Audiences might remember Smithfield from Mel Gibson’s 1995 film Braveheart, Wallace crying, “Freedom!” as he faces death. There is no record of Thomas saying anything in his final moments, but his story itself speaks volumes.

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The distance between the Tower and Smithfield is just over a mile and a half, much of it uphill from the River Thames, but it must have felt like an eternity as Thomas made his final journey.

Thomas had spent six years imprisoned for defending the truth and remaining loyal to the queen he had faithfully served. He had endured hunger, isolation, illness, and the uncertainty of never knowing when—or how—his imprisonment would end.

He was never given a trial or allowed to defend himself. As he witnessed the deaths of Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Cromwell, he must have wondered whether King Henry VIII had thrown him into the Tower and forgotten about him.

But the king had not completely forgotten. On a day in July, more than four years after Queen Katherine had died, guards came for Thomas and took him to the scaffold.

For Christians, the death of a martyr is not simply remembered as a tragic event. It is also regarded as a dies natalis—a “birthday into heaven.”

So, happy heavenly birthday, Blessed Thomas Abell.

Those who follow this Substack know that Thomas was Queen Katherine of Aragon’s chaplain and personal confessor. When Henry VIII sought to have his marriage to Katherine declared invalid, Thomas became one of her most determined defenders. He wrote Invicta Veritas—Unconquered Truth—arguing that the king’s marriage was valid and that Henry could not simply remake truth to suit his own desires.

Thomas must have known that his stand would cost him, and he could have remained silent. He could have distanced himself from Katherine and accepted the king’s decision. Like many other members of the clergy in his day, he could have sworn the required oath and returned to a comfortable life.

But he would not. He could not.

For men like Thomas Abell, there is no comfort in a lie, and I have no doubt that Thomas could not have lived with himself if he had made any other choice. But that did not make it any easier.

While imprisoned in the Tower, Thomas carved his name into the stone of the Beauchamp Tower. Above the outline of a bell, he carved the name “Thomas.” Inside the bell, he placed the letter “A.” Thomas A-bell.

The carving remains there today.

I have always wondered what Thomas was thinking when he carved that image. Alone in the coldness of his isolation, he could not have guessed that thousands of people would one day walk past it each year and think about his life and the decisions he made.

Perhaps it was simply his way of saying: Thomas Abell was here.

On July 30, 1540, Thomas was executed alongside two other priests, Richard Fetherston and Edward Powell, and three Protestants. Their deaths were intended to silence opposition and demonstrate the power of the Crown.

But the sovereign king of England was never the true Sovereign. Kings die and kingdoms change, but God remains on the throne of heaven.

Thomas Abell’s story is the reason I wrote The Queen’s Priest. I wanted readers to know the man behind the carving—not merely as a name on a list of Tudor martyrs, but as a priest, scholar, friend, and human being who faced impossible choices.

Historical fiction allows a writer to imagine the moments the official records could never preserve: the conversations, fears, prayers, and intimate relationships that shaped a life. But at the heart of the novel is the true story of a man who believed that truth was not his to alter, even when speaking it became dangerous.

Perhaps Thomas believed his voice had been silenced. Perhaps, during those long years in the Tower, he wondered whether anyone would remember him.

Nearly five hundred years later, we do.

Today, on his heavenly birthday, I remember Blessed Thomas Abell with gratitude—not because he sought suffering or conflict, but because, when both came to him, he refused to surrender the truth entrusted to him.

May we have the courage to do the same.

The royal couple had gathered at Blackfriars, the Dominican monastery so-called for its black-robed friars, where two cardinals conferred to decide the fate of their marriage. The king and queen were seated on thrones on opposite sides of the packed hall, and throngs of Londoners squeezed around the building, filling the streets and hallways, desperate to catch a glimpse of history being made. The king of England had humbled himself to participating in the public spectacle and would no doubt get the object of his desire, a quick annulment and holy permission to proceed with a new marriage.

But the day would not go as King Henry expected.

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When King Henry VIII determined to divorce Katherine and marry his mistress, no one really wanted to oppose him, not even Pope Clement in Rome. But unfortunately for the king, royal marriages in the 16^th century were more than declarations of love; they were binding international contracts. To break one was to risk fracturing an alliance that kept the delicate balance of power across Europe.

So despite the Pope’s reluctance to weigh in on Henry’s marital woes, he had to take a stand. Had the previous Pope erred in his decision to allow Henry to marry his brother’s widow, or had he been correct?

Pope Clement waffled between his desire to please the English king and his increasingly strained relationship with Katherine’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. It did not help that Imperial forces had just brutally sacked Rome, leaving the Pope at the mercy of Charles V.

Behind closed doors, everyone pleaded with Queen Katherine to quietly endure the disgrace and retire to a nunnery to spend the rest of her days in service to God. But while Queen Katherine was notoriously pious, she was not willing to quietly disappear for the sake of her husband’s infidelities.

The King’s Great Matter put her in a bind because she knew full well that a wife’s first responsibility was to support and obey her husband, especially if that husband were the sovereign king of England. To openly oppose him would be a deep betrayal that would forever sever their friendship—a friendship she valued despite Henry’s unfaithfulness.

But the king’s quest for an annulment, after two decades of faithful service, was a deeper betrayal, a personal injustice. And perhaps because of their daughter Mary, who would also be stripped of her position and authority, Katherine chose to take a stand.

Katherine of Aragon was no polite pushover. She was the youngest daughter of the mighty Queen Isabella, who, along with her husband, King Ferdinand, had reclaimed the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic rule, united Spain under one banner, and set off global colonialism with her risky decision to finance Christopher Columbus’s initial voyage.

So Queen Katherine did what any powerful, pious woman would do. She fell to her knees and begged.

Historical accounts describe how Katherine rose from her throne, waded through a crowd of lawyers and politicians, and fell before King Henry’s feet.

“Sir, I beseech you for all the love that hath been between us, and for the love of God, let me have justice.…”

Twice King Henry pulled her to her feet, and again she knelt.

She insisted that she had been a virgin when they wed, despite the previous 4-month-long marriage to his 15-year-old brother, Prince Arthur. She asked him to consider the plight of their child, who would be bastardized by the annulment process, and she begged him specifically to agree to have the hearing moved to Rome, where it could be fairly considered by the Pope and not the two cardinals who represented him.

The crowd, stunned by her tears and heartfelt speech, called out in support of her. And King Henry, equally unprepared for her petition, uttered an awkward conciliatory remark about letting her have her way, and she stood up and walked out of the court.

Cardinal Compeggio, desperate for a way out of the proceedings, latched onto the king’s remarks and used them as a reason to delay. Within a few weeks, he moved to recess the court, and it was never decided whether Queen Katherine should get her day in Rome or whether the king would get his quick annulment proclamation. Instead, it ended in a stalemate, and it was not until Anne Boleyn got pregnant that the king found enough reason to declare himself head of the church of England. He created a new religious hierarchy, one in which he could declare that he had never really been properly married to Katherine and therefore free to marry Anne.

When I wrote this scene into The Queen’s Priest, I imagined it through the eyes of Thomas Abell. As Katherine’s chaplain and trusted supporter, he was almost certainly present at Blackfriars. Watching from the background, he could not have known how costly that moment would become.

Many of the men who defended Katherine would eventually lose their positions, their freedom, and in some cases their lives. Abell himself would spend years imprisoned before being executed for refusing to accept Henry’s claims.

I sometimes wonder whether any of them realized, as they sat in that crowded hall, that they were witnessing the beginning of England’s break with Rome. History often feels inevitable when viewed from a distance. Living through it is another matter entirely.

Today, Blackfriars is simply another neighborhood in central London. Commuters pass through the station, office workers cross the bridge, and tourists rarely notice the significance of the place. Little remains of the monastery where the hearing took place.

When we visited London earlier this year, we stopped at The Blackfriar, a beautiful Victorian-era restaurant near the site. The chicken tarragon pie was excellent. Yet as I sat there, I found myself imagining the crowds, the tension, and the queen who crossed a crowded courtroom to kneel before her husband and ask for justice.

Five hundred years can hide a lot of history.

Joy is dancing in the waiting room, preparing to be clothed in glory.

The hard work of planning is over. The guest list has been made, the ceremony planned, the venue booked—and paid for. Even now, the caterers are preparing the food. Even now, the guests are traveling to the wedding. Even now, the groom is preparing to meet his bride.

Now is not the time to worry about dark rain clouds threatening the outdoor wedding ceremony or the unfinished decorations in the reception hall.

Now is the time to rejoice. Now is the time to dance.

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Wedding planning is a lot for any young woman to carry.

There are spreadsheets for guests and expenses, and an ever-expanding list of decisions. Should the flowers be fresh or silk? Can we skip the wedding cake and have s’mores? What about table linens and napkins? Should we rent or buy? And what about the catering, the table decorations, the music, the DJ? Who should I choose for my bridesmaids? What about the rehearsal and hotel rooms for out-of-town guests?

Childhood dreams of a perfect wedding day are adapted to available venues and the realities of inflated wedding expenses. Anxiety replaces joy as body-image issues, long repressed, surface with one big, overwhelming question: Will I be beautiful on my wedding day?

And in the midst of it all, the real questions lie hidden beneath the busyness. What will it be like to be married, to share a bed and a budget with another person? What if this long-desired state of matrimony is not what I had hoped? Am I ready?

The answers, of course, are yes to all of these. Yes, my precious daughter, you will be beautiful on your wedding day. Yes, you will be glad you got married. And yes, you are ready.

But the anxiety is there, and so, on the day of the wedding, as the makeup artists and hairstylist finish their work, and the bride waits to be clothed in her carefully tailored wedding dress—the one that had to be taken in twice—she begins to think about the reception afterward. Not the logistics of the decorations or the catering, but the line dancing she and her brother have practiced.

And she begins to dance.

The atmosphere shifts as she moves, laughter replacing anxious tears. This is her wedding day, and she is surrounded by the people she loves most.

I begin snapping pictures of her—my daughter, my beloved—dancing in her second-best white dress, delighting in the now-and-not-yet moment.

And suddenly I see that she is a living picture of us, the Bride of Christ, awaiting the moment when we too will be clothed in perfection, spotless before our Bridegroom. We, too, have a wedding feast awaiting us, and yet we live anxiously in the present age, where thunderstorms and unplanned expenses threaten to spoil our joy.

But joy is not out of reach. Joy, in the person of the Holy Spirit, waits, inviting.

Come, Beloved. Dance with me. The waiting will soon be over, and everything will be exactly as it should be.

Dance!

“The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come!’” (Revelation 22:17)

Readers sometimes ask me about the historical accuracy of The Queen’s Priest. The short answer is that I built the story on as many historical details as I could find, and like any good storyteller, I filled in the rest with my imagination.

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My husband, Kip, specifically questioned whether the townspeople of Buckden would really have raised their pitchforks and come out in defense of Queen Katherine when the king sent messengers to cart her away. It seemed improbable that the villagers would risk the king’s wrath with public defiance.

I told Kip that I thought it had happened exactly that way and that there was historical evidence for the English people supporting Queen Katherine, despite King Henry VIII’s insistence that they accept his new queen. But I found scant historical research specific to the episode in Buckden, so I used what I found and wrote it as I imagined it, hoping it was mostly true.

As it turns out, it was.

Last month, I was delighted to discover the full story of Queen Katherine’s defiance and the townspeople’s support, beautifully commemorated in the stained-glass windows of a modern chapel in Buckden. It had happened exactly as I had imagined it—pitchforks and all.

The Trip

Our April trip to the UK was a last-minute adventure, squeezed into the only crack we could find in our schedule. The idea for it began during Seattle’s rainy months, when Kip was working on a household project. He was listening to the audiobook of The Queen’

s Priest and decided we absolutely needed to make a mini-documentary of Thomas Abell, the graffiti he carved in the Tower of London, the book, and my research.

I’m a bit shy in front of the camera, so I was a little reluctant, but the prospect of going to England with my husband, who avoids places rainier than the Pacific Northwest, won me over. So in mid-April, the day after I spoke at my church’s women’s brunch, we were on a red-eye to London.

I had dreamed of doing a book tour in London, but as you can imagine, that takes contacts and bookstore distribution, neither of which I have in the UK, so I decided to view this as my own version of a book tour—Theresa-style. And so that is what we did. We traveled to London, took the book to the places I wrote about, took a million photos and videos, met people, and even gave the book to several new English friends who seemed very excited to read it.

It was unforgettable, and I highly recommend the experience to any author.

The sun shone the whole time, which apparently is a big deal in England. Like any crazy adventure, there were difficulties, but we got some great photos and video, along with gigabytes of not-so-great photos and videos, and I came home with a new respect for travel vloggers.

Buckden Towers

During the research phase, I learned that King Henry VIII sent men to Buckden Castle to strongarm the queen into moving further away. He, or perhaps Anne Boleyn, wanted Katherine to move on to a marshy area, even further away from London. So he sent the Duke of Suffolk, Charles Brandon, to do his dirty work.

When Brandon arrived, the queen dug in her heels. She actually ran up one of the towers and locked herself in her room—a very relatable move, I think—and refused to come out. Brandon was irritated by this, and also by the revelation that the queen’s household continued to call her “queen,” instead of “the Princess Dowager,” as the king had commanded.

