After a week of wondering if I should start a Substack like most of my writer friends have done, I ended up in a jumbled mess in my head—and so had my words. I can’t write when my head is jumbled.

I realized the remedy to all this is simple: feeling loved.

That’s the one thing that can turn a jumbled mess into inspired flow. And this morning, someone made me feel really loved. (Thank you, Elisabeth.) 🤍

And I also realized—that’s why I read the Bible. It’s that simple. I feel loved.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been focusing on the arcs and stakes in my novel, cutting 16,000 words, as I’d been advised. There’s been some “intrigue” from a publisher if I do—that has more than intrigued me. So I put my manuscript on a protein diet.

I wrote to a friend to celebrate when I hit the 10K mark halfway through the manuscript. It feels good to clarify the stakes, to see the character arcs and the overall story arc come to life. She said hers is on a Mediterranean diet and wasn’t shrinking as fast.

I said maybe we should switch. Mine might be losing too fast. I’ve cut a few paragraphs I realized in the night I want to add back.

So I did switch. I’m even eating hummus and greens and feta with olive oil for lunch.

Maybe this is the reason I’ve woken twice recently from dreams where I could see the arc of the entire Bible.

It started last summer when I studied the five women in Jesus’ genealogy. I saw that red thread of redemption running from Genesis through the New Testament, and it astonished me. It also helped guide the arc of my novel.

But more recently, it was in studying Ezekiel that my eyes were opened as never before. He became real to me. Not just a prophet on a page, but a man living through collapse.

He was twenty-five when he was exiled to Babylon, carried away with thousands of others, his future interrupted before it had even begun. At thirty—the age he would have entered the priesthood—he was instead called by God to speak to a people in ruin.

For years, his message was almost unbearable to deliver. Jerusalem would fall. The Temple—the very place they believed God dwelled—would be destroyed. Being chosen would not shield them from consequence.

And then, in a moment that undoes me, God tells him his wife—the delight of his eyes—will be taken. And he is not to mourn her publicly.

His life became the message.

Everything he loved stripped down to reveal something deeper: God was not confined to a place.

And He had not abandoned His people.

I paused there and thought about the world we’re living in now—how it feels like upheaval, like exile, like loss stacked upon loss.

My brain and heart start to explode.

We’re living in a dark, dark time. So was Ezekiel. And still, the message does not end there. Because in the final chapters, everything turns.

Hope returns.

Not as sentiment, but as promise: restoration, renewal, a people brought back to life.

And suddenly, I could see it. The arc. From Genesis: creation… to rebellion and its consequences… to restoration and renewal.

Judgment, somehow, reflecting grace.

Do you see it?

We are exiles in this world. God is not limited to the Temple. And still—He makes Himself known, saying sixty-five times in Ezekiel: “Then they will know that I am the LORD.”

I found something I had written in the margin of a devotional this morning. I had asked, years ago, how God could use me with all my sin?

That was 2012.

The answer written beside it surprised me then. It still does: Even this—I will use.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

It’s like the simple card I picked out recently for my goddaughter before her wedding. I chose it because of the one word on the front.

Flourish.

Later, I saw something I hadn’t noticed when I picked it out. On the back cover was the word Kintsugi.

The art of taking broken pottery and mending it with gold—highlighting the fractures as part of its history, not something to hide.

Golden repair. The piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

Like Ezekiel’s story. Like the arc of Scripture. Like our own lives.

Jesus shows us His broken body. He tells us to break the bread and give thanks in remembrance.

And somehow, in our ordinary lives, in the rhythm of that remembering, we become part of the restoration.

The gold does not erase the break. It reveals it—as the very place where grace entered.

So flourish.

Not because your story was never broken—but because, all along, it has been held

in the arc of being loved.