#SanctuaryInTheStorm