He ordered the queen’s household to leave, but instead of simply going, they returned with the townspeople who surrounded the castle and demanded that Brandon leave the queen alone. The duke acquiesced, but not without exacting his toll. He arrested some of the queen’s household and returned to London.

Some historians believe this is when Thomas Abell was arrested, so when I wrote The Queen’s Priest, I included all of those details, including the townspeople’s ardent support for their disgraced queen.

But in the months since publication, a few people have questioned if that was likely, if the townspeople really rallied to her support at Buckden. I didn’t have much historical evidence, but I said I thought it was historically probable.

While we were planning the UK trip, I realized that Buckden Castle was still standing and had become a Catholic retreat center. In fact, it is even possible to stay there.

So we rented a stick-shift car in London, which Kip bravely drove on the left side of the road, and we headed an hour and a half north of the city to the little town of Buckden. For Kip’s part, he said that driving on the left side, through traffic, around roundabouts, through windy roads, and small villages, was more difficult than flying an airplane, which says a lot since he only started learning to fly around the same time I started writing The Queen’s Priest.

At one point, I briefly wondered whether it was riskier to drive with an American on British streets today or to travel in the queen’s caravans along highwayman-infested 16th-century roads. I remembered that one incident where the queen’s carriage hit a hole and Thomas had to guard them with a crossbow, but then I remembered that I had made up that scene.

Of course, we made it to Buckden without any issues, and I was delighted to find the castle standing there, exactly as I had imagined, down to the four corner towers on the building. The staff who knew the building’s history were gone, but a groundskeeper, noticing us looking around, offered to take us through.

Inside the castle, it looks like a regular, functional old house, repurposed to host a summer camp. The upstairs rooms are full of bunk beds for kids attending spiritual retreats, and the room that the queen would have used is now a closet-sized room with a single bed for an adult camp counselor. After seeing so many historical restorations filled with carefully recreated furnishings, it was strange to see these rooms still in active use, even though the furnishings were decades rather than centuries old.

But when I looked out the window from the tower room, it was exactly as I had hoped. The queen would have been able to see the gatehouse, where the gate was lowered, and the castle walls and moat. She would have been able to see into the little village with its quaint houses, and she would have absolutely been able to see people gathered around them, cheering for her.

The groundskeeper also invited us to go into the modern chapel, which I politely agreed to, thinking it was far too newly built to be of any real use.

But I was wrong.

In the basement, at the back of the chapel, there was a stained-glass window telling the whole story of Queen Katherine staying at Buckden, the duke coming to remove her, and the townspeople surrounding the castle in support. I was absolutely stunned. It was exactly as I had written it in The Queen’s Priest.

Kip caught the moment on his phone camera.

Outside the castle, there is a modern replica of a Tudor garden, open to the public. As I walked around the garden, I thought about how natural it would have been for Katherine to walk through a space like this, praying, contemplating her situation, and what she should do next. One of my favorite scenes between Thomas and the queen took place in a garden at Buckden, and it was surreal to walk through a replica of a place I had only hoped existed.

While we were in Buckden, we had lunch at a local café and spoke with a few local women working in a clothing store who confirmed that Buckden is proud of its association with Queen Katherine and its historic support for her.

On the street in front of the castle, I found a classic red telephone box that had been retrofitted to be a free library. I signed a copy of The Queen’s Priest, thanked the people of Buckden for their support for Katherine, and left it in the library. I hope someone finds it someday.

There is so much more I could write about… filming at the Tower of London, dinner at Blackfriars, exploring Hampton Court, flying a drone under the Abell bridge, having a pint at Oxford’s Bear Inn, and sitting at C.S. Lewis’s writing desk.

Have you ever been to a place you first visited in your imagination? I would love to hear about it in the comments.

After a few short days in Bangkok, we hopped on a domestic flight and headed south, almost to the Malaysian border, where we took a transport van to the coast and a speedboat to the increasingly famous island of Koh Lipe.

Koh Lipe

In Thailand, there are three basic boat types—speedboats with their loud, multiple engines, ferryboats with their slower pace, and long-tailed boats that look the most traditional, with their long wooden prow and brightly colored sashes. Repurposed car engines power these long-tail boats.

We mostly opted for the fastest routes with speedboats, but once on the trip, a local Thai girl selling boat tickets recommended the ferry, and we were not disappointed at all. On that day, we took the slow boat, hanging out on top with a pile of luggage and tourists from all over the world, our bare feet hanging over the edge of the boat as it gently bobbed up and down in the sea.

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A French-Canadian man sat next to Kip and told us the story of how he and his wife had sold their house in Vancouver and were spending 10 months touring the world with their young daughters, ages 6 and 8. We assured him they would never regret the time together. School can wait.

No Flygskam in Thailand

Despite being located far beyond the other Thailand hotspots, Koh Lipe is not a well-kept secret. The island was packed to the gills with northern hemisphere winter refugees.

Half of the tourists seemed to be Swedish; in fact, we heard more Swedish on Koh Lipe than anywhere we have traveled outside of Sweden. Kip met a couple in the airport and immediately struck up a conversation that continued for a few days as we saw them several times around the island.

One of the Swedish men was a business investor, so we told him about pickleball restaurant clubs in the US and recommended that he start something similar in Sweden. Hopefully, he takes our advice and becomes a millionaire so he can keep coming back to Thailand every winter.

Koh Lipe has some particularly beautiful white-sand beaches with turquoise water, so we spent most of our time there—swimming in the warm, crystal-clear waters, snorkeling, and digging toes into the sand while reading books.

In the evenings, we roamed the island, finding great Thai food. The first night we went to The Castaway, a beach restaurant with open walls. We ate barefoot, the evening ocean breeze tousling our hair.

Later in the week, we took a “taxi,” which was really a scooter with a sidecar about the size of a golf cart, into the center of the island, where the “walking street” produced an astonishing number of bars and restaurants. It amazed me that so many businesses could be sourced every day by speedboats dropping off food and supplies for the thousands of tourists who filled the narrow streets.

We settled at the loud, densely packed Papaya Mama, a traditional Thai restaurant with long shared tables and spicy Thai food piled high in old-school backpacker-budget-friendly portions. A Thai guitarist on a side stage belted out ‘90s covers while sunburned German backpackers, too young to remember Wonderwall on the radio, drank Chang and devoured heaping plates of pad Thai and papaya salad.

Koh Kradan

After four days of crowded paradise, we left on a packed speed boat, along with another 50 or more other tourists. After an hour and a half, we arrived at a quiet island. We were the only two people to get off the boat, and a local boy grabbed our suitcases and ported them down the beach to the resort office that managed a large collection of beach bungalows.

My apprehensions about being the only two people to get off the boat were quickly dissipated when we had a chance to walk around and see the island. Despite being ranked among the world’s most beautiful beaches, Koh Kradan actually does seem to be a well-kept secret.

Most of the island remains undeveloped jungle, part of a public park, with only a section of the beach having hotels, most of them high-end, luxury bungalows. We stayed at Kradan Beach Resort, a property of simple cabins facing the beach. Unlike the tourist areas in places like Koh Lipe and Phuket, there were no beach umbrellas, no loungers, and no attendants walking around taking drink orders and removing trash. Instead, there was a seemingly endless white sand with aqua blue, clear waters, and rock formations as far as the eye could see. At low tide, coral reefs and sandbars were exposed. At high tide, the same area was a living aquarium, teeming with tropical fish.

I think it is probably one of the most peaceful places I have ever visited, and as we walked around the island the first afternoon, I felt my soul relax. The next morning, I woke up to see the sunrise. Then later, that same day, we walked through the jungle, across the island to the other side, swam out into the warm waters, and watched the sunset.

When the ferry came to get us a few days later, it felt too soon to leave.

Krabi

Our next stop was Ao Nang in Krabi. The limestone cliffs and proximity to prettier island beaches are definitely Krabi’s claim to fame. But after spending several nights in the quiet of Koh Kradan, I found the loud, crowded tourist town to be overwhelming. We stayed in a very nice hotel, luxury even by American standards, but unfortunately, the restaurant across the street decided to host a live band until after 1 a.m., and I found it difficult to sleep.

After talking to the hotel staff, we were moved to another room several hundred feet up the side of the mountain. The new room proved to be a bit of a challenge, since the resort’s elevators also stopped working for the three days we were there, and every time we left the property, we had to hike up several floors, traversing three different buildings to reach the back of the resort. But I welcomed the distance from the busy tourist street and was happy to get a good night’s sleep.

The new room was also near the hotel’s infinity pool overlooking the limestone cliffs, so I didn’t complain about that.

While we were in Ao Nang, we took a long-tailed boat to Railay Beach for ฿100 (about $3 each way) and hired a rock climbing guide to take us out to the famous rock climbing walls.

I’m not very experienced as a climber, but our son is. He started climbing a few years ago, around the time he started college, and if climbing could have been a college major, he would be a straight-A student. He climbs indoors, outdoors, whenever and wherever he can. He became a certified rock-climbing instructor and even started a competitive rock-climbing team at his college.

Our son also has the kind of enthusiastic personality that tends to draw other people into his passions, so he has gotten our whole family into rock climbing, taking us to his indoor gym when he is in town.

I enjoy scaling up the wall, but with all the other things I am doing, I really only climb when our son is around, and when I do, I typically stick to the easy, safe routes.

When we heard that Railay Beach was world-famous for its rock climbing over emerald-green waters, we had to try it, if only to send our son pictures.

Our guide took us to a well-climbed route overlooking the famous bay and set us up to top-rope a fairly challenging 5.10. He belayed for us, giving us feedback and using a laser to point out accessible holds on the rock. I went into the experience a little nervous, hoping to try it out and maybe watch Kip do it, but I ended up scaling two routes and literally felt on top of the world.

I also slipped at one point and fell off the rock wall. Our guide was a professional belayer, and he caught me. I frequently fall at the climbing gym, so I am used to trusting the harness and rope system, but watching the video later, despite my cheery voice saying, “I’m fine,” I realized how much trust I put in the holds, the ropes, the harness, and the belayer that I had just met. Had any of that failed, I might not be writing this.

But as I reflected on that sobering fact, I realized that international travel necessarily requires people to trust strangers. That is what happens when you get on an airplane, boat, cab, or even the back of a pickup truck—like we did over and over again on this trip. We also ate food that came from small kitchens and street vendors and sat next to coughing strangers on airplanes. Traveling is an act of trust that fellow humans are basically good people who want to do their jobs well and take care of the people entrusted to them.

It’s actually true at home too. Living well involves trusting people not to run a red light, misdiagnose your symptoms, or forget to feed your cat while you are gone. It’s trusting that we mostly share the basic goal of being happy and living well.

Of course, I am not naive. I know that many places are not safe. Some people are on the lookout for travelers to take advantage of, and it’s responsible to do all the regular things: put your passport in the safe, don’t carry much cash, keep an eye on your belongings, watch your drink, wear a mask when you are packed like sardines on public transit—I get it. But sometimes I think we focus so much on the scary stories, the horrific what-ifs, and spend so much time on self-protection that we build a false sense of control, believing we can keep ourselves safe from harm. We can and should use common sense, but we are always, to some extent, at the mercy of fellow humans.

For me, the balance in this trade-off between trust and self-protection is a deep assurance in the goodness of God, who is ever present. My life is in His hands, and my ear is attentive to His voice guiding me. He is the ultimate belay rope that catches my fall.

Phuket

We ended our Thailand adventure in Phuket, the country's most famous beach area. I had wanted to avoid Phuket in general, after reading too many stories of overcrowding and misbehaving adults. But because I had booked our flight out of Phuket International Airport, it made sense to spend at least one night in the area.

Phuket has multiple distinct vacation areas ranging from wild backpackers’ partying quarters to exclusive, wealthy enclaves.

We found a busy, family-oriented area near Kata Beach with ample white sand and clear waters, beach loungers and umbrellas, and beachside restaurants. We were only there for a day, but I would recommend it for a relaxing beach day.

Unlike Koh Lipe, Kata Beach seems to have mostly Russian tourists, and I may or may not have narrowly avoided an international conflict when I chided a very large man in a bright red Speedo for fishing in the swimming area. He seemed to think it was ok to toss crackers into the water near the snorkeling area and drop a hook and line—snorkelers beware. Oh well, if I had to deal with 11 months of winter, I would go to Phuket too.

Home Life

As I finish editing this entry, we have been home for several weeks now, and I have been increasingly busy with wedding planning, writing, reporting for magazine stories, and everything that comes with writing and editing.

I need to finish filing our taxes, and I’m also doing some more public speaking and helping organize a writer’s conference in my city. We are planning another trip to London, and I am looking forward to revisiting the places I included in The Queen’s Priest.

I am busy in ways I have not been in the past few years, but it feels good to be doing things that I used to dream about. Not the taxes. I never dreamt of filing taxes, but, like all work, there is a natural reward in finishing a task, and I am grateful for it all.

Chickens

Last year’s chicks are about a year old now. They are all laying eggs—even the one I initially suspected was a rooster—so I am averaging at least six fresh eggs a day. We can’t eat them all, so our local friends have learned to stop by with empty egg cartons, and that is just fine with me. It is really nice to have something valuable to share.

