A decade ago, I heard God say, “Tell them how I restored you.”
My restoration story has been—if I consider every ordered step—a lesson in miracles. I made several attempts to obey the call before the manuscript I finished this past weekend, but every time I tried to unpack the inciting incident, I got stuck. I was still healing, and my children were too young.
The situations explored in my new book happened to more than just me, but the stories are mine. No one experienced them the way I did. No one learned what I learned or used the loose threads to form what I formed. It took me many years to own my version of the truth as something I have a right to represent on my terms. But I’ve learned there’s power in story. My lessons are not just mine. Your lessons are not just yours. This lone wolf idea that we must make our way through every wilderness solo has us feeling less wild and free and more worn and faint.
Before the book I just finished writing, I was writing a business book about cultivating cross-boundary relationships. This is part of my job, and the stories I wrote were of times I extended myself to form connections—and to facilitate them—with and between people who didn’t have much in common. My firm has helped people find their way to more respectful, harmonious relationships at work so they can get more done and experience greater joy doing it. I believed the ability to meet this need would become more important, not less, and felt that professionals would benefit from learning what I’ve learned and doing what I’ve taught.
I wanted this to be a “big” book, so I hired a book proposal coach whose team helped me shape something that would be attractive to major publishers. We added stories that might expand the book’s appeal—examples of grace-giving and trust-granting and risk-taking, and accounts of times I offered many benefits of many doubts and encouraged others to do the same. While not especially provocative, it was a respectable body of work.
The coach helped me secure a reputable agent and I chose a partner from the publishers who expressed interest. I started writing, but in the months leading up to the 2024 election, my creative flow came to a screeching halt. Even parts I’d once been moved by now read as overly simplistic, and the advice I’d given leaders time and again fell flat on the page.
My spirit was irritated. The book and its contents felt like a sweater you loved on the model but couldn’t stop itching in. Day after day, I’d brew myself a cup of coffee. Light my candle. Arrange my snacks. Turn on my instrumental focus tunes. Sit in front of my laptop. And stare desperately at pages on pages of content I no longer loved. I knew it was over when I stopped feeling personally compelled to do what the book aimed to encourage. To put it plainly, I had no interest in contorting myself so strangers would respect me, and I couldn’t ask anyone whose life experience mirrored mine to do so either—at least not leading up to and through the watershed moment I sensed was upon us.
After having invested more than six months, tens of thousands of dollars, and forty thousand words, I called my literary agent and told him I decided to sideline the business book. Immediately, I began writing a new, more personal work that I initially called “See the Light.” The plan was to gather stories and light practices from people all over the world to help the rest of us see our way through dark times. I envisioned traveling to different locations—my own “eat, pray, love” sabbatical of sorts. It was soothing to think about and hopeful to talk about. Who doesn’t love light? Who hasn’t experienced darkness? But it was safe. In planning to tell everyone else’s stories, I was hiding from my own unearthing.
I sat down again one fall morning to write about the inciting incident, and vignette by vignette, the new book took shape. Friends cautioned me about withholding my accelerators—the biggest lessons I learned the hardest way, like the moments I spent on my knees, the leaps I took, the mistakes I made. The fears I had and have still—all of which laid the foundation on which abundance has been built.
I didn’t know if, at this point in my life, exchanging privacy for potential impact was wise. After all, writers never really know if what they’ve written resonates until someone reads it. You throw your heart against a wall and see what sticks. This trepidation was amplified by the fact that I am simply me—an ordinary person with an extraordinary life in which extraordinary is not defined by followers or fame or praise or recognition.
I’ve found extraordinariness on the other side of curiosity—in seeking, trying, failing, and trying again. In giving, loving, and serving. And in learning how—with each step forward, backwards, and away—to put myself before the world. As I work with my new partners to refine this book, I’m believing that your longing to be human will recognize my longing to be human. That you’ll be inspired and compelled by both the ordinary and extraordinary moments I’ve chosen to share with you. Our misguided frame that any one person is more or less than another has muddied our spirits. To me, this is one of the greatest lies ever told—that God’s children share one narrowly defined story, and that there are millions if not billions of people whose stories do not count.
We’re here now, together, because I feel called to remind givers that the world is both your helping ground and your harvest ground. We find our way to a life of significance not by following a blueprint we paid $199 for, but by remaining open to what life insists on teaching us, no matter how many times we run from the lesson.
When it’s time to share more about my forthcoming book, which I wrote for every helper and healer, every soul who’s still looking for themselves beneath the rubble of trauma inflicted by home or work, every person who believes—behind the fear and righteous rage and skepticism—that “we” are greater than “me”…I will start right here. Please subscribe.
I have something real for you. Something vulnerable. Something true.
Tara Jaye Frank
