Living The Book

When I first started writing The Process of Becoming, I didn’t really know what kind of book I was writing.

Honestly, I still don’t.

It’s part journal, part story, part reference guide, part autobiography, part collection of evidence from a life I’ve been trying to understand while I’m still living it.

Very organized. Very professional.

I originally thought this book was going to be about becoming yourself again.

About what happens when you’ve spent years being shaped by relationships, motherhood, expectations, disappointment, survival, other people’s needs, and all the various versions of yourself you’ve had to become along the way.

One of the first subjects I wrote about was trust, particularly learning to trust myself again. I wrote:

Trust is the reward for accumulated evidence.

At the time, I thought I was writing a chapter.

Looking back, I think I was accidentally writing instructions.

Because the funny thing about writing a book about becoming is that life apparently feels obligated to provide research material.

Mine has been extremely committed to the assignment.

Over the last several months, the book has started changing.

Or maybe it hasn’t changed at all. Maybe I’m finally figuring out what it was actually about.

My journal started filling up with prayer. Questions about God. Conviction. Relationships. Boundaries. The difference between loving someone and believing I’m responsible for carrying them.

I started trying to distinguish fear from intuition, noise from wisdom, and what I wanted from where I genuinely felt God leading me.

Then came obedience.

And apparently obedience is much easier to study than to actually do. Noted.

One of the biggest turning points started with a prayer that was simple enough and, in hindsight, slightly terrifying:

God, remove anything from my life that isn’t from You.

Things started moving.

Some gently.

Some…less gently.

I started recognizing things I had normalized. I felt conviction about things I hadn’t previously questioned. Relationships changed. Priorities changed. Things I’d been wrestling with suddenly became much harder to ignore.

I called one of those journal entries The Great Revealing because that is exactly what it felt like.

Not God suddenly dropping a brand-new life into my lap.

More like somebody turning the lights on.

And once you can see something clearly, you have to decide what you’re going to do with what you’ve seen.

I’ve learned that something doesn’t have to be terrible, evil, or catastrophic for it to not belong in my life anymore.

Sometimes it simply isn’t taking me where I’m supposed to go.

And sometimes the hardest part isn’t hearing the answer.

It’s accepting that you already heard it.

This realization has completely changed the way I’m approaching the book.

I’m not writing from the finish line.

I’m writing from inside the process.

There are journal entries where I understand something beautifully, followed by entries where I am very clearly learning the exact same lesson again.

Humbling.

There are prayers and realizations and contradictions. There are old journal entries that mean something completely different to me now than they did when I wrote them.

And instead of cleaning all of that up and pretending transformation happened in a neat little straight line, I think I want to keep it.

Because maybe that’s what becoming actually looks like.

We circle back.

We see things differently.

We live enough life to finally understand something we wrote two years ago.

So I’ve stopped worrying so much about writing the book chronologically.

Right now, I’m collecting the evidence.

Journal entries. Memories. Stories. Scripture. Questions. Drawings. Photographs. Conversations. Mistakes. Things I believed then and things I understand differently now.

And themes are emerging on their own:

Trust. Identity. Prayer. Discernment. Conviction. Obedience. Relationships. Letting go. Returning. Rebuilding.

Becoming.

And woven through all of it is a question that keeps getting bigger:

Who am I when I stop becoming what everybody else needs me to be?

And lately:

What happens when I stop asking God to bless the life I’ve constructed and start letting Him change me instead?

That one has been considerably less convenient.

But considerably more interesting.

So that’s where the book is right now.

Unfinished. A little unruly. Growing faster than I can organize it. Held together by journal entries, prayer, screenshots, half-finished notes, and whatever thought I desperately typed into my phone before I forgot it.

I’ve also started building a workbook and Bible studies alongside it because I don’t just want to write about transformation after the fact. I want to document the actual questions, prayers, practices, mistakes, and revelations that are happening along the way.

That’s also why I created The Rad Process of Becoming.

I don’t want to disappear, emerge a year later holding a finished manuscript, and pretend I knew where this was going the whole time.

I want to document some of it while it’s happening.

The questions before I know the answers.

The scripture I’m studying.

The things I’m testing.

The moments something finally clicks.

The moments when God makes something painfully obvious and I still require additional documentation.

Maybe someday all of these scattered pieces will sit neatly between two covers and look like I knew what I was doing all along.

For now, I’m resisting the temptation to pretend.

The book is being lived first.

And I think that may end up being the best part of it.