Last night, my son and five of his college friends showed up unexpectedly to spend the night. They are on spring break and have been camping and rock climbing, not too far from here. Our son invited them all to stay instead of camping, which is fine—we love having people stay with us. But because I had just given most of our eggs to church friends, I realized we only had a few left for breakfast.

As it turns out, some of the kids grew up with chickens and felt quite confident around the breakfast vending machines. They were out in the coop long before I got up, looking for fresh eggs. By the time I came downstairs, there were scrambled eggs, coffee, pancakes, bacon, and oatmeal waiting.

I guess you don’t have to go on vacation to get a good breakfast.

Although we almost didn’t go.

I had originally booked our plane tickets back in October, when plane tickets seemed unreasonably cheap, especially in comparison to summer trips to Europe, but I was too busy working on the audiobook release to pay much attention to researching where to go and what to do.

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Then there was Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and my daughter’s wedding planning. Before I knew it was early January and we had not made any real plans—no list of places to go, no sites to see. And I considered canceling.

I told a friend who had recently lost her husband that we had a planned-but-unplanned trip coming up. I told her I was thinking of canceling it, saving the adventure for later when it felt less ridiculously spontaneous. And she responded wistfully, “Sometimes the unplanned trips were the best.”

I went home that night and resumed planning our trip. Two and a half weeks later, we were on a plane to Asia.

Leaving Phi Phi on the Table

You can’t see Thailand in two weeks—not even in two months—and hitting all the highlights in the standard guidebook will likely leave you feeling exhausted. But if you are curious, the kind of traveler who takes in the world with awe, I think you will find Thailand is a land of many, many incredible places and adventures.

We biked through Bangkok, walked through the jungle, climbed the cliffs on Railey Beach, fed an elephant, snorkeled around coral reefs teeming with the entire cast of Finding Nemo, discovered pristine beaches with white sand and emerald waters, watched the sun rise, watched the sun set, tried a sunrise yoga class on the beach, got stretched, cracked, and massaged by traditional Thai massagists. We saw monitor lizards lounging in downtown Bangkok and monkeys playing in public parks in Krabi. And we did not feed the monkeys, even though they seemed more than happy to accept food donations from tourists, despite the posted signs forbidding it.

We got a few fancy drinks on rooftop bars and on beachside bars, but found the cheap Chang beer to be just as refreshing, especially on a hot afternoon or with a dinner of spicy Thai chillies.

We tried all the typical Thai foods--Pad Thai, mango sticky rice, papaya salad, fried noodles, pineapple fried rice in an actual pineapple, basil stir-fried rice with an egg on top, fresh seafood, and of course, every type of curry—red, Massaman, and panang, and never got tired of it.

We did not make it to Chang Mai to visit the beautiful highlands. And we didn’t brave the crowds to see Phi Phi Island (pronounced Pee Pee) and the beach made famous by Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Beach.” We also didn’t visit any of Bangkok’s famous temples or see its famous floating markets.

But we met a few Thai people, heard their stories, and felt like we saw a bit of their country, altered as it is in touristy areas.

Bangkok

Our Bangkok hotel reservation was one of the last decisions we made. We booked it after we sorted out what islands we wanted to go to and how we were going to get there, and chose from the limited options left at the height of tourist season.

I was eager to stay in an area convenient to tourist sites, and far away from the infamous red-light districts and backpacking party neighborhoods. We somehow ended up staying in a premium high-rise hotel in the heart of the upscale shopping mall district. The breakfast buffet, which was a ridiculously robust sampling of every kind of breakfast food—western, Thai, Middle Eastern, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian —clearly catered to the upscale clientele. While Europeans seemed to be in Bangkok as a stopover on their way to the beaches, the Asian and Middle Eastern guests at our hotel seemed far more interested in high-end shopping. The malls in Bangkok are legendary—giant palaces of air-conditioned wealth.

On our first day in Bangkok, we skipped the luxury brand stores and wandered into a nearby budget mall with small kiosks selling wholesale and knock-off clothing. I had read that their beauty treatments were also budget-friendly, so I got a pedicure for about a quarter of what I would have paid in Seattle. Kip got his first Thai massage of the trip.

I also bought a pair of ubiquitous elephant pants for about $5, and Kip found a pair of ill-fitting flip flops and dried fish snacks for later.

From there we wandered, jetlagged from our flight, through Lumphini Park and saw monitor lizards lounging in the sun.

Bangkok is famous for its rooftop bars, so we headed towards one, ordered gringo-priced cocktails, and watched the smoggy pink sunset. By the time we dragged ourselves back to the hotel, we were tired and less than enthusiastic about getting back out. We had planned to go to a YouTube-influencer-recommended restaurant in a nearby high-end mall, but when we got there, it was closing, and so was everything else around it.

Despite being exhausted, we walked several blocks in a different direction and found a less touristy Thai corner of Bangkok. There, I got my first real Thai food of the trip—the best spicy red curry I think I have ever had—and we washed it down with Thailand’s version of light beer—the infamous green bottles of Chang.

At 10 p.m., the local Thai people were attending to their own lives, washing their clothes at the laundry mat across the street, getting foot and leg massages at the busy parlors catering to hard-working middle-class people. It was a nice glimpse into the real Bangkok that we would have missed if the mall had been open.

Riding through Bangkok

The next morning, the first thing we did was change the plan.

We had planned to spend the next day visiting famous museums and temples, taking a river cruise, or seeing the famous water markets just outside the city, but when we woke up early the next morning, Kip told me that he really wanted to do a bike tour of Bangkok.

I wasn’t particularly excited about navigating a bicycle through Bangkok traffic. I love biking, but my son and I once took a tour in Bogotá, and it wasn’t a great experience. All I remember is our sweet Colombian guide standing in the street, arms out, holding back traffic so I could catch up with the rest of the group careening through chaos. I gave him a generous tip for placing himself between me and certain death and decided that urban bike tours in foreign countries were a one-and-done.

But Kip was persistent, and I don’t like to miss out on adventures, so I agreed to the three-hour bike tour.

It was the right decision.

Our Thai tour guide took us through the back streets of Bangkok, stopping to explain all things Thai. Then he took us through a busy food market and a Buddhist monastery. When we got to the river, we loaded the bikes onto a long-tail boat and crossed to an island mostly covered in jungle and farms, connected by raised walkways over wetlands. We gingerly rode over the walkways, careful not to veer off and tumble three feet down into the swamp.

The entire afternoon was a unique experience, but visiting the Buddhist monastery and temple was particularly interesting. I have visited cathedrals and churches all over the world. I have even been in a few synagogues and a mosque in Europe, but this was my first opportunity to spend time in a Buddhist temple. There were some surprising physical similarities to other religious houses of worship.

Inside the temple, there was an extravagant golden altar in the front of the room with a raised image of Buddha. The walls were covered in paintings, not unlike medieval Christian art, that reminded worshipers of Buddhist stories and doctrine. And like a mosque, the temple lacked any seating other than the red carpet. Monks typically sit cross-legged on the floor in meditation and prayer. But when we visited, there was no one meditating, just a cat, stretched out, asleep in the afternoon heat at the foot of the altar.

Our tour guide, a former monk, told us that monks generally disliked cats but wouldn’t kill them because “It’s forbidden.” I guess, if you are a cat, karma has its privileges.

I asked our guide about a painting on the wall that reminded me of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which I once saw at the Prado in Madrid. Like that famous surreal hellscape painting, this one also pictured people being tortured as a punishment for breaking the Five Precepts of Buddhism, which incidentally coincide with at least four of the first five Ten Commandments of Hebrew scripture.

Our guide explained the art piece and its intention to convey the Buddhist concept of hell. It sounded just as terrible as any Western concept of eternal damnation, and I thought about my New Age friends in California, with their Buddha statues. I wondered if they were aware of Buddhist hell.

On the 16-hour flight from Seattle to Singapore, I read “Jesus and the Buddha Belt,” a book retelling the stories of four Myanmar men, so I had already been thinking about Buddhism and the experiences of those who leave their family’s religion. The first story in the book is about a Buddhist monk who is afraid of going to hell.

The stories, though simple, made me more aware of the people around me working in the restaurants and shops we visited, and I found myself praying for them more.

People often asked us where we were from, so we did the same, and I discovered that more than a few of them, especially in Krabi, had come to Thailand to escape the civil war in Myanmar. This reminded me of another story in the book, the one about a young man who left his village to live in Myanmar’s main city. His plan was to learn English well enough to get a job abroad and send money home. He ends up developing a friendship with Western missionaries who offer English classes. The story offered a glimpse into his life—details about the kind of youth dormitory he lived in, what he ate for dinner, what he longed for, what confused him about Christianity, and how he felt about being a young person thrust into an unfamiliar environment. It made me more curious about the people we met—the young Myanmar man handing us a menu at the restaurant, the girl trying to sell me a dress for 200 baht ($6.50). What were their stories?

The people in Thailand work hard, arriving at hotels and shops early in the morning, well before foreign tourists begin meandering out of their hotels and into restaurants for breakfast buffets. And they often stay late, sometimes working well past sunset. They call Thailand the land of smiles, because Thai people smile all the time. They also seem disposed to be agreeable, and they don’t like open conflict. It creates a hospitable culture, but I sometimes wondered what lay behind the smiles.

Street food in Chinatown

We finished our Bangkok adventure with a trip to Chinatown to experience Thailand’s world-famous street food phenomenon. The food was everything generations of backpackers and travel influencers have led us to believe, except cheap. The word is out in Chinatown, and the street vendors crowded along Yaowarat Road don’t hesitate to demand gringo prices for their satay sticks and lobsters. Of course, even gringo prices are still significantly less than any lobster would cost in the US.

It was a fun experience, but certainly not very relaxing. After a few hours of elbowing our way through the crowded streets, I was more than happy to get back to our quiet hotel for a short night’s sleep. Before the sun rose over Bangkok, we were in a cab, heading to the airport and a domestic flight to Hat Yai, a city near the southern border of Thailand.

Coming next: white sand and crystal-clear emerald waters.

Last weekend, I reorganized my closet and all the bookshelves. Several weeks ago, we scheduled a new carpet installation, but it was not until the night before the carpet layers arrived that I realized that everything that touched the old carpet, including the shelves that supported the clothing rods, would need to be cleared out. As a result, we spent the night filling the bathtub with clothes and shoes and stacking books anywhere the floor wasn’t carpeted.

It was a huge project, both to deconstruct and then reconstruct my study and walk-in closet. And as I put everything back in a more organized manner, I could not help but feel a little guilty over the books I should have given away a long time ago, especially the ones I have never and will never read.

I still have homeschooling books I should have passed on years ago. I kept some of them because they represent good memories, especially the historical novels we read through Sonlight. And I kept some of the science and history textbooks, in part, because they contain bits of information I missed in my own education. Maybe one of these days I’ll pick up that general physical science book and try to understand some of the basic concepts that elude me. But I know I probably won’t. We live in a digital world with digital information at our fingertips. Will I really pull that heavy textbook off the shelf anytime soon?

In the end, I compromised with my conflicted self. I kept a small bookshelf of sentimental children’s books for future generations—my faded Little House in the Big Woods that I read in second grade, my daughter’s battered Sandra Boynton board book that was poetry to my early mommy years, and of course, the first-edition Chronicles of Narnia library cast-offs that I snagged from a yard sale nearly two decades ago!

But I managed to remove two large boxes’ worth of books from the other shelves, and I soberly vowed to make more time to read the remaining books that I want to read.

While I was cleaning up, I imagined someone, someday, pulling an unread copy of The Queen’s Priest off a shelf and putting it in a Goodwill pile. I am sure it will happen. Why wouldn’t it? Far better books are in my giveaway pile. It’s the way of things in our oversaturated, distracted world. There is only so much space on a bookshelf, only so many hours in a lifetime.

There is a fictional scene in The Queen’s Priest where Thomas Abell watches a mob of protesters burn his book. To be clear, I am sure that Invicta Veritas was very likely burned. King Henry’s administration seemed to handle controversial books that way, but I suppose it would have been rather extraordinary for the author to have been present to see it. But it makes for a better story if Thomas experiences and describes it from his point of view, so I put him there. And Thomas, being Thomas, watched the spectacle and had existential thoughts about how truth cannot be destroyed by physical fire. He understood that his ideas would outlive his book, as a martyr’s convictions outlive his physical body.

Books are just books. They can be read, enjoyed, shelved, forgotten, donated, burned. They are physical memorabilia of the experience of reading and the ideas they contain. I suppose that is why it is sometimes difficult to get rid of good unread books. It’s like walking away from untapped potential. But, of course, there is the hope that a donated unread book will somehow have an afterlife of usefulness in someone else’s library.

What I Am Reading Now

I’m on a slow read through Matthew right now. In 2023, I read the Bible in a year. In 2024, I set out to do that again, but it ended up taking two years instead of one. This year, I decided to do something different. I decided to read slowly through the gospels and Acts, paying closer attention to Jesus—what he says, what he does, what he values, who he is. It’s been beautiful so far.

One thing I’ve noticed about Matthew is that the book seems to have a theme of reception. It’s in the background of so many stories and parables, leaving the reader with a question: How will you receive Jesus and his teachings? How will you receive these stories?

