The Book Launched. Life Didn’t Stop.

Last Tuesday was supposed to be a big day.

After months of writing, rewriting, editing, questioning myself, and wondering whether I would ever actually finish the thing, my new devotional book, After the Ashes: A 30-Day Devotional for Rebuilding Your Life After Loss, was finally being released.

I had envisioned a fairly quiet morning. What I had NOT envisioned was a uniformed police officer standing inside my front door at 4:30 in the morning.

But that’s exactly what I got.

One of my sons woke me from a sound sleep. “Mom, the police are here.”

Still half asleep, I got out of bed and headed toward the door. At first, I assumed the officers were using our driveway for something. Perhaps there was an incident in the neighborhood.

Not exactly. There stood an officer, right inside my house, while I stood there in my pajamas, sporting what I’m sure was spectacular bedhead. Good morning, indeed.

My mind immediately began racing. Why was he here? Was someone hurt? And, perhaps most urgently, what in the world had this child of mine gotten himself into now?

Before I go further, I’m sharing this with my son’s permission. He gets to tell his story, and some parts of it will always remain private. But this story also has a side that belongs to me, as his mother. And that side has something to say about rebuilding a life that refuses to cooperate with our carefully made plans.

As many of you know, I’m an adoptive mother to children with complex special needs. A couple of them have profound mental health challenges, and our family has spent years learning to navigate circumstances most people never encounter.

Some situations are frustrating. Others are heartbreaking. And some are genuinely frightening. This particular son struggles with emotional regulation, among other things, and has an intense need to feel seen and heard. Those needs can lead to decisions that don’t make much sense to someone unfamiliar with the way his brain works.

In the middle of the night, he believed he was experiencing hallucinations. Instead of waking me, he emailed his school resource officer to tell her what was happening. She took his concerns seriously, as she should have, and dispatched police and EMS to our home for a welfare check. Which explains why I found myself talking to an officer before most people had even considered getting out of bed.

After hearing what had happened, I was fairly confident my son wasn’t experiencing a psychiatric emergency. We’ve walked through enough of these episodes for me to recognize certain patterns. But confidence isn’t certainty.

And when you’re parenting a child whose mental health can shift dramatically, you don’t have the luxury of dismissing something simply because you’ve seen similar behavior before. So I agreed that he should be evaluated.

About ten minutes later, an ambulance was taking him to a local emergency room for a psychiatric assessment. It was our second visit like this in ten days. I joined him at the hospital after getting my other children settled for the morning. Thankfully, he was discharged roughly three hours after arriving, and things have been stable at home since. I’m enormously grateful for that. But I’d be less than truthful if I suggested that experiences like this don’t take a toll.

Constantly assessing whether a situation is serious, deciding how to respond, and trying to distinguish between behavior that needs correction and distress that requires medical intervention is exhausting. And loving a child fiercely while recognizing that love, by itself, cannot resolve everything he struggles with takes an emotional toll.

Here’s the almost comical part of this story.

While I sat in the emergency room, answering questions and talking with medical personnel, my book made its debut on Amazon. The book didn’t care that I was distracted. It didn’t care that I had barely slept or that my carefully imagined launch morning had gone completely sideways. It was launch day, and that was that.

Thankfully, I’d prepared most of my promotional material ahead of time. Several posts were already scheduled, so I kept checking my phone to see whether everything had published as planned. There’s something rather absurd about trying to celebrate a major personal milestone between conversations about your child’s psychiatric health.

I suppose there’s a certain efficiency to it. Multitasking: motherhood edition. But beneath the absurdity was something else.

Disappointment.

Not disappointment in my son. He was struggling, and his well-being mattered far more than any book launch. I was disappointed that a milestone I’d worked so hard to reach had been overshadowed by yet another crisis.

I wanted one day. Just one day to enjoy what God had allowed me to accomplish without something else demanding my immediate attention. Is that too much to ask? Apparently, on this particular day, it was.

Later, as I thought about everything that had happened, I couldn’t escape the irony. I’d just released a book about rebuilding your life after loss. A book born from years of grief, unexpected endings, financial struggles, and the often-painful process of learning how to begin again. On the very morning it was released, life reminded me I’m still in the middle of that process.

I still get overwhelmed. I still wrestle with disappointment when something I’ve looked forward to gets interrupted. And I still occasionally wish God would give me a little advance notice before the next crisis comes knocking.

But here’s the thing:

God never required me to finish rebuilding my life before I could encourage someone else who was rebuilding hers.

When I first began writing After the Ashes, I wasn’t sitting comfortably on the other side of every hardship, looking back with all the answers. I was writing from experience, yes, but also from the middle of a still-complicated life.

Some of the losses were years behind me. Others were much closer. And the ongoing responsibilities of raising children with significant needs hadn’t disappeared simply because I felt called to write a book. If I’d waited until life became manageable, predictable, and relatively trouble-free, I doubt I would have written a single chapter. And at 54, I have become increasingly aware that postponing everything until the circumstances are ideal is an excellent way to never do anything at all.

I don’t believe God caused my son’s difficulties to make a point about my book launch. My son’s struggles are real, and they deserve compassion and appropriate care, not a convenient spiritual explanation. But I do believe God was present in that difficult morning.

Jesus told His disciples plainly in John 16:33 that they would have trouble in this world. He didn’t promise a trouble-free life to those who followed Him. What He offered was something far greater: Himself.

I think we sometimes confuse God’s faithfulness with the absence of difficulty. We want evidence that He’s at work, and we look for it in smooth days, answered prayers, and circumstances that finally make sense. But His faithfulness isn’t dependent on any of those things. It’s just as real in a hospital emergency room as it is during a joyful celebration.

Despite everything, I released my book. A dream I had worked toward for months became real, even though the day looked nothing like I’d anticipated.

I’m proud of that accomplishment. I’m thankful to everyone who has already purchased a copy, shared the announcement, or encouraged me along the way. And yes, I still wish I’d gotten my quiet morning. But I’m also learning to appreciate what this launch day represented.

I am not waiting for life to become easy before I move forward with what God has put on my heart.

We can love God deeply and still face terribly difficult circumstances. We can be grateful for what He’s doing and disappointed about what we’re experiencing at the very same time. One doesn’t cancel out the other.

So, if you’re waiting for everything to settle down before you begin whatever comes next, I hope you’ll reconsider. Take the step you can take today.

You may not have the uninterrupted time you’d hoped for. Your progress may be slower than you want. That doesn’t mean you have to abandon what you’re working toward.

Last Tuesday, I had a son who needed me, a book that was launching, and a day that went completely off script. By the end, my son was home, my book was available to readers, and I was exhausted. Not exactly the celebration I’d imagined. But the book was out in the world. And the woman who wrote it was still rebuilding.

Perhaps that’s why I needed to write it.

If you’re navigating your own season of rebuilding, I wrote After the Ashes: A 30-Day Devotional for Rebuilding Your Life After Loss, with you in mind. It’s now available on Amazon, and I’d be honored if you’d read it.