Why you’re a real writer (even if you don’t think so)
September 28, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 50 Comments
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You had to have a manuscript, for instance. Or at least be working on one. And you had to have a blog and a “social networking presence”. You had to have followers and friends and readers. An agent. And, of course, a publishing contract.
To me, procuring that last one would be my golden ticket into the chocolate factory. To have a book out, to be published, would eliminate the need for that “someday” I kept adding. I wouldn’t need it anymore. I would be a writer. A real one.
Until that time (and if that time ever came, because I understood the odds), I considered myself merely a wannabe. And those thoughts didn’t change after I had a manuscript and a blog and a “social networking presence” because I saw the writing world as a segregated one. The ones who had books on Amazon and did interviews occupied the castles, and the rest of us were left to beg at the gate for any morsel of acceptance tossed our way. I would pass notes through that gate in the form of queries and proposals to any who ventured close enough, hoping against hope that one of them would pity me and bid me to pass. Theirs was the life I wanted, not my own.
It was tough looking through that gate and watching those published writers gorge on their dreams while I starved on my own.
Every so often someone on my side would be granted entrance. Those were always good times, hopeful times, because everyone left would believe their turn may be next. I would watch as those people crossed over and imagine they were me. Often they would each come close to the gate and talk to the rest of us on the other side. We’d hear amazing stories that would both fill us and leave us hungrier.
I had hope that if I hung around long enough—if I kept knocking—my turn would come. I was right about that. Talent can only get you so far in the publishing business. You have to persist. You have to always try once more.
For proof of that, the gate did open. I found on the other side my agent, Rachelle Gardner. And she helped me find my publisher, FaithWords. Amazon and interviews have followed. I thought I would be loosed then. Set free. I suppose in my mind I’d always considered being published akin to shedding my mortal coil in favor of a heavenly body.
That wasn’t true.
There are a lot of writers who change when they go from the land of wanting to be published to the land of author. They think they’ve become someone they’re not because they’re in a place few have been blessed to venture.
I’ve always promised myself that if I were fortunate enough to cross over, I’d stay close to the gate just to see you. Just so you would come close and I could talk to you and say this:
Writing is the most democratic form of expression I know. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you stand in this life, you have a story to tell. One that is just as important, just as needed, as anyone else’s. Being a real writer isn’t a matter of being published, it’s a matter of how you see yourself. It’s a matter of study and work and determination, not a contract.
I found that out.
There is no “someday”. You are a real writer the moment you put pen to page and soak it with your tears and sweat and dare to share yourself with the world. It is that supreme act of courage that gives your life meaning, not a piece of paper to sign and initial at the bottom.
That’s what I will tell you.
And I will tell you this as well—the world on this side of the gate isn’t that different from the world on the other. We strive in each to inspire and transport our reader.
That is our hope and our call.
Roger’s questions
September 27, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 3 Comments
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I’m not sure when I began equating questions with a lack of faith, but it happened. I would like to think this took place when I was young and didn’t know any better. I doubt that. It’s usually when you think you know a lot that you don’t, and I didn’t make the mistake of thinking I knew a lot until I was about eighteen.
I had a lot of questions about God then. Not about His existence, though. More about His reasons. Things like why He let people kill each other and why He sat back and let horrible things happen. Stuff like that. Serious stuff.
I never really paused to think through those questions or even to look for any answers. I didn’t think it was my place, for one. And for another, I thought entertaining such notions meant I was tottering on a very narrow ledge between faith and doubt, heaven and hell. Questions didn’t make people stronger, they just tore people down.
But then I talked to Roger.
To say he’s had a rough life would be an understatement, and yet Roger is in my estimation one of the truly great Christians in history. Read his story, and you’ll agree. It’s over at Katdish’s place today.
Losing what’s important
September 24, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 25 Comments
My notebook is somewhere. That, I know. And I also know that wherever it is, my pen will be with it. And my glasses. The fact that if I find one of those items I will find all three should make things easier, but it isn’t.
To make matters worse, I’ve been looking for my notebook and my pen and my glasses for three hours now. That’s 180 minutes of trying and failing, just enough to do some serious damage to one’s self-esteem. I wouldn’t be worried about it—I lose stuff all the time—but this is sort of important. My notebook contains everything from marketing plans for my first novel to revisions from my editor for my second to notes for my third. And I can’t read anything without my glasses. And I really like that pen.