Many of the people in the stories respond with faith, but others reject him. The disciples are often confused, and maybe justifiably so. Jesus is kind of a game-changer. But Matthew writes it all down, giving the first-century listener and the twenty-first-century reader an equal opportunity to decide how to respond.

This morning, I read about Jesus miraculously feeding the five thousand. The story begins with Jesus processing grief. When he hears about John the Baptist’s death, he gets into a boat and goes somewhere to be alone. But the public gets wind of it, and they run to the other side of the lake before he even shows up.

Jesus does not respond with irritation. He sees them. He notices their pain. In his own humanity, in his own grief, he sees theirs. That is the incarnation. It is not only a God in the sky who loves us, but it is also a God who experiences the senseless, brutal injustice of King Herod killing his cousin to pacify his wife’s demands.

John was beheaded in a culture that honors a person’s dead body. The text says the disciples came and took the body. I cannot imagine their horror as they wrapped it, headless, and buried it. It was so unholy, so undignified, so dehumanizing. It would be understandable for Jesus to be outraged. He expressed righteous anger at the merchants in the Temple. Surely it would not have been out of character for him to express disgust and outrage at John the Baptist’s death. But as far as we know, that is not what he did.

Jesus responds to the news of this atrocity by withdrawing from his closest friends to be alone. And it is in that context, in that desperate moment, that Matthew tells us that Jesus’s private time is interrupted by a giant, needy crowd.

But Jesus sees them and is moved with compassion. He heals the sick. It must have taken a long time to attend to everyone, and even after he supernaturally healed their diseases, they still had the common human needs — food, shelter, and much more.

The disciples saw the crowd the way we would, as a problem to be solved. Where were all these people going to get dinner? It was getting dark. Would they just lie down along the roadside and sleep a bit before walking back? Would they even make it back to the villages they came from without fainting along the way?

So they bring the problem to Jesus, and he responds that the people don’t need to leave to find food. He has a practical solution. “You give them something to eat.”

I can’t help but wonder if the corner of Jesus’s mouth turned up in a slight smile when he said that. Surely he knew his men were exhausted and hungry themselves.

But the story moves on. The disciples realize they have five loaves and two fish. And Jesus says, “Bring them to me.”

You know how the story ends. Jesus tells everyone to sit down. He looks to Heaven. He breaks the bread and gives it back to the disciples to distribute. And at some point, something happens, and five thousand men, along with an untold number of women and children, eat and are satisfied. The leftovers exceed the original amount offered.

This is one of those stories layered with cultural and Biblical significance, but at a basic level, it’s an account of Jesus, God in human flesh, meeting real physical needs in a supernatural way, using a ridiculously small donation and the obedient, faithful hands of his distributing disciples. This is what Jesus is like. That is what his kingdom is like. And this is what I am paying attention to in this season.

The Well-Read Fish

Speaking of fish and abundance, The Well Read Fish recently reviewed The Queen’s Priest and gave it a glowing review and their highest rating—five fish.

If you have limited reading time but really want to read The Queen’s Priest, I highly recommend the audio version. It’s now available on multiple platforms, including Audible, Spotify, Chirp, and Apple Books. It’s also available on Storytel.

Storytel is the number one audiobook app in Sweden, so I am really hoping some of my Swedish friends will listen to it there and send me a picture of them listening on the train.

Kip just finished re-listening to the audio version while he was building the shelves in our closet to replace the particleboard ones that collapsed during the carpet install, and he was once again really impressed with the story and Alex Bhat’s ability to bring it to life.

The Chicken Report

God has also blessed my chickens with abundance. When I returned from Thailand, we had 60 eggs waiting for us.

I am now regularly giving eggs to friends and family and always scrambling for gently used egg cartons. Our son visited us this weekend, and I sent him back to college with a box of eggs wrapped in paper towels.

Roz, the reluctant rooster, has found his voice. He is currently cock-a-doodling away, even though it’s midday, dark, and rainy. I can imagine we will be hearing him quite a bit when the days lengthen and the summer sun warms our backyard before 5 a.m. It’s probably a good thing that I have so many extra eggs to give our neighbors.

Coming soon… thoughts from our trip to Thailand!

The margins between Thanksgiving and the Christmas season have long been blurred—early Black Friday sales, Christmas decorations in the stores, trees popping up in grocery store lots.

Sometimes I spend the weekend after Thanksgiving preparing for Christmas, shopping for presents, putting up the Christmas tree, and decorating. But this year, I am lingering a bit longer in the post-Thanksgiving week, enjoying the quiet house after a boisterous week of visiting family.

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The Thanksgiving leftovers are almost completely gone, save a lone container of homemade cranberry sauce. This morning, I hashed the very last of the sweet potatoes into a Spanish omelet with spinach that needed to be used, along with a smidge of leftover salmon from last night’s dinner.

This weekend, we will crack open the big black Christmas decoration box sitting in the hallway, halfway along its journey from the garage to the front room. I’ll pull out all the old decorations, and then Kip and I will have our annual discussion about whether we really need a few of the lesser-loved ornaments that have nonetheless traveled with us across the US and up the Pacific Coast. Some of them will go up, others will stay in the box, caught in a sentimental purgatory between celebrated and discarded.

But this week, as I wash sheets and towels and reset the house, I’m relishing Thanksgiving, the time I spent with my parents and my adult kids, the coziness of a well-built house standing against the November drizzle, and the quiet of pre-Christmas.

This week, I have been meditating on the connection between gratitude and peace. In this world of chaos, everyone wants peace. We all want health, financial security, the absence of conflict, the rock-solid, absolute assurance of being loved, adored, cherished.

Our pastor reminded us on Sunday that the biblical word shalom, translated as “peace,” is all those things and more. It’s the deep-down quiet of knowing that all is well and all will be well.

I want that—every day.

And I am learning that thanksgiving is no small part of that experience.

The psalmist said, “I will enter your gates with thanksgiving in my heart. I will enter your courts with praise.”

If you cycled through church in the mid-80s, your brain is probably already finishing that refrain with the well-worn, clap-happy song. “I will say this is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice for He has made me glad.”

The simple song, made even simpler by my childhood memory, belies its power. It’s not simply another Jesus Movement chorus. It’s the psalm Jesus and his disciples sang on the night he was betrayed. It’s an act of faith, a statement of identity. In fact, it’s part of the ancient Passover liturgy.

As a child, I thought the song meant we were supposed to be thankful as we entered church, like having the right attitude when we go into God’s house. But I think the verse is actually much, much more. It seems to have a double meaning: not only do you give thanks when you walk through the door, but the act of giving thanks is like a secret code that gets you through the door—the password into God’s Presence.

And it is a progression. It goes from thanks to praise to recognizing God’s sovereignty over the day, “I will say this is the day that the Lord has made…” And it is an act of the will, “I will rejoice,” because, back to God’s actions, “He has made me glad.”

Joy is a dance between God and us. We give thanks. We praise. We recognize His authority over His creation, and He makes us glad.

And somewhere along the line, with all that joy dancing, the perfect peace of God settles over our souls—like a warm hearth on a cold day, a cup of perfectly brewed coffee, a cozy blanket. Rest.

The Queen’s Priest

People always ask me how The Queen’s Priest is doing, and that can be a difficult question to answer. The short answer is good. I’m getting wonderful feedback all the time. Several people told me they enjoyed the book so much that they bought multiple copies for Christmas presents.

On the other hand, I could still use a few more Amazon reviews. A few good words from verified purchasers make a considerable difference in lending the book credibility, and as an unknown author, I could use all the help I can get.

Marketing has never felt comfortable to me, but I know the book is good. I know it has been a blessing to people, and I feel a bit of a responsibility to let people know about the book while it is still a newish release. I know that the best marketing happens before and just after a book’s release, and I am outside that window, but as my friend Carol told me, “every time someone discovers a book is a new launch.”

I am also learning how to make the book available in more international markets and libraries. I believe The Queen’s Priest could be a great resource for homeschooling families and schools looking for a literature-based approach to teaching history, and I want to make it available to families with limited book budgets.

Once the book is available to libraries, there is a process for getting a title into their catalogs. At that time, I will lean on my readers to request the book through their local library systems, so stay tuned for more updates on that!

Chicken update

Over Thanksgiving weekend, my son noticed that one of my hens was acting strange. I had let the chickens out to free-range, and my son noticed that one of them stood still in the middle of the yard, eyes blinking, not moving as he drove a motorcycle around her.

After examining Henrietta, one of my fat Plymouth Barred Rocks, I thought her symptoms matched coccidiosis. She was lethargic, puffed out, and had watery stool.

So I raced off to the co-op for a remedy, and when I came back, a multi-generational task force assembled in the kitchen to get medicine down Henrietta’s beak. I held her still in an old towel while my dad held a flashlight or propped the beak open, and my daughter carefully squeezed a syringe of medicine over Henrietta’s tongue, taking care to avoid the airway. It took a few minutes, but we got the medicine down her throat.

I set up the dog crate in the shed and settled Henrietta in it, giving her water and encouraging her that the best was yet to come.

But in the morning, when I checked on her, she was gone, her head peacefully resting next to the water dispenser, her eyes closed.

I treated the rest of the chickens for coccidiosis by adding Corid to their water, and have not observed any other signs of sickness in the flock.

My friend, who advises me on all things chicken, told me it probably wasn’t coccidiosis after all, especially since she looked otherwise healthy. Sometimes these things just happen, and there is not a lot you can do, she said.

This is not the first time that my alpha hen, the one at the top of the pecking order, has suddenly died. Another time, a bobcat carried off the bully hen, and I have to say, I did not cry about that. But this time, I felt a bit sad that I had been unsuccessful in trying to save Henrietta.

Death is part of the life cycle, and there is no escaping it when you decide to bring farm animals into your life. It’s good to love and care for an animal, to give them your best and express your gratitude for the role they play in your life. But chickens die—a lot—it’s part of the hobby farm experience.

But I am grateful for the 11 chickens I have left. Like so much in my life, they are more than enough. I am getting an abundance of eggs, and now I have the pleasure of giving eggs to my friends and neighbors. And for that I am grateful.

The journey from deciding to create an audiobook to releasing it this week has been a huge learning process, highlighted by the delight of working with a talented narrator and experiencing the story in a new format.

Writing a story is one thing. Allowing it to be crafted and refined through editing was another step. And then sharing that book with the world this summer forever changed the story as it became something that belonged to other people as much as to me.

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Over the last few months, I have thoroughly enjoyed talking with readers about the story and their impressions of Thomas, Queen Katherine, the Cardinal, the King, and even Richard Featherstone. People have experienced the story differently, pulling different details that I barely remember writing. It’s an interesting example of how the writer’s subconscious sometimes expresses thoughts that she is barely aware of, especially when the story is coming fast.

On the first read, Kip thought it was great that Thomas knew how to use a crossbow, and my mom cried when the Queen came to Thomas’s rescue the first time he was imprisoned, sending him provisions to ease his suffering. Another person told me he understood the history from Katherine’s perspective for the first time, acknowledging how painful it must have been for her to be rejected and set aside.

I absolutely love hearing this kind of feedback, because not only does it bring these characters to life, it brings meaning to history and an appreciation for the very real humans who occupied it.

Listening to Alex Bhat, the narrator, passionately read this story was like feeling it through another person’s experience. Not only did I get to hear his creative interpretation of the different voices in the dialogue, but I also heard the phrases and words that stood out to him as a reader. It highlighted subtle details of the story that I had long forgotten I’d written. It was a gift to me, and I hope that it will be a gift to many people around the world.

For now, the book is available on Audible. You can buy it with Audible credits or as a single purchase. My next goal is to make it available through libraries. As I have said before, I have greatly benefited from library audiobooks, especially when I couldn’t afford a subscription, so I want to make this story available in the library system in as many countries as possible.

But listening to the story, through the creative expression of another person’s voice, has been an unexpected delight that I hope many people, far beyond my circle of friends, will enjoy.

Our sweet daughter and her boyfriend are engaged! And we couldn’t be more thrilled. The son-in-law-to-be is a thoughtful, kind-hearted man with a deep love for Scripture and the Lord, and a tender affection for our daughter.

When they called to tell us they were engaged, I told him that he was an answer to prayer. And he is. For the past few years, my husband and I have been praying that God would bring the right man into our daughter’s life, someone who loves her and shares her love for the Lord. This guy meets those requirements in abundance, and we are so grateful.

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Wedding Planning

My daughter and I have begun discussing wedding planning, and I already see how it is going to be an interesting project. She said she wants a relatively short engagement, a simple wedding, not too expensive, but one in a beautiful place, with great pictures. Oh, and she wants to invite all of her family, friends, and community. I laughed and told her we needed to watch Steve Martin’s 90s version of Father of the Bride when she comes home for Thanksgiving.

With Pinterest-perfect photos and drone-shot, cinematic videos, wedding expectations are a bit crazy these days. Both my daughter and I tend to gravitate towards the understated, the practical, the unpretentious. But as we talked about it, we both remembered that huge, sometimes extravagant, wedding celebrations are nothing new. They are even a part of biblical culture, and for good reason.

Weddings celebrate the formation of a new family, a man and woman coming together to begin a new life. And, as they make a lifelong commitment to each other, they invite their community, because although marriage is a contract between two individuals, it inevitably impacts the community as a whole. Weddings represent hope for the future.

