Looking back at 2025

And what we’ll do together in 2026

Hey friends, today I want to look back at 2025 with you.

As I do, the first thing I want to celebrate is this new community and the fact that you are on this adventure with me.

How did all of this begin?

Twenty-five years ago, I sat in front of an agent with my heart hammering. The work she fell in love with that day was my fiction. I signed with the literary agency. I prepared. I wrote.

But fiction was not the path I found myself on.

For the next 2 plus decades, I wrote 14 nonfiction books, co-hosted 2 podcasts, led online Bible studies, wrote hundreds of devotionals and blog posts. I traveled around the country and internationally to speak to beautiful women about Jesus. I served 2 global ministries, training and mentoring writers and speakers.

I loved it. I still do, but I often wondered about the novels I longed to write.

Maybe it will never happen, I thought.

Fiction remained a dream, but at the same time it became a distant memory.

Until 2025.

One day I acknowledged the dream had never gone away.

So I took a leap of faith.

One that was unique. It didn’t go the traditional route. I started a Substack and tenuously began to share my love of fiction with you.

It went against all the “rules” like, “If you begin in one genre, you have to stay there” or “The people who love your nonfiction words will not know what to do with your fiction, and they’ll leave.”

I took the leap of faith anyway — because it was time.

I sat for weeks, reacquainting myself with a few of the books I had written along the way. Novels that took months of research. Novels that I had written because I couldn’t “not” write fiction, if even for myself.

I took them out of the depths of my computer files.

And then I began to share them with you, one or two chapters at a time. I can’t begin to express the joy this brought me — even as I prayed it would be a gift for you too.

What does 2026 look like?

Last year, I held an online Bible study, “Moving Past What You Cannot Change” with my FB study community. I recorded 48 podcasts with my beautiful friends and co-hosts, Holley Gerth and Jennifer Watson for More Than Small Talk. I hosted and recorded 244 Prayer Starters podcasts with the KLRC Podcast Network. I coached writers, hosting a WFL Mastergroup and also coached individually.

But now that I’ve started writing fiction, 2026 will continue this novel adventure. In two weeks, I’ll debut the next book in this series, titled Single Scarlet Thread.

For those of you who read Generous Orchid, you’ll be excited to know that we’ll be taking a journey 70+ years into the future to see what happened to Sunsoo, Annabelle, Thomas, and Junhui. This next book in the series is just as gritty, and just as grounded in faith and the miracle of what can happen as we follow Jesus, wherever he leads.

What is your miracle, or long-awaited dream that was unwrapped in 2025?

Maybe 2026 will be the year you gently pull that dream, that hope, from the dusty archives of trust and brush it off.

Maybe that dream won’t look like you originally thought, and that’s okay.

Maybe that dream won’t make a huge splash or be in lights, but it will light up your soul because you were meant to do it, and that’s beautiful.

I pray that over you, friend. I really do.

Next week I’ll share a recap of Generous Orchid and an introduction of Single Scarlet Thread, and then we’ll begin our next novel together the following week.

Thanks, again, for walking this path with me. I treasure you. Happy 2026!

For my paid subscribers, you’ll receive a code next week that will allow you to receive your free copy of Generous Orchid from Amazon. I hope you truly enjoy sitting with the book in its entirety, reading the story one more time from page one to “The End.”