I’ve looked everywhere, too. In my office and in my truck and on the dining room table. On the coffee table and the in the bedroom and on top of the dryer (which has somehow been designated as the family’s Lost and Found spot).
Nowhere. Gone.
I’m not panicking. That’s the first rule we’re taught when we lose something—Don’t worry about it, it’ll turn up. That’s mostly true. Like I said, I lose stuff all the time. Keys especially. My Blackberry. I lost the 1957 Micky Mantle baseball card my father gave me for Christmas. And once for a very scary five minutes, I even lost my son in Target.
Found them all of course, and in reasonably short order. Which makes me believe that I’m not necessarily losing my memory, it just shorts out from time to time.
Have you ever noticed that more often than not, it’s the important things we lose? Things like keys and cell phones and kids? I have to my knowledge never lost a pencil. Ever. Same goes for junk mail and rubber bands. Which leads me to believe the things that really don’t matter will always be around, but I have to keep an eye on what’s valuable. They may sneak off from time to time without my knowing.
Sounds a little backwards, I know.
I think I’m a little careless with my important things sometimes. I take for granted they’ll be there when I need them. I can be rough with them, too. Not because I mean to, but because I know they’re not going anywhere. And then, of course, they do. I misplace them for the simple reason that I didn’t think I ever could.
I’m not alone here. Just the other day I spent an hour helping a neighbor go through boxes of old pictures so he could find the first one ever taken of him and his wife together. He was going to have it blown up and framed for their coming anniversary. “I know it’s here somewhere,” he said. That may have been true, but we never did find it.
Yesterday my wife lost a thumb drive full of students’ grades that she uses every day.
And just a few hours ago, my parents called wondering if I knew where the key to their shed was.
Blame it on the busyness of our lives, I suppose. There’s always so much to do and keep up with. Everything becomes important, and so nothing is.
My son just peeked around the corner and asked if I was busy. When he walked into my office, he was holding my notebook and glasses. He sat down on my lap and stared at my computer screen and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was writing about how we all lost things sometimes and we’re always told not to get worried about it but maybe we should a little.
“What’d you lose, Daddy?”
“That notebook in your hands.”
“You didn’t lose it,” he says, “I was just keeping it safe for you.”
Good. I need people to help me keep the important things in my life safe. It’s too easy to wander away from them or let them wander away from me.
“We’re all gonna die!”
September 21, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 19 Comments
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I listened as well as I could, though I’ll admit she nearly scared me to death at first—Die? Why die? What happened?—but then I managed to get the entire story. She’s eight now, my daughter, an age I’m quickly beginning to see as Not So Young Anymore. The world is opening up to her, and not just the good stuff, either. She’s learning that not all of life is so wonderful and that the future doesn’t always seem rosy.
It was strange at first that what bothered her so much wasn’t something that would happen, but something that already had.
“Do you know how the dinosaurs died?” she asked me.
“No room in Noah’s ark?”
She looked at me like I was the kid and she was the parent. “It was a meteor!” she said.
“So why are we all gonna die?”
“Because there’s more,” she said. She waved her tiny arms around her head as if she were trying to beat them all away. “It like happens all the time.”
“What does?”
“They hit our planet and kill everything.” She slumped down on the sofa beside me and sighed. “One could be coming now.”
“I hope it waits until this ballgame’s over,” I said, “because I really want to know who wins.”
“I’m being serious, Daddy,” she said. “Aren’t you scared?”
I told her I wasn’t, and that seemed to satisfy her enough. Nothing else was said about things falling from the sky. Mission accomplished, I would usually say. But the fact is that I kinda/sorta lied to her when I said I wasn’t scared.
Because I kinda/sorta was when I was her age.
The truth is that the history of our fair world isn’t fair at all. There have been five mass extinctions in our planet’s history, the last of which occurred just over 70,000 years ago after a volcano almost wiped humanity from history before it had even started.
Just weeks ago, two meteorites passed within just a few thousand miles of Earth.
Global warming.
Nuclear war.
Solar storms.
Superflu.
You get the picture.
I remember when I was about my daughter’s age hearing a preacher on the radio saying he’d received a vision from God (which, heard through his Southern accent, sounded more like GAWT) that the world would end in exactly seven days and thirteen hours. I can’t recall who the man was, but I remember the panic he caused among the few who actually believed him. Me included, of course.