Feasting is also one of the most underrated spiritual disciplines. Christians talk about the spiritual disciplines of fasting, giving, and taking a Sabbath rest. But feasting is also a sacred activity. The Hebrews were commanded to set aside resources so they could hold public celebrations. And sometimes the festivities lasted days!

And of course, the kingdom of God is a party. Jesus references this over and over. His first miracle was at a wedding. Many of his parables involve weddings and feasts, and the New Testament concludes with the ultimate wedding of Jesus and the Church and an invitation to it: The Spirit and the Bride say, Come!

Come, Holy Spirit

After a week of dark days and heavy rains, we enjoyed some brilliant sunshine over the past weekend. Kip flew down to Oregon to visit our son, who is in college, and I spent the weekend with women from my church at a beautiful retreat center near the Canadian border.

These annual retreats are always a special time of connection, nurturing old friendships, and building new ones. This year, it was also a time of intentionally connecting with the Lord and learning to hear his voice. I’ve been reading Trevor Hudson’s In Search of God’s Will through a Renovaré book club, so the weekend’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit dovetailed with other things I have been reading and processing.

The theme of the weekend centered around the ancient prayer, “Come, Holy Spirit,” and the retreat speaker did a great job of explaining what the prayer means and why it is so helpful. According to traditional Christian theology, God is all-powerful and all-present, so despite how the prayer might sound, it is not calling the Spirit to come into a place where He is not already present. It is a request for the Holy Spirit to make us more aware of his presence. It is an invitation to awakening.

Jesus tells the church in Revelation that He is standing at the door of their heart, knocking. If he is invited, he will come in and have dinner with them. This invitation from Jesus is a request for us to open the door for Him to come in, to have dinner together, to commune, to feast. It is an invitation to friendship, to intimacy, to really knowing the God we talk about.

So indeed, “Come, Holy Spirit!”

I said, "Yes" to the Rooster

We have a new bird.

My friend, who lives within city limits, has been offering me a rooster for weeks. One of the chicks she and her daughters hatched this summer turned out to be the crowing kind, and she has been concerned about his future ever since.

Her girls, the human ones, were very attached to Roz, initially thought to be Rosaline, before his biology became apparent, and they were very sad to let him go. However, they visit a couple of times a month, so I hope it will give them some comfort to know that they will see Roz grow up to be a happy and healthy rooster.

When they arrived last night, the 8-year-old looked at me with soulful eyes and said, more than once, “He is a sweet rooster,” and then later, in her own characteristic fierceness, “Don’t put him in a pot!”

If you have ever raised chickens, then you know the meet and greet can be a bit tricky. So last night we tried the old switcheroo, tucking him into the coop while the hens slept. That seemed to work, and Kip connected his computer to our TV, allowing the kids to watch the live chicken cam feed while they had dinner inside.

This morning, I heard a bit of commotion and went out to the chicken run to find Roz in a corner, cowering in a “safe” area I created for the spring chicks when they were smaller than my full-grown hens.

I decided to put an end to their meet-cute and put Roz in a dog crate I keep near the chicken run. I’ve found this arrangement allows the flock to observe a new bird without being able to do any damage. I used this system to reintroduce Strawberry after her month of rehabilitation in the garage. Tonight I’ll put Roz back into the coop, and hopefully Henrietta, the big gal, will be in a better mood tomorrow.

Eventually, Roz will rule the roost, but for now, he is a bit smaller than our fattest hens, and I don’t want him to get too hen-pecked.

As my little human friend told me, Roz is a remarkably sweet rooster. I carried him around a bit today, and he settled easily into my arms like he had spent the last few months being petted and loved, as I am sure he has. I hope that when he finds his place in the flock, he will remain his sweet-natured self while maintaining order in the coop. There is nothing like a rooster to keep bully hens from pecking the other girls.

And that would be something to crow about.

Coming Next Week…

The audiobook version of The Queen’s Priest is in its final Audible review and should be available next week. Listeners will be able to purchase it using Audible credit as well as a direct Audible purchase. If you are interested in buying The Queen’s Priest directly from me, please send me a message.

I am still learning how to make the book available through avenues other than Amazon. I will continue to let you know when it becomes available in other stores. In the meantime, if you regularly purchase books—audio books, e-books, or paperbacks—from outlets other than Amazon, please let me know. I have focused on Amazon because the vast majority of book sales (something like 90 percent of the market) flows through Amazon. But of course, I would like to support other retail outlets, particularly if readers would like those options.

Last Chance

If you are interested in downloading the e-book version of The Queen’s Priest for the low, low price of $3.99, do it this week. When the audiobook launches, the e-book price will increase to $5.99.

The big leaf maples are explosions of yellow. Their bountiful branches hang over the country roads, interrupted only by evergreens and smaller red maples. These are the days of apple-laden trees, pumpkin-dotted fields, and corn mazes.

But while the autumn beauty builds to a crescendo, a bitter truth lingers beneath the surface of joy. The days are rapidly growing shorter, and long bouts of cloud and drizzle, followed by brief bursts of sunlit clarity, warn that the dark months of Seattle rain are on the horizon.

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There is a spiritual discipline to living in the moment, fully rejoicing in the beauty while holding it loosely, knowing that fall glory lasts only a few weeks a year. Until the final restoration of Creation, when all will be made eternally beautiful, healed in the light of God’s presence, light and darkness will take turns—day and night, summer and winter.

Perhaps I’m nostalgic about the fall colors and the brevity of their beauty because I was gone for a week in the Midwest and just returned a few days ago, at the height of fall color in my neighborhood. While I was gone, I spent several days visiting with family members, including an intimate Abell family reunion with my dad’s siblings and some of my cousins.

My dad and his siblings grew up in Africa, the children of missionaries, so when they returned to the U.S., they scattered across different parts of the country, coming together for infrequent but deeply cherished holidays and summer reunions.

This reunion was partly held at a campground, so there were several nights of sitting around the campfire—telling remember-when stories, laughing, roasting marshmallows, and trying to make s’mores without making a gooey mess. We sang old worship songs, read Scripture, and prayed for one another.

There was a bittersweetness as I enjoyed the company of my family, those drawn from the same well of generational faith. But I felt the loss of those who are no longer with us. It was a subtle reminder that human life is temporary. Beauty and bitterness. Spring and summer; fall and winter.

My family has been very supportive of my process in writing The Queen’s Priest, my historical novel about our common ancestor Blessed Thomas Abell. And my aunts embarrassed me by insisting I sign all the copies they bought for themselves and my cousins. My daughter snapped a picture, and I realized it was my first real book signing.

First Podcast

I had my first interview as a podcast guest, and I really enjoyed the experience. Wendy Jo Cerna and I chatted about the history behind The Queen’s Priest, as well as the writing process, on her lovely podcast “So God Told You to Write a Book—Now What?”

I had been nervous about the idea of being on a podcast, but it turned out to be a really fun experience. It felt like having a coffee date with a good friend, and at some points I forgot that we were recording. If you’re interested in hearing more about my writing process, I think you’ll enjoy it.

Audiobook

The audiobook is almost finished! I recorded a special “Author’s Note,” and uploaded my final edits for the narrator to correct. I spent this last weekend re-listening to the entire 10-hour production, and I was very impressed with the narrator Alex Bhat’s performance of the characters, particularly Thomas, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Queen Katherine, King Henry VIII, and Thomas Cromwell. It brings a whole new level of enjoyment to the story, and I look forward to sharing it with the world.

I expect to have the final updates uploaded to Audible within the next few days, making the audiobook available by mid-November. My eventual goal is to make it available on all the major audiobook platforms, so it would be really helpful to hear how you listen to audiobooks. Do you use Spotify, Chirp, Libby, or OverDrive?

Amazon Reviews

Several readers have submitted reviews for the Queen’s Priest, which is extremely helpful for me as a new author. So if that is you, thank you!

If you have read the book and would like to share your feedback with other potential readers, even a few sentences, I would deeply appreciate it. If you don't want to write a review, even leaving a rating would help improve my rankings on Amazon. If you bought the Kindle version, there should be a prompt at the end of the book to leave stars.

Chicken Update

The girls are doing great. Strawberry is fully integrated back into the flock, and I removed her apron to wash it, noticing that her feathers are growing back well. She still walks with a slight limp, but she seems to be moving around better.

All the spring chicks are laying full-sized eggs, some daily, others every other day. While I was gone for a week, my neighbors harvested 40 eggs. So you could say life is excellent (egg-celent).

As a new author, working with a narrator for the first time, it has been an interesting experience to listen to words I wrote and hear them in a new art form. It’s as if I am hearing the story for the first time, even though I know what is going to happen next.

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I would generally be hesitant to say my own work is amazing because, of course, that is obnoxious, but there is something about listening to this truly extraordinary performance that gives me space to enjoy my words in a new way.

All that to say, the audiobook is going to be amazing. I expect to have it ready for Audible by early next month. If you have Audible credits, save one for this. I don’t think you will be disappointed. I plan to make The Queen’s Priest available on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Books, Chirp, and everywhere else audiobooks are available. I also want to make it available at every library in the U.S. and the U.K.

What platform do you use to access audiobooks? Please let me know in the comments.

Making The Queen’s Priest available in audio form to libraries is very important to me because I know not everyone can afford Audible or premium Spotify subscriptions, and I want the book to be accessible to families living on limited budgets.

When I was a homeschooling parent living in Los Angeles, I spent hours with my kids in the minivan, driving between classes, field trips, and of course, park days and beach meet-ups. Some of my friends called it “carschooling,” and we would joke that the world was our classroom. During those days, we relied heavily on audiobooks, learning history and literature while we sat in traffic on Venice Boulevard. And because we were living on one income in one of America’s most expensive cities, we also relied heavily on the public library.

My narrator Alex Bhat also remembers listening to Harry Potter as a child on a road trip and being inspired by Jim Dale’s performance. He has since narrated several audiobooks and works as an actor. His impressive credits include the Royal Shakespeare Company, Disney, HBO, BBC, Amazon, and Warner Bros.

The first Audible book our family enjoyed together on a road trip was Peter and the Starcatchers, also read by Jim Dale, so we have wonderful memories of hearing Dale’s performance, too. And I can clearly hear his influence on Alex Bhat’s performance.

Speaking of homeschooling, people have asked me if The Queen’s Priest is appropriate for young teens. I think that is up to individual parents to determine, depending on their willingness to discuss complex subjects like adultery and divorce. But I think the story is interesting enough to hold the attention of middle-grade students. The content, while acknowledging necessary topics like lust, adultery, virginity, and sex, contains no graphic descriptions of sex. In fact, if you are looking for a historically accurate novel to introduce Tudor history and the political machinations that prompted the beginnings of the English Reformation, I don’t think you can find a cleaner version than The Queen’s Priest.

I was recently invited to a middle school class to talk about Thomas Abell, his role in King Henry VIII’s life, and the process of writing and publishing a book. It turned out to be a really fun conversation, and I was impressed that the students all seemed interested and engaged.

Ecuador

In July, my husband Kip and I traveled to Ecuador to visit our son, who was serving as an intern for a nonprofit organization that provides clean water to remote people groups. We ended up joining a few minga community days where local Quichua people work side by side to build sustainable water systems for their villages.

I was inspired by the organization’s model of community involvement, which requires local people to invest in every aspect of the construction and maintenance of the system—water towers, spring captures, pipes, and related infrastructure. The goal is to ensure the water systems are maintained long term, and so far, the model seems to be working well.

While I was there, I interviewed several people working with the project and put together this podcast piece for The World and Everything In It. If you follow the link, be sure to click on the play button so you can hear the piece as well as read the transcript.

Chicken update

The chicks are fully integrated into the coop and are regularly giving me eggs. I get about a half dozen eggs every day, a beautiful bouquet of green, brown, and white. If you know me in real life, live in the Pacific Northwest, and would like eggs, please let me know. We often have extra, and I would be happy to share.

Integrating hens into the established flock has not been without drama. All of the familiar chicken-related social terms apply: ruffled feathers, pecking order, henpecked.

A few days after my last post about Charlie Kirk’s death, I went out to the chicken run to find one of my older barred rock hens limping in the corner. She was a bloody mess, missing most of her back feathers and her entire tail. I think if I had not found her when I did, the other hens would have finished her off.

I gently pulled her out of the chicken run and brought her into the garage. I thought we would probably have to euthanize her, but I didn’t want to do it alone. So I decided to wait until Kip came home. I took her into the house, washed her wounds, gave her some treats, and made a bed for her in the garage. By evening, I was talking about giving her a couple of days to wait and see.

As I was cleaning up Strawberry (as Kip renamed her due to her featherless pink rump), I was still processing the heaviness of Charlie Kirk’s death and the varied response to it. I couldn’t help but feel like we, our country, our culture, was a bloody chicken, nearly pecked to death by sister beaks. I wondered if we would make it.

But Strawberry made a slow recovery, eating, drinking, and resting in the dog crate in the garage. I bought a hen apron for her to keep her from picking her own wounds, and after a few weeks, I decided to cautiously move her back to the coop.

The hens immediately began plucking the feathers around her neck, so I scooped her up again and took her back to the garage. A few days later, when I tried again, I put Strawberry in the dog crate near the chicken coop. I fed her treats and watched the other hens watch her, aware that she was out of their reach. It reminded me of Psalm 23, where David says, “You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies.” I wonder how often we dine on the goodness of the Lord, protected, while the forces of Hell watch, unable to interfere?

