There are things you carry so long they become part of the furniture of your life—a scar on a knee, a song you hum without thinking, a secret that weighs like a stack of unreturned letters. For forty years I carried a story I could not tell. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t neat. It belonged to the raw, messy place where survival and shame meet. And it wasn’t mine alone to carry anymore.
Somewhere along the way, in the quiet of prayer and in the slow, stubborn dawns after sleepless nights, I knew I wanted to step forward. Not with a trophy or a tidy ending, but with a truth that might help one person, or maybe many. The Psalms were there, howling and pleading like an old friend: “Protect me,” I prayed. David’s cries for protection felt like the echo of my own. My family’s opposition has been fierce and the risks real. That is part of why I’m writing about this now—the cost of telling has been immediate and personal. Still, the gift felt bigger than my fear.
Faith is not a neat map. Sometimes it is a knocking at the door when your hands are full of suitcases. Sometimes it is a small, stubborn conviction that this story, my story, will not be wasted if it can light one lantern for someone else. I thought of the girl I was—trembling, seven months pregnant, carrying more than her body could hold—and I thought: I wish someone had handed me these words back then. I wish someone had said, “You will live. You will learn. You will still belong. I can help you.” If telling this helps even one lost child of God find a foothold, then it’s worth the cost.
So I move forward. Not because I am brave in myself, but because I believe courage is sometimes simply doing the next small thing in front of you. I move forward with trembling hands and a fierce, private prayer for protection. I move forward knowing my telling could upset people who love me imperfectly and fear the truth. I move forward because there are more important loyalties than comfort: loyalty to truth, loyalty to the healed and healing heart inside me, loyalty to whoever might need to read, “You are not alone.”
If you are standing where I stood—listening for a voice, afraid to obey it because the price seems high—hear me: courage is not always a trumpet call. Often it’s a soft step. It’s the whisper of a woman turning on a light in a dark room. And sometimes that light is enough.
Why I’m sharing this now
This book grew out of that small whisper. Bones Beneath the Prairie is the fuller telling—the stories I wish someone had given me. I’m blogging this now because the call to speak has arrived again, and because there are readers who are walking where I walked. If you’ve been carrying something in the dark, I wrote this book for you—and I’m putting these words where someone might find them at the right moment.
If you want to read more or preorder: Pre-order on Amazon here.