I sat out on the hood of my father’s truck that night and waited for Armageddon. Didn’t come, of course. And even though predictions of The End will stick on me like a burr from time to time, I learned my lesson that day.
I learned that no matter how hard we all may try, none of us can keep the bad away. We can lessen its impact, we can fight it, we can even turn some of it into good, but the fact remains that it’s still there and it’s still coming. The world’s full of trouble, and whether that trouble comes from earthquakes or madmen doesn’t really matter.
If that sounds submissive, I didn’t mean it to be. My daughter fell into the very trap I’ve found myself in so many times—she was worried about something she couldn’t influence. In the age of twenty-four-hour news channels and the internet, that’s something we can all struggle with sometimes.
But I’m older now. I can let solar storms and the superflu go.
It’s the other, personal forms of destruction I want her to worry about, and that’s what I’ve learned to concern myself with more, too. Because it doesn’t take a meteor or a volcano to ruin our lives, especially when we can do that just fine on our own.
We can give in to pain rather than get through it.
We can surrender to temptation rather than fight it.
We can yield our dreams rather than cling to them.
Those are our choices to make, those small decisions that perhaps have no influence on the world outside but make all the difference in the world inside.
That’s what I want my daughter to know. Because planetary destruction is in God’s hands, but self-destruction is in ours.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Brokenness, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
Four rules
September 20, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 4 Comments
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I haven’t thrown up in fifteen years. Not even kidding.
I can’t brag about much, but I do brag about that. It’s an amazing achievement. I don’t know of anyone who’s even come close to approaching that level of longevity. And it isn’t because I’ve been well that whole time. In that span I’ve battled more than my fair share of viruses and at least one case of please-God-kill-me flu. But I’ve yet to succumb to that most horrible of symptoms, mostly because I know how to avoid it.
It’s a simple four-step process that I’ve detailed in great specificity over at katdish’s site. Since flu season is fast approaching, I think it would be wise for you to head on over there so I can drop some knowledge on you. And just in case you think there isn’t some semi-profound spiritual point I make, think again. Because in the end, most everything can have a spiritual point.
Even this.
Passing on
September 16, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 29 Comments
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A friend of mine lost her mother two weeks ago after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. I suspect we all knew the end was approaching. Not how long she had or how quickly that end would come, but certainly that it would and soon. Death, I think, is something we always fight against. No matter how much faith we have or how much we pine for heaven, the instinct is still to cling to this world. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
But in cases like my friend and her mother, I can understand the opposite as well. Can understand that even though this is your mother, watching her let go would bring a sense of peace and calmness rather than pain and grief. There were signs, she told me, that everything was okay. That God was still in heaven and that her mother was with the angels. Little things that mattered much, like the two jets that bisected each other’s contrails during the funeral and left a perfect cross in the sky or the flock of geese that were huddled against her tombstone the following day. Her mother always loved geese.
Having to watch a friend go through this always gets to me. I feel for her. And as we’re both Christians, I share in that strange combination of mourning her loss and rejoicing in her mother’s gain. And I’ve also found myself pondering not just that loss and gain, but death itself. Isn’t it amazing how seldom we consider death? How we’re faced with it every day on the news and yet hardly ever really pause to consider that one day, maybe soon and maybe not, it will also find us?
I’ll admit I seldom do. I’ll also admit that even though I pray and read my Bible and go to church and am washed in the blood of the Lamb, death continues to be pretty high on my list of things to avoid at all costs. For me, yes, but especially for the people I love.
My friend had a curious thing to say when she told me about her mother. She didn’t say she died. She instead used another phrase—her mother passed on. As in, “We were with her all day, and we’re all very thankful. She passed on that evening.”
Passed on.
I’m not sure if that’s a expression used very often outside of the rural areas of our country. I’ve never heard a city person say someone has passed on. It’s always been died. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I don’t know a lot of city folk.
But I am of the opinion that regardless of who says it, that’s a saying should catch on more. There’s no air of finality in passing on. It does not signify a period at the end of a story, but a comma that says the story continues elsewhere. It’s a reminder that everything we can see and feel is but a small part of a larger picture that lies hidden on the other side of the frame.