A few nights ago, I tried an old chicken keeper’s trick that seems to have worked. I introduced Strawberry back into the coop while the other hens were sleeping. I just opened the coop door and slid her in. The rest of the hens continued sleeping, in the one-eyed, restless way they do, and seemed to ignore her.

The next day, Strawberry seemed to be holding her own. She had found a reasonably secure spot in the chicken run, behind a circle of hardware cloth. The other hens could have gotten to her there if they wanted to, but it seemed like they were leaving her alone.

I realized that it was a bit of a risk putting her back in the flock, but it seemed unsustainable to keep her in the garage forever. Chickens need to be with other chickens, even if they can be mean to each other.

I don’t know what all this says about our country or culture. Maybe the analogy breaks down. But I am hoping that Strawberry will make a full recovery, and I hope our country will too. Humans can be destructive animals, but we are also made in the image of God, and He is sovereign over the affairs of men. I sincerely hope and pray that we will learn how to listen to each other with love and kindness. But I am not naïve about the state of our world. We need a revival. There is no real peace without the Prince of Peace, no true Kingdom without the King.

Come, Lord Jesus.

On Saturday, I was at a writer’s conference, a secular writer’s conference in the Pacific Northwest, where the political default tends to be far left, and I talked to writers who said they had been crying for days—days!

But the online smear campaign has been in full force, cherry-picking quotes, twisting the intended meaning of some of his conversations, as if any political statement could possibly justify killing a man in broad daylight in front of his family—even if he were a racist or a homophobe.

Although he wasn’t either, as plenty of people have demonstrated.

Charlie Kirk has become a martyr to conservatives and people with traditional values because he simply held to core beliefs—traditional marriage is good, raising kids is good, the Bible is reliable, Christianity is true, and working hard is good. It's like a country music song.

And despite all the reasons people say they disagreed with Charlie Kirk, the real venom came from his biggest critics because he challenged their two sacred cows—abortion and transgender ideology. And what really drew their ire was that he was so obviously right.

Abortion is the termination, not just of a pregnancy, but of a unique human being. The only logical argument left is about the value of that tiny, preborn human being. The reality of its existence as a unique human entity is a closed case.

And no matter how much someone feels like they were born in the wrong body, they cannot alter biological reality. It is not as simple as changing pronouns or an online avatar. No amount of synthetic hormones, surgeries, or wardrobe changes can ever alter the cellular-level sexual identity of a human being—it’s literally written in their chromosomes. To insist otherwise is scientifically unfounded.

I understand how simple-minded statements like that sound.

There are, of course, many real-life nuances that complicate the conversation. I know and love many women who have chosen abortion, and I have many dear friends whose children have transitioned. They love their kids and want to support them. I understand that for many people, this conversation around transgender ideology is painful. But it does not change the biological realities.

A male can live a culturally female existence. He can present as female, even be treated as female in every way, but he will always be fundamentally different because, at birth, he did not have female sex organs. He didn’t experience puberty as a female. He may experience attraction and even attractiveness like a woman (person assigned female at birth), but he can never create life in the unique way a woman can.

A fully transitioned transgender woman is not the same thing as a biological female, and forcing the world to accept them as the same is having tremendous unintended consequences. Therefore, it is appropriate for college students to debate such a relevant topic.

And yet, to say any of this out loud has, until recently, been a justification for getting fired, canceled, and ostracized. Just ask J.K. Rowling.

Despite championing abortion rights and same-sex marriage, Rowling has been a target of the Left for challenging transgender ideology. Following Kirk’s death, she shocked many on X with a statement calling out the hypocrisy of those who say they are liberal and open-minded and justifying Kirk’s assassination.

“If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian. If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.” —J.K. Rowling

It took me days to write this Substack article, days to process and understand why this event cut so deeply. Having spent the last three years researching the history of a martyr and then writing a novel from his perspective has given me an additional reason to pause.

What is it that drives someone to actually pull a trigger and end a life like Charlie Kirk? Evil? Hate?

There is probably more than one answer to that, but I do see a comparison between Kirk and someone like Thomas Abell, who was executed as a traitor for simply addressing Katherine as “Queen.”

“Queen” Katherine

In modern cultural terms, Thomas committed the unforgivable crime of continuing to “dead name” Katherine, undermining the king’s claim that, despite a public wedding, coronation, and 20 years of cohabitation, he and Katherine had never been married. Never. I don’t think most people realize this. King Henry was not arguing that he should be allowed to divorce his wife—that we can possibly relate to.

King Henry VIII essentially argued that his first marriage was never valid, therefore never really happened, and thus not real. Katherine was always just his sister-in-law, and by setting her aside, he was repenting for the sin of living with her as his wife. It was a bizarre claim—his marriage should not have happened, therefore it did not happen.

It took theological gymnastics to support the morality of King Henry’s claims, and yet he demanded that everyone in his country do so. It was not enough to tolerate the king’s choices; he required every priest, nun, butcher, baker, and farmer in his realm to accept his relationship with his girlfriend as morally equivalent to his publicly celebrated first marriage.

Thomas’s great offense was simply continuing to speak the truth. He called it Invicta Veritas, the “unconquered truth.”

Three years ago, when I began writing The Queen’s Priest, I told a fellow writer that one of my motivations in writing the story was to give the next generation a story about someone who was faithful to the Lord even though it cost him his life. I said I thought it might help provide a model of faithfulness for a generation that may face persecution. My friend got upset and said, “No, don’t say that. I have grandkids.”

I think this past week has been a wake-up call for many people who now realize that hatred toward people of conservative ideology and religious values is more widespread than they thought.

How many Americans and Europeans believe that it is ok to use violence to silence someone who advocates for traditional religious values concerning marriage and sexuality? A free speech advocacy group, FIRE, found that more than a third of college students thought it was acceptable to use violence to stop a political speech they thought was offensive. A whopping 71 percent of college students thought it was justifiable to shout down a public speaker who was expressing opinions they deemed hateful. That was the environment Charlie Kirk navigated every day.

How do we respond?

We are all trying to figure that out now.

For me, I find it helpful to look to those who have gone before us, who walked with Jesus, held to his teachings, and laid down their lives.

Ultimately, it is not about free speech, abortion, gun rights, affirmative action, transgender ideology, how we feel about Donald Trump, or any other political issue. How we respond comes down to who owns our deepest allegiance. For people of faith, that question was answered long ago.

One of the unexpected joys of publishing my first novel has been hearing feedback from friends and family members who genuinely loved it.

Writing and publishing a novel is vulnerable work—far more so than I anticipated. As a writer who bleeds into the page, I know that I leave a lot of myself in my stories. How could I not? For The Queen’s Priest, I wrote a story based on historical facts, but writing it authentically required me to enter into the experience, even just a little bit, to pass that along to the reader.

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It felt risky, and it was, but as with any risk, I am already beginning to see the potential reward—not so much in monetary terms, but in the pleasure of seeing my book well-received.

I have gotten emails, pictures, and texts from friends—a message from an excited friend reading it on a long transatlantic flight, and Facebook messages from family members who were delighted to get their copy in the mail.

One of my LA friends who writes screenplays sent me this message: “I LOVED your book and I’ve been recommending it. It’s the best I’ve read in ages. Let me know if you want help with the movie. I KNOW there will be a movie!”

Several people told me they felt like they were there in Tudor England or that they cried while reading it. My favorite comment is still, “I loved him.”

Me too. That was always the goal.

As I develop as a novelist, I want to write deeply authentic characters who embody virtuous lives—flawed humans, saints, fellow pilgrims on this journey of life.

I started as a nonfiction writer, but as I've begun to explore fiction, I’m realizing the power of a well-told story. Genesis begins with a narrative, not a set of instructions, for a reason. We make sense of our lives by seeing them reflected in story. I want my writing to provide a healthy, believable framework to explore human nature and transcendent truth.

If you have had a chance to read The Queen’s Priest and would like to support my work, it would mean a lot to me if you could write a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Those reviews have a huge impact in helping readers discover an author.

Finding Hidden Lake

The weekend The Queen’s Priest came out on Amazon in paperback, I also celebrated my 50^th birthday. My two kids and my daughter’s boyfriend came home to celebrate with us, and then my kids made another longtime dream come true—they took me on an overnight backpacking trip in the Cascade Mountains.

It was amazing. And it was sooo much more difficult than I anticipated. Turns out, carrying your bed and provisions on your back and climbing a difficult trail with a 3,300-foot elevation gain is not a piece of cake—even if it is your birthday. Maybe turning fifty had something to do with it. Or maybe it was just that I have not been as faithful about running this summer, and am probably a bit out of shape. Whatever the reason, I walked, almost hobbling, away from the experience, determined to keep doing it.

Waking up to stunning beauty in the company of my favorite people was worth the climb. My daughter and I have birthdays, two days apart, so as we sipped coffee just after the sun rose over the Cascades, we celebrated her too. We read the Psalm of her age, prayed for her, and blessed her as she entered her new year.

Northwest Christian Writers

This summer, I also took on a new role as the President of the Northwest Christian Writers Association (NCWA). It’s an organization to which I feel deeply indebted, and I’m delighted to help lead.

This past weekend, I led NCWA’s annual board retreat, and I shared my story of how I stumbled into an NCWA meeting in the spring of 2022, unsure of what I wanted to write or if I even wanted to write at all.

What I discovered that night was a group of local writers who embraced me and encouraged me. They consistently had the same message about God calling us to write, which was something I had to wrestle with. Was God calling me to write? Why? How? At first, that felt presumptuous. But it was really only in embracing writing as a calling that I had the energy to push through the rigors of writing, editing, and publishing.

I attended NCWA’s annual writers conference that spring, spent two days feasting on the collective knowledge of dozens of published authors, and then started working on the book about Thomas Abell. It was a clunky start at first, and joining a critique group helped me work out those first few awkward drafts.

Now I am really excited to be helping lead this 35-year-old organization that has launched so many Christian writers. We have an amazing board, teeming with fresh ideas on how to equip, empower, and connect writers, and I am super excited to be a part of it.

If you are in the Pacific Northwest and looking for a high-quality community of Christian writers, please check out NCWA.

Chickens

The girls are doing great, and it does seem that we have 11 hens. I have a friend who keeps offering to give me a rooster, just to balance out the flock. But I need to talk to the neighbors—see how they feel about the early morning alarm clock.

For now, here is a video of them chowing down on my leftover birthday watermelon from Costco. Because who can eat a whole Costco watermelon?

Ten years ago, I would have thought that might be an awful statement, because, wow, 50 is half of 100, and well, not young. But as it turns out, turning 50, surrounded by friends, family, and fresh opportunities, is beautiful.

I feel incredibly blessed—because I am. And I am thankful too.

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One of my dear friends, Ann, reminded me that this is also my year of Jubilee—a biblical celebration of freedom, restoration, renewal, and new beginnings. In the Hebrew Bible, every 50 years, when they celebrated Jubilee, debts were canceled, slaves freed, and lands returned to their original owners.

This weekend, the paperback version of The Queen’s Priest launched on Amazon, and I am indeed celebrating new beginnings as the story I have worked so hard to bring to life is making its way into people’s hands.

As I reflect on this next season of my life, I hope that my life, my friendships, my love, my words, my work and my writing bring freedom and restoration through the Holy Spirit.

Alison Weir, one of the UK’s most prolific Tudor writers—with bestsellers in both fiction and nonfiction—has just released The Cardinal, a novel about Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.

As someone who’s read her work before and recently written my own Tudor novel, I was curious to see how she would weave fiction around historical fact.

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The Cardinal is about the rise and fall of Thomas Wolsey, a major character in my novel, and so I was curious as to how Weir would depict the facts surrounding him, as well as Wolsey’s personality.

She depicted him fairly similarly to how I saw Wolsey—as a man driven by ambition with the need to please King Henry VIII. As that relationship begins to fall apart, the reader actually feels sorry for Wolsey, understanding that he is playing a part in the divorce proceedings that he would not have chosen.

But the backbone of the story is really about Cardinal Wolsey’s love affair with Joan Larke. The relationship is historically accurate and something that I make passing mention of in The Queen’s Priest.

It certainly adds depth to Wolsey as a person, showing him to be a man who needs a confidante, a lover, a friend. The relationship is sympathetically portrayed, with all the emotional conflict of a suppressed love affair. Weir’s descriptions are restrained, though the implication is that the lovers’ passion was not. Overall, it comes across as more emotionally charged than sexually explicit.

At some point, though, the reader has to ask: is an affair between a priest and a young woman excusable simply because they love each other? Modern readers may be inclined to give it a pass. Shouldn’t two consenting adults be allowed to love each other? But such a view risks ignoring the collateral damage: abandoned children, disillusioned parishioners, and the betrayal of vows taken before God.

I appreciate that the writing was not graphic, yet it still felt emotionally manipulative. Like much popular historical fiction, modern debates lie just under the surface. But in a way, that is what makes storytelling good. The reader should be left with something to wrestle with.

Thomas Abell

I was delighted to find Thomas Abell mentioned in The Cardinal. Henry VIII references him in conversation with Wolsey, listing him as one of the queen’s supporters as the annulment trial looms.

“All this delay has given the Queen leisure to marshal support. Bishop Fisher is foremost in her defense, and that chaplain of hers, Thomas Abell.” King Henry VII speaking to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in The Cardinal by Alison Weir.

If I ever have tea with Alison Weir, I’d be tempted to point out that this comes a bit early—historically speaking—since Abell hadn’t yet openly declared his support. Still, seeing his name in historical fiction at all is exciting. I think this may be the first time his name appears in fiction, though historian David Starkey devoted several pages to him and his mission to Spain in the best-selling nonfiction history, Six Wives.

Weir includes the trip to Spain and reinforces my interpretation of that event—that King Henry VIII had ulterior motives in wanting to retrieve the Papal Bull. In fact, the incident is perfectly recounted from Wolsey’s perspective in such a way as to reinforce the version portrayed in my book, since The Cardinal explains that the king sent men to Spain and they came back with the report that the one in Spain was a forgery.

Unfortunately, Weir did not give Abell credit for going to Spain, but since Wolsey would never have known that Thomas Abell was the secret hero of that moment, it seems more appropriate to have the event marginalized.

For Thomas Abell, it was the point on which his whole story pivoted. For Wolsey, it was just another detail in the long, painful story of how he failed to obtain an annulment for his king.

Still, I jumped out of my seat when I saw Thomas Abell’s name in Alison Weir’s story

The Queen’s Priest

Many of you have asked about the paperback version of The Queen’s Priest. The initial setback with the cover size has been resolved, and The Queen’s Priest should be available on Amazon within the next few days.

The Chickens

The chicks are doing well, beginning to lay eggs. One of them recently had a mishap that left her looking like a bloody zombie. But her bleeding seemed to be mostly from a crown injury, so after a nice, long, warm shower, she revived and was soon back to laying her tiny eggs.

It must be challenging to manage a tender, floppy, red crown when you are a 20-week-old pullet.

I had to laugh because I had just written out a long list of urgent and impossibly important things to do, and then I found myself bathing a chicken. Priorities!

Today is Thomas Abell’s feast day—a day to remember his life and sacrifice. On this day, July 30, 1540, he was taken from the Tower of London to Smithfield, where he was executed as a traitor. In 1886, the Catholic Church recognized his sacrifice (and that of his companions) as martyrdom and beatified them.

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I chose to launch my own telling of Thomas’s faithfulness today, July 30^th, in honor of Thomas Abell’s feast day and in recognition of his life of unwavering commitment to God. You can find The Queen’s Priest: The Story of Blessed Thomas Abell as an ebook on Amazon.

The First Martyr

This morning, as I was reading through the Gospel of Luke, I was a little surprised to realize that Abel was not only a martyr, but a prophet. At least, Jesus called him a prophet, and nobody disagreed.

In Luke 11:51, Jesus tells the Pharisees that they are hypocrites for believing they are better than their ancestors who killed the prophets. He tells them that their generation will be held responsible for the “blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world—from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah… ”

I’ve always thought of Abel as the first murder victim. But he was also the first martyr—because Cain’s rage was born of religious jealousy. Cain was envious—not because Abel was more handsome or had better possessions, but because God approved of Abel’s sacrifice and not his.

In case you need a Bible story refresher, Abel is one of the original sons of Adam and Eve, the man and woman God created and placed in the Garden of Eden. According to Genesis, Abel kept sheep and offered a sacrifice to the Lord, which God accepted.

The New Testament authors described him as righteous, but unlike most other biblical prophets, we have no record of anything Abel said or wrote. All we know from the Genesis story is that his brother resented him for his favor with God, and one day he murdered him.

And perhaps this in itself is a prophetic act—to be righteous in a land East of Eden.

Or maybe it was his death that made him a prophet. The writer of Hebrews says, “By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was approved as a righteous man, because God approved his gifts, and even though he is dead, he still speaks through his faith.”

The writer of Hebrews later describes Abel’s blood as “speaking”—a silent judgment on the world’s sin. And in this instance, it is compared to the blood of Jesus, which speaks a better word—redemption.

There is so much that could be unpacked with that last reference. Like Abel, Jesus is both the one who makes the sacrifice and is the sacrifice. So in that way, Abel’s life is a foreshadowing of Jesus. But on a more basic level, Abel’s life is prophetic simply because he lived a righteous life and died an unjust death. A martyr’s death is always prophetic because it silently condemns sin with its stubborn refusal to back away from the truth. The blood of a martyr speaks beyond the grave.

Abell or Abel

Though I believe that Thomas Abell’s last name is associated with a bell, pronounced like “clear as a bell,” many historians have also spelled and pronounced the name “Abel.”

English spelling conventions were loose in the 16th century, and it was not unusual to spell the same word in multiple ways. Thomas certainly engaged in a variety of spellings in his own book, Invicta Veritas. Unfortunately, he wrote this book anonymously, so the only written evidence of his name is the graffiti, which simply says, “THOMAS” and depicts a bell.

Hints of this comparison to Abel are in the first introduction of Thomas Abell to King Henry VIII in my novel, The Queen’s Priest.

“The king’s piercing blue eyes scanned Thomas from the top of his dark head to the leather boots protruding from beneath the floor-length priestly robes.

“His name is Thomas Abell,” Wolsey said.

“Abell,” the king said slowly. “An unusual name. Like Cain’s brother?”

“No, Your Majesty,” Thomas said, finding his voice. “Like a bell that one rings, Your Majesty.” He swallowed hard. “Our family is from Essex.”

“Yes,” the king said thoughtfully. “I know the family—some gentry.”

King Henry turned to Wolsey and pursed his lips, eyeing the cardinal’s sallow face. The king was silent as if he wanted to make an offhanded remark, perhaps about Wolsey’s lack of family connections, but after an awkward moment, he merely nodded, leaving his unspoken opinion lingering loudly between them.”

I loved writing this scene because it not only introduces Thomas Abell and the pronunciation of his name, but it also hints at the tension between Cardinal Wolsey and King Henry VIII and the recognition of Wolsey’s humble background.

It also serves as a foreshadowing of Thomas’s relationship with King Henry VIII. Like Cain, King Henry VIII seeks God’s favor for his life decisions, specifically a blessing to annul his marriage to Queen Katherine and marry his mistress Anne Boleyn. And like the biblical story in Genesis, God (or in this case, the Pope) withholds blessing. Cain’s sacrifice is not accepted. King Henry VIII’s requests are denied. And it drives them both crazy—manifesting in murder.

I don’t believe this is the end of the story for Abel or Thomas Abell. Of course we grieve the death of godly people, but a feast day is called a feast day for a reason. It is not a fasting day. It is a day to celebrate what the Catholic Church calls “birthday into eternal life.”

Thomas Abell was faithful to the end. By faith, I believe he was welcomed into the Presence of God, where he lives today, his suffering a distant memory. And that is worth celebrating.

I grew up hearing about Thomas Abell.

My father’s family are Abells, so I knew that we had a family ancestor who had carved his name and our family emblem in the Tower of London, and I knew that he had been martyred for his faith. But it was not until I began researching Thomas Abell that I learned the heroic details of his faithful resistance to the king.

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Writing the Story

When I began researching Thomas Abell’s life, I was simply curious about our family hero. But the more I learned about him, the more I wanted to make his story accessible to a new generation.

As I began writing the story, I realized this wasn’t just about honoring the past — it was about illustrating what faithfulness looks like in times of political and cultural upheaval. It is incredibly relevant to our world today!

The story of King Henry VIII and his six wives is hardly new. In the U.S. alone, we’ve seen documentaries, novels, miniseries, and even a Broadway musical retelling this saga. But what’s often missing are the voices of those who stood firm — those who chose faithfulness over convenience, and conscience over compromise.

The book, entitled The Queen’s Priest: The Story of Thomas Abell, tells the true story of a quiet, intelligent, sensitive Oxford-trained priest who stood faithfully by the side of his queen, Katherine of Aragon, in the face of England’s most consequential divorce.

You can preorder it here…

Love of Truth

My depiction of Thomas’s personality and interior life was shaped by my research into his own book, Invicta Veritas, which is preserved at the British Library. In this booklet, Thomas painstakingly dismantles the king’s arguments for divorce, using both Scripture and Church history.

It’s not an easy read. But what struck me most was how much it revealed about Thomas’s value system. He was deeply offended that his fellow scholars would twist Scripture to justify the king’s desires. And that sense of righteous indignation, combined with his meticulous research and logically articulated arguments, told me alot about who Thomas Abell was, and what he wanted. So I tried to portray that in the story.

Love of Scripture

Catholic historians1 have observed that Invicta Veritas and Thomas’s prison letters reveal a deep and nuanced grasp of Scripture. His frequent biblical references reflect not just knowledge but a genuine love for the Word. I’ve tried to reflect that same spirit throughout the story.

One of my favorite quotes from him comes from Invicta Veritas when he explains his decision to speak up against the king, saying, “Yet for all of it, my conscience would not suffer me to hold my peace, but compelled me to offer, with ye poor widow, a farthing of my learning to the honor of almighty God.”

In other words, “I am using everything I have—the education, the opportunities, the platform—to honor God. Like the widow who put her life savings into the offering plate, Thomas gave what he had. And it cost him everything.

How could we not honor that?

Early Reviews

One of the greatest delights of this entire process has been having conversations with friends who read advanced reader copies. A few days ago, I spoke with a friend who had just finished reading the book, and she wanted to share her favorite parts with me and ask if certain details were historically accurate or fictional. (Most of them were historically accurate.)

And she made the comment that she loved Thomas.

It really took me back because I realized that was the highest compliment she could have given me. She understood this fictional representation of a real person, and she loved him. It made me so happy.

Ecuador and Back

If I had not been so busy with last-minute book launch tasks, I would have written a full Substack post about our trip to Ecuador. Let me just tell you, it was one of the most meaningful international trips I have taken in years.

So often, when people travel, they stick to the tourist places, and interaction with locals is limited to people who have been paid to serve foreigners—hotel clerks, waiters, tour guides, etc. This trip to Ecuador was the opposite of that.

We arrived in Quito and immediately drove to Riobamba, one of the least touristy cities in South America, and from there, traveled high into the mountains and worked side by side with Quichua men and women building their water systems.

I was so inspired by the experience that I began interviewing people and pitched a story about the work in Ecuador to the Christian news podcast that I freelance for. I am currently editing that piece and will let you know when it airs.

While we were in Ecuador, we climbed Chimborazo, not summiting it, of course, but hiking as far as you can without a special permit—up to 16,732 feet!

The effects of elevation at that level are intense, like nothing I have ever experienced before. I felt a sense of elation when we reached the top of the trail, similar to the endorphins released after a good run. I thought this was just the pure joy of accomplishment, but my son told me that my euphoria might also have been due to the effects of oxygen deprivation.

There is so much more that I could say about the week, and it deserves its own travel blog post, so perhaps I will take the time to write one soon.

The Chickens

I know you were wondering, and I didn’t want to disappoint you. All of my seven chicks are growing up healthy, and I find myself taking breaks from writing and housework to go outside and just enjoy watching them run around.

Earlier this week, I was having a particularly frustrating day, trying to work out the glitches in uploading my final, edited manuscript to a formatting software. So, I went outside to check on the chickens.

I picked up my fattest hen, Nugget, and just held her for a while. She relaxed in my arms and seemed to enjoy our walk around the yard. It is a mystery to me that a chicken would let me pick her up and snuggle her. And it is a further mystery as to why that would be so comforting for me. Who knew that was possible? The animal/people connection is real.

Also, because I know you are waiting to know, it seems increasingly likely that Poco is a pullet after all. I have not heard any more gender bender sounds from her, and it seems that she is filling out into a hen shape. So perhaps I have 11 hens after all.

Let me know if you want any fresh eggs!

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I only have one photo from the summer I spent in Ecuador.

It's me, grinning, half-headed, full-hearted, straddling the equator with my friend Amanda, ready to take on the world in my socks and sandals, black denim cut-offs, and a bright blue t-shirt.

This week, when Amanda sent it to me, apologizing for my lack of forehead, she said, “Our kids will never know the pain of waiting for the film to develop.”

That is true. And now it's difficult to imagine an entire life-altering summer slipping by with only one half-headed photo to prove it happened.

Every moment of our lives is photographed, from the Amazon driver dropping off my vitamin supplements on my front doorstep to a friend’s perfect, professionally captured Instagram Reel engagement photos.

Everything is documented. Everything is saved.

It is as if tangible images, instantly harvested from the cloud, gleaming from smartphones, prove the timeline of our lives. It happened because we took a picture of it, and now the experience is forever saved in the alternate reality of our digital memories.

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In a couple of weeks, my husband and I are heading to Ecuador to visit our son. He has been working there as an intern, serving a missions organization that provides clean water to rural communities in the Andes mountains.

As I plan the trip, I am looking forward to seeing him there in Ecuador, meeting his host family, walking around the city of Riobamba with him, seeing his water project. We will try out our limited Spanish, probably buy some artisan things at a tourist market, eat some good Ecuadorian food, and maybe hike.

During part of the week, we will visit a rural community high in the mountains. I’m planning to bring my warmest sleeping bag because I heard we might be sleeping on the floor, along with a team of Americans who will be there to host a children’s vacation Bible school. It should be an adventure.