That the opposite side of this life isn’t a conclusion, but a continuation.
I hope to keep that more in mind. And as morbid as this may sound, I hope to keep my own eventual continuation more in mind as well. There doesn’t seem to be much sense in avoiding what must happen at some point. Better, I think, to make sure my life is lived as it should be.
That my worries shrink and my heart grows.
That I keep my concerns with the things that matter rather than the things that don’t.
Henry Benson and the backseat prophecy
September 15, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 12 Comments
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Everyone would laugh then. The fathers especially, but also many of the mothers (and especially Megan’s, because Terri Benson remembered that Henry wasn’t so wholesome himself back in the day). Megan, however, would not laugh. Ever. She loved her father more than most anything in this world, and she did not like the fact of him having to kill a boy just because he came knocking on the front door one Friday evening.
She spent many of her formative years trying to decide if Henry was being truthful with that promise or if he was just showing off. Her daddy liked to act big and tough, even though she knew for a fact that he cried every July 4 when the Stars and Bars were raised at the VFW. Henry caught her catching him once when she was ten. He told her that sort of crying didn’t count. That, in fact, crying when the Stars and Bars were raised was what good people were supposed to do.
At thirteen, Megan had all but given up on ever having a date at all. It wasn’t worth all the trouble that would likely happen. By then she’d decided that Henry was telling the truth after all. She didn’t like the thought of watching her daddy ride the lightning at the state prison up near Richmond all because of her.
She did prod, though. Megan had seen a war movie about a soldier who’d made it all the way through a mine field by poking his knife in the dirt and then stepping where the blade had gone. To her, that was what she did with her father. Short, innocent remarks about this boy at school or that boy at church. Henry would always give her his undivided attention and listen to every word she said. He was always polite enough to save the “BOOM!” for when she was finished.
Then something happened that neither Megan nor her father quite expected—she grew up. Sixteen came, and with that new year came what she saw as opportunities and what Henry saw as hell itself.
Say what you want about love’s abode being in the heart, it first enters through the eyes. What had drawn Henry to his wife wasn’t her cooking—which was mighty fine, by the way—but her beauty. The former Terri Gordon and current Terri Benson had always been easy on the eyes. I guess that’s what bothered Henry all along. He knew those genes would be passed on to his daughter, and he knew that sooner or later, someone would come calling.
That someone turned out to be Johnnie Chambers. Seventeen, clean cut, and very polite when he showed up at the Benson front door for Megan’s first official date. Henry had been staunchly opposed of course, but Terri had come to her daughter’s rescue. Megan was a good girl, she said, and would know how to act. Henry wasn’t nearly as concerned about his daughter being good as he was the idiot kid with the raging hormones who was currently standing in the living room. Terri told Henry to behave. Henry did, though while his wife’s back was turned he took the opportunity to offer a quite “boom” in Johnnie’s direction.
The Bensons sent their daughter off on her first steps into adulthood that night. Henry waited up. So did Terri, though she’d never confess it to him. Both of them were shocked when Megan walked through the front door a full two hours before she’d been told to be home.
Johnny Chambers was nowhere to be seen. If he could have been seen, though, he would appear to be rubbing his jaw right where Megan had socked him. Seemed Johnny’s hands had a mind of their own and weren’t as polite as the rest of him.
She never told her father that, of course.
The backseat shotgun prophecy would have been forever fulfilled if she had.
Snow Day
September 13, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 46 Comments
![Snow Day cover comp2[1]](http://www.billycoffey.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Snow-Day-cover-comp21-203x300.jpg "Snow Day cover comp2[1]")
I took a job at a local factory ten years ago.
I hadn’t been married long. My wife and I had just bought our first house and were planning on filling it with a child or two. Her teaching job at a local Christian school wasn’t far above minimum wage, and the job I had at a local gas station didn’t pay much more. Going to the factory was a choice based much more upon necessity than desire. To me, the thought of having to spend forty hours a week cooped up in noisy rooms with questionable air didn’t seem the right career path. But no one around here went to the factory because of the work conditions. They went there for the money. And so did I.
I was thinking about the future when I walked through those iron gates. I suppose that’s where my trouble started; we spend a lot of time thinking about the future, much of it at the expense of the present. Like everyone else there, I adapted to the working conditions and the shift work. It’s amazing what you can get used to if the money’s good.