But of course, I am on this side of the memory. The only pictures I have now are the pre-memory ones, the hoping, planning, dreaming pictures that never live on the cloud and cannot be downloaded onto a phone.

But I have real memories of Ecuador too—the kind that actually happened. Unconstrained by photographic limitations, these thirty-year-old memories loom large and dreamlike, without the benefits of specific shape and color. Like a sunbaked photograph, faded by time, only the faintest of details remain. And I am left with a lingering taste of what it was like to be 17 in a foreign world with colonial streets and quiet Ecuadorians in flannel hats.

That summer, I was part of the hodge-podge group of about 30 American kids in homemade costumes parading through Ecuadorian streets with a portable sound system.

We were loud and exuberant—everything our name “Teen Mania” seemed to promise—as we called out, “Venga, venga por favor!” and squared off space, transforming the marketplace into a street stage.

When the music began, we fell silent, pantomiming the story, an allegory of creation, fall, and redemption while a deep Spanish voice narrated.

In our story, a grand shipbuilder created a boat full of colorful characters and launched them on a voyage. But then, an evil pirate slipped on board and tempted the people to mutiny, casting off El Capitán, and turning the ship off course. The pirate put chains around the people’s necks, making their lives miserable, until El Capitán intervened, sending his son to rescue the ship.

This turn of events led to an epic PVC pipe battle between sailors and pirates while an equally epic soundtrack blared American rock music through our sound system.

I don’t remember exactly what happened next; I was too busy hopping over the PVC pipe my sailor counterpart slashed at me, but at some point, El Capitán agreed to sacrifice his life in exchange for the people on the ship. And then, in a very Aslan-inspired moment, our rugged street drama depicted the great Gospel exchange. Jesus willingly took on the sin of the world and then rose from the dead, giving each character an opportunity to choose between El Capitán and the Pirate.

The internet is full of ex-evangelicals, millennials bemoaning their toxic youth group experiences. Any internet search of Teen Mania is likely to bring up results of people my age and younger regretting their teenage Jesus experiences, but I am not one of them. There were plenty of weird, cringeworthy, misguided things about my summer experience with Teen Mania, but the memories that linger are sweet.

The months that I spent in Ecuador—and in Venezuela, the summer before Ecuador- were adventures that solidified the reality of God in my young heart, and I am deeply grateful for the experience.

It was there, in South America, that I learned the habit of spending time with God daily, reading the Word, journaling prayers. I learned a lot about prayer and faith, and seeing God work in the real world.

I have an album of pictures from the summer in Venezuela, and I planned to bring home pictures of Ecuador too. I actually brought a nice camera on the trip, but in a rushed moment, I left it, along with my entire bag of film, in the back of a taxi cab. It was a tough loss, even then, and I grieved it.

But after seeing the half-headed picture my friend sent me this week, I decided that perhaps it is ok that I don’t have any real photographs. The images are all in my heart, where they are safe from the dull reality of poor fashion choices and ridiculous teenage antics.

In the absence of photos, I remember the stories I have told myself for the past thirty years—the silly games we played, the miracles we prayed for, and the spiritual lessons I learned for the first time there, like the lesson of the unseen mountain.

Riobamba

Riobamba, the mid-sized city in the Andes where my son is currently living, is famous for one reason. But the first time I visited, I completely missed it.

It's cloudy and wet most of the year in Riobamba, and the summer I first went there, it seemed depressingly cold and dreary. We slept on the floor of an unfinished school classroom and probably didn’t shower for a week. I am sure we had a great time performing the drama in schools and parks, but I only remember being cold and tired, especially when I remembered that my family back home was at a summer concert festival.

The next month, when it was announced that my drama team was returning to Riobamba, I was severely disappointed. I had really hoped to be part of the team that was going to the beach in Guayaquil or the jungle. Nothing was exciting about the high-altitude, gray city that rained every day.

When I arrived in Riobamba that second time, it was gray and drizzling, as I expected. But by the next day, the rain stopped, the clouds parted, and I saw Chimborazo, the tallest mountain in Ecuador, and it completely blew my mind.

At more than 20,000 feet, Chimborazo towers higher than any mountain in the lower 48 states. In fact, due to its position on the equator, it is the closest place on the planet to the sun. And it was by far the tallest mountain I had ever seen.

And I could not get over the fact that it had been there all along. In my homesick, cold, wet week, it had been there, just behind the clouds. No one had bothered to mention it to us, and had I not returned to Riobamba for that second week, I would have never known it existed.

As it turned out, I enjoyed being in Riobamba that second week, and I carried that little lesson into my adulthood. Sometimes in the midst of your discomfort, you cannot see the absolute majesty of God, but He is there, like a massive snow-covered peak.

That is what I remember about Ecuador.

I remember it, not because I have a faded, grainy 30-year-old picture of me smiling and Chimborazo in the background, but because I have told my kids this story multiple times. The mountain was there, and I had no idea! It’s one of those formative stories, like when you suddenly realize the truth that has always been there.

Anniversary

My husband and I are celebrating our anniversary this week. We have also been married for more than thirty years, which is a crazy thing to say. We started our journey together not long after my summer in Ecuador. We got married when I was still a teenager. We survived college together and had kids together. We moved from the East to the West Coast, over to Europe, and back to the US. It has been an incredible life, and I am incredibly thankful.

Several years ago, we adopted a habit of remembering all of our anniversaries on our anniversary. It takes most of dinner to get through the decades, but we have been doing it for so long that we cannot stop now.

We start with that cabin in Colorado on a trip with his parents to see the Rockies for the first time. Then we remember the camping trip along a river in Pennsylvania and the time I got a couple of free passes to an amusement park in Ohio. There were a few years in the first decade that we shared with friends, celebrating their weddings as our college friends began to pair off, too.

But by the time we reached our second decade, we had gotten more creative about doing it up big. We went to Mexico several times, then Europe. Last year, we spent our anniversary in Santorini on a restaurant rooftop, watching the sun slowly sink into the Mediterranean while we sipped white wine and ordered nearly everything on the menu.

This year, partly because we are in the middle of planning to go to Ecuador, and partly because work is busy and I am trying to launch my first book, we will probably go out for dinner locally and have our annual reminisce. Whatever we do, someday it will be part of the chain of anniversary memories that string our lives together.

Book Launch

Several people are currently reading Advanced Reader Copies of The Queen’s Priest: The Story of Blessed Thomas Abell and plan to help me promote the book launch. So far, I have heard wonderful, encouraging feedback about the story, which makes my writer heart very happy.

My hope is that enough people will read the book before the launch that they will be able to honestly recommend it to their friends so that it can get some early reviews and traction on Amazon. If you would like to help me with this, please send me a message.

Chicken Update

In case you read this far to find out, the chickens are fine. The four big hens are still laying most days, for which I am grateful. The bully hen continues to make her presence known. She single-wingedly keeps the seven adolescent birds in one corner of the chicken run, so I make a point of letting her out to graze in the yard for a few hours so the little hens get some time to run freely through the chicken coop. But overall, it seems to be going well. My chick with the questionable gender has not revealed him or herself fully yet. I had thought I heard a prepubescent croak, but the bird has been mostly silent the last few weeks, so maybe I was wrong. I might just have to wait a few more weeks and count eggs. I will be sure to let you know.

I heard that writing a book was a long process. I had no idea how long.

First, there is the decision to breathe life into the images, ideas, and unresolved questions that have begun percolating in your mind. Then you begin to write.

But even long after the first draft is done, there are many steps to editing, writing again, editing again, etc. And technology changes the writing process, of course.

Jane Austen used a scratchy quill pen that had to be continuously dipped into an ink well. Her paper, made of cotton or linen rags, was expensive. She sprinkled sand over her delicate handwriting to dry the ink and carefully stowed it away in her desk until she was ready to share it with the world. She had no keyboard with a backspace button, no spell check, or any of the myriad of new AI-powered grammar tools we have at our disposal.

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Ideas on paper were expensive, both in time and money, but perhaps something about the slow process gave priority to well-formed thought, mature ideas. Or maybe not. Maybe there is a reason why only the classics survive.

All that to say, I am still in the pre-publication process. I printed a sample copy of The Queen’s Priest, The Story of Blessed Thomas Abell, and immediately got feedback that the print was far too small. So I reformatted it yesterday and sent it back to my print-on-demand service to see if it looks better. But I am still planning for a July 30^th release, so you should be able to pre-order it soon.

To Launch a Boy

Tomorrow morning, my son will be flying to South America to spend the next two months serving with a nonprofit that provides clean water. He visited their operations last summer and then spent the school year designing a water system for a remote village in the Andes. The organization chose his team’s design for their project, so he and two of his college friends will help implement the work this summer.

It's an incredible opportunity for him, and if I were his age, I would be delighted by the combination of adventure and purpose. And he is.

But as we get ready to say goodbye for a couple of months and release him to the Lord’s care, it’s a little bittersweet. We are so incredibly proud of him, but of course, it is a long way away. But, as my daughter once told me, arrows are made to fly.

She is right, of course. 1

To Launch the Chicks

Speaking of leaving the nest, I finally moved the chicks out of the garage and into the chicken coop. I was a little concerned that the big hens would bully them, and I did have to rescue one of the chicks from the ruthless beak of our Alpha Hen. But that chick seems to have recovered, and the big fat hen, whom I lost a little affection for, seems to have also calmed down a bit. I saw her chasing the seven chicks around the chicken run today, and it looked more like a friendly game of tag than a bad episode of Squid Game.

The oldest chick, the lone survivor of the first batch of chicks, seems to be revealing himself as quite the gentleman. He is making prepubescent croaks, and I expect that his full-throated cock-a-doodle-doo is just weeks away.

Roo is only slightly larger than the other six chicks. Most casual observers would not immediately realize he is a cockerel. But he hovers around the two smallest ones, the white leghorns that first joined his flock, and protects them from the Alpha Hen. These girls always seem to find him in the chicken run, and I have seen both of them snuggled up to him, heads resting on him like a pile of kittens.

I had not planned to get a rooster, but I am getting quite attached to him. I hope my neighbors don’t mind.

Giving it Back to God

One of the focuses of my life for the last few weeks has been growing in my practice and understanding of prayer. I helped facilitate a course on prayer at my church, and I have been rereading and revisiting several resources on prayer. The Prayer Practice Course is designed to introduce people to different kinds of prayer, from praying alongside liturgical and Biblical prayers to listening and contemplative prayers. The last one, contemplative, is the most challenging as it requires full attention, silently focusing one’s heart, mind, and affections on almighty God and receiving His heart and affection back.

It’s a mysterious prayer life, one that many people I admire seem comfortable with.

In a frequently retold story, CBS journalist Dan Rather reportedly asked Mother Teresa what she said to God when she prayed, and she responded, “I don’t say anything. I listen.” And so, he asked, "Well then, what does God say to you?" and she replied, "He doesn't say anything. He listens. And if you don't understand that, I can't explain it to you."

Brother Lawrence, made famous by the booklet The Practice of the Presence of God, seemed to live this reality. This 17^th-century book, written by Brother Lawrence’s friend Joseph de Beaufort and published after Lawrence’s death, describes how this simple French monk kept a continual vigil of prayer.

The book, divided into conversations with Lawrence, letters Lawrence wrote, and a biographical narrative about him, reveals a man who learned to enjoy God in the fullest sense. He kept a continual communion with the Lord as he went about his daily tasks, cooking and cleaning for the monks at the Discalced Carmelites in Paris.

Brother Lawrence’s example of “practicing the Presence” has had an enormous effect on Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, since the book was published in 1692. I grew up hearing his name mentioned in evangelical church circles when people wanted to describe this idea of praying without ceasing, but it was not until recently that I read the book for myself.

The Practice of the Presence of God is an easy read, perfect for digesting daily in bite-sized pieces of wisdom. It's simple and yet so utterly foreign to our busy, noisy, content-heavy, attention-displaced generation. I highly recommend reading it, or even rereading it if it has been a few years.

I would love to write a biographical novel about Brother Lawrence's life and how he became the spiritual giant he is remembered for.

Although Lawrence was born into a devout Christian family, he suffered greatly from war and poverty and, at one point, almost completely lost hope in life. But a radical encounter with God changed his life’s trajectory.

The young Lawrence, then known as Nicolas Herman, came upon a tree stripped of its leaves and immediately understood that both he and the tree would recover. It’s a simple metaphor, but a powerful moment in his life. It reminds me of Martin Luther’s story of being caught up in a violent thunderstorm and narrowly escaping a lightning strike. He emerged from that field vowing to become a monk.

For Martin Luther, that point was only the beginning of his journey, and for Brother Lawrence, too, his moment of clarity and conviction at the foot of the tree was followed by years of worrying about his salvation.

For Luther, the pivotal change happened years later when, through scripture study, he realized that he was saved by faith alone.

For Lawrence, the change took place slowly, over years, as he quietly pressed into God’s presence. Only as he looked back did he realize he no longer wondered if he was saved. He knew, by the very love of God, that he was.

In many ways, I think these two men, with very different experiences, came to the same conclusion. Salvation indeed comes through faith alone, but what is faith if it is not the act of resting in God's love?

Are you resting in God’s love?