Things were okay. Not good or great, but okay. For five years I chugged along in the noisy rooms with questionable air and repeated to myself the words the plant manager told me my first day there: “Show up, do you job, and you’ll retire a rich man.” My daughter was born. Then my son. I tried to picture myself sticking it out for another thirty years or so until retirement, but that was an image I could never really form in my mind. I soon found out why.
Recessions are like volcano eruptions—there are plenty of signs before the big bang. One of the first signs is a slow in manufacturing, and that’s what happened in 2005. Orders coming into the factory began to slow, then stutter, then stop. And in December, I was told I would likely lose my job.
I had a wife, two children, a mortgage, two car payments, school loans, and a thousand dollars in the bank. By then, all the local job market could offer was part-time positions either flipping hamburgers or delivering pizza. Not even the gas station could hire me back.
It was in many ways the worst period of my life. A man wants to work, wants to support his family, and I couldn’t. The faith I had in both God and myself waned. Dark thoughts crept into my mind. I thought my life was over.
That’s when I began writing. Not for publication or distribution, not for anyone’s eyes but my own. It was therapy, a means to try and make sense of what was happening to me and find what I’d lost. The memoir I started became the novel I finished, and through more miracles than I can count, what was once meant just for me can now be shared with you.
Snow Day will be published by FaithWords on October 11, and I can now officially announce pre-sales through just about every online retailer I can think of. Feel free to click on the Snow Day tab above to see the new and revamped book page, thanks to both Katdish and Peter Pollock.
Snow Day is the story of one day in the life of Peter Boyd, a husband, father, and factory worker who lives in the small town of Mattingly, Virginia. He, too, faces a job loss during Christmas. He, too, has a crisis of both faith and purpose. When Peter wakes on one December morning to find a sudden snowstorm has struck his town, the thought of schlepping off to work is too much for him to consider.
So he takes a snow day. Peter calls in not sick, but well.
But Peter’s plans to spend the day sulking about his job are quickly put to rest by the grocery list his wife hands him. Peter has to go into the storm after all—both the one outside in the world and the one inside his heart. What he finds there will not only bring him comfort, it will bring him healing as well.
Snow Day is an easy read for hard times. The truths Peter discovers are the ones I managed to stumble onto as well, though it took me a little longer than a day. If you’re a fan of my blog, you’ll enjoy this book. It’s full of small-town wisdom and colorful characters who will touch your heart and offer you hope.
When the monsters reached out
September 10, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 18 Comments
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That one time wasn’t when I fell out of the tree, though. It was when I decided to finally do something about my monster.
My monster was twelve feet tall and covered with green slimy skin. Four sharp horns, three gray and one black, jutted out from its forehead (I can’t tell you how many times those horns nearly impaled me). But it was its breath that was the worst—fiery and pungent, as if it had neither eaten nor brushed its teeth in a very long time. That was where I came in. I just didn’t know whether it wanted to eat me or use me as a monster toothbrush.
It lived in the dark recesses beneath my bed, which made sleep impossible. At night I could hear it moving around down there, stalking me. All attempts at prayer seemed useless. So did my attempts to get my parents to look for it. Parents can never see anything.
So in a fit of sleepless desperation, I took matters into my own hands one night and tucked my cap gun under my pillow. Sometime around midnight—breakfast time for my monster—it began stirring. I counted to a hundred and prayed, then leaped down onto the floor and fired off six shots beneath the bed.
I didn’t know if I’d managed to wound it or, even better, kill it outright. But I did succeed in scaring my parents half to death.
They came running (staggering, really, since it was the middle of the night). After threats of everything from grounding to eternal damnation, they finally looked under the bed. Didn’t see anything, of course. But I thought I spotted monster blood in the carpet.
Whether I had winged it or killed it or simply scared it away, my monster left me alone after that. All the monsters did, really (there was one in my closet and one in the crawlspace of the house, too). I found out what those monsters were really—a clump of toys, clothes that I didn’t hang up, the rumblings of an old furnace. Knowledge goes a long way in battling monsters.
That small but important fact proved itself true over and over again as I grew. There were no monsters, just reasons.
Today, September 10, marks the ninth anniversary of the last day I believed that. Because the next day was September 11, 2001. The day I learned the truth.
There really were monsters in this world.
They didn’t have slimy skin or horns or fiery, pungent breath. But they wanted to kill me just as much.
Maybe more.
I sat on the edge of my bed that day for seven straight hours. Watched as the towers fell and the Pentagon burned. Watched as a plane when down in a Pennsylvania field. And I remember looking down at my hands sometime that afternoon and finding a picture of my first child’s sonogram in them. I’m still not sure how it got there, but I still know what I was thinking. I was thinking about the world my daughter was about to be born into, one that had just turned a darker shade of black.
That was one day I swore to myself I would never forget. Not just what happened, but what I felt while it was happening. And I haven’t. I remember it all.
It was a horrible day. And I guess like most horrible days, the temptation is to move on. To let the past be the past and look to the future.
I suppose that sort of thinking accounts for a lot of what’s going on nowadays. I won’t get into that. All you have to do is turn on the news. It’s everywhere.
But me, I still choose to remember. I’ll let the past be the past. I’ll look to the future. But I’ll still cast a wayward glance behind me while I’m walking on. I’ll still remember that day. Because that’s the day the monsters reached out and grabbed us all.
And that’s the day I vowed that my children wouldn’t just be raised to believe in them, but to fight them as well.
Calling home
September 7, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 30 Comments
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My speed during the nine hours or so I spend at work tends to fluctuate between all-out and breakneck. I’m a busy guy with a lot to do, which means there is little time for things like phone calls. Or eating, for that matter. And yet every Monday through Friday between the months of June and early August, my phone will ring approximately every seven minutes and I will hear the voice of one of my children on the other end.
Why they call is a matter of interpretation. Sometimes the reasons are practical in nature, such as the time a while back when I had to give directions on how to get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich out of the DVD player (not the first time that had happened). Some are general, such as the times when I was called to be informed about what was for supper or what games I would be participating in later that evening (for the record, I was seldom allowed input in either).
Most times, though, the reasons were simpler. More heartfelt. My children would call just to let me know what was going on, what they were doing and thinking and planning. They didn’t need advice our counsel, they just wanted to hear my voice. They wanted to know I was there, even if I wasn’t. And though I was nearly always in the middle of something when my phone rang, and though (I will admit this only if you keep it between us) there were times when I uttered an inward groan upon receiving the thirty-seventh call of the day, I always answered. Always.
Because you don’t avoid your children. Ever.
The truth was that I did more than get used to these hourly and sometimes by-the-minute updates about life at home. I learned to crave them. They brought me the comfort of knowing all was well and a sense that my children not only missed me, but wanted to talk to me. I knew the preciousness of that sense of belonging. The teenage years were not too far off in the grand scheme of things. I may be invaluable now, but I knew I could well be a nuisance then. I vowed to enjoy it while it lasted.
But now the summer is gone. We’re all two weeks into a new school year and the unavoidably frantic pace it brings, one that has already seemed to envelope us. I still go about my work; the pace is more frantic now, more all-out and breakneck. And the phone in my pocket has grown silent.
My kids have too much to do now. They can’t call.
There are no peanut butter and jelly emergencies. No quorum calls for supper or kickball in the backyard. No updates on how many butterflies were outside or how much water was in the creek. No hellos and I-love-yous and see-you-in-a-little-whiles.
I would suppose God feels the same way sometimes. In our seasons of rest and relaxation, of happiness, it’s easy to give Him a call. No doubt He’s busy, but never too busy to talk. He’s glad to hear from us. He knows how precious that sense of belonging is. But then those seasons end and others arrive, those times when things seem too busy or too stressful and calling Him becomes something we can’t do now but maybe later.
I wonder if I sometimes make God feel the way I feel now. I’m thinking yes.
Of course it’s the little things that have changed in my family—the big things are As Is. They’re still my kids and I’m still their Daddy. But I miss getting their calls, and I’m really hoping they miss giving them.
And I think that rather than continue to write about this, I’ll go pray it. I’ll call my heavenly Dad. And I think I’ll tell Him the same thing my daughter told me in a note she snuck into my lunch this morning.
Dear Daddy,
I’m good. I hope you are, too. I love you millions!
This post is part of the blog carnival on Hope, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
Author of Snow Day and Paper Angels (November 2011), both by FaithWords. But don't let that fool you. I'm just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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