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Rob says that when recording this podcast, he tries to pretend that there are people around them as they record—not 5,000 people; he’d be okay if it were just 5 people.  Tricia pushes him to admit that he’d truly prefer 5,000. She recalls that, during their childhood, their house’s back patio opened up to a big back yard and—in Rob’s imagination—that patio was a stage before a large audience that he could so clearly visualize in his mind! On that “patio stage,” he performed for an imaginary crowd of thousands—so Tricia is not surprised that he still pictures that size of a crowd listening to this podcast! Rob grudgingly admits that…she’s right.

At the top of Tricia’s list today is a book she is reading, Courage, Dear Heart: Letters to a Weary World by Rebecca Kay Reynolds. Tricia relates the theme of the book to her experience of having a caterpillar garden with her boys when they were preschoolers, as together they watched the caterpillars spin their cocoons and then transform unseen inside of them. In her book, Reynolds asks, “I wondered if it was frightening [to a caterpillar] to feel yourself breaking down….does God whisper something of hope to all the little insects settling down to their own undoing…? Or does metamorphosis feel like the end of the world?” Tricia reads an excerpt in which Reynolds wonders, “if it were possible to cut open a human soul during chaos, I wonder if that is what we would look like, too. A casual observer staring into our mess would never believe that we have ever been okay, or that we would ever be okay again.”  What can we count on, in this pandemic crisis? We seem to be in the very middle of a cocoon right now. Who will we be when this all ends?

Rob talks of continually preparing his heart and soul by reminding himself that “everything is going to be okay—but that does not mean that everything is going to stay the same.” He invites Tricia into a conversation about who she was in high school, and then points out that in her description, she reduces who she was over those four years down to a single sentence.  And such is life: the further away we get from each season of our lives, the more the memory gets whittled down until eventually you describe it with just a sentence or two: “this was the stage of my life, and this is what happened then.” And although this crisis is currently in front of us every minute of every day, life will someday have a new normal—and, knowing that, we can take courage.

Tricia shares this quote from Reynolds’ book: “When you name a miracle by steps, it feels cut and dried; but when you raise insects yourself and you spend the slow time examining them, you begin to see a thousand nuances of growth in-between stages that make up larger stages.  Something similar happens when we get a close-up view of chaos: we begin to realize that big stages, like ‘before cancer and after cancer,’ break down into specific days and hours that require miracles to survive. At social-media-distance, we might hear that someone ‘got divorced,’ but at the distance of a text or a phone call, we hear that a friend cried her guts out on the day that she divided the wedding towels, the spatulas, and the pets.”  Reynolds encourages us to slow down and truly picture what it looked like on that day. Later, it will simply be a summary wrapped up as “I got divorced.”

Rob changed directions a bit to talk about a book called Adopted: A Decision to Love by Jeff Hutcheon “with T. L. Heyer.”  That happens to be Tricia, who in addition to writing her own blog and books, sometimes serves as a collaborative writer (formerly known as “ghost writer”) for those who have a story to share but are not personally skilled in writing. This book was Tricia’s first foray into writing fiction, which is the way the author wished to have the story told. As their newly adopted son began to grow into adolescence and have serious struggles with the reality of how his life had gone, he grew difficult to love—and yet the Hutcheons, his adoptive parents, maintained, “We have made a decision to love, and this boy—more than anyone in our lives right now—needs this love.”  They determined that their decision would hold firm: they would love him through anything. “Sometimes love is a decision. It’s clean underwear and folded shirts; it’s fresh sheets on the bed and cold milk in the fridge. Love is a decision.” (This book isn’t just for those considering adoption; it’s a great story of the parallels of how we have all been adopted into a family by a Father who made a decision to love us and will not change His mind.)

Rob asked Tricia to talk about the process of partnering with someone to write a book. How does Tricia eventually write a book from their story?  “Everyone has a story—but not everyone can write it,” she maintains. They may not have the time or the training—and that’s where a collaborative writer comes in. Tricia loves “listening to people’s stories very carefully and then writing their truth beautifully”—that is her mission and passion.

A few years ago at a conference, Tricia and Rob both heard Pastor T.J. Jakes offer this bit of wisdom at a conference, “As a leader, you’ll never be able to keep all the plates spinning. You have an opportunity at work, but a plate drops at home. …You get the plates spinning at home, but you’ll drop a plate at work.  At the end of the day, you just need to pay attention to which plate you dropped—and never drop the same plate twice in a row.”

Rob reflects on the teachers and librarians he has known who strongly forbid the action of ever, ever writing or underlining in a book. He agrees that this applies to the books that don’t belong to you, but if the book is yours?  Underline, circle, and make notes wherever you want to remember something in the book—because it is yours!  Keep a book in one hand and a pen in the other!

Rob quoted “some author” who wrote, “The black parts on the page are what the author thinks; the white parts are there for you!”  His sister clarified very quickly that SHE wrote the book where he read that!  Hmmm…he probably won’t make that mistake again…

To listeners: What book do you own that is falling apart because you’ve read it so much?  Tell us—we want to know!

(Also, please don’t post a picture of your Bible.  We all know that the Bible that’s falling apart belongs to a Christian who isn’t…)

Resources Mentioned:

Take Courage, Dear Heart, a novel by Rebecca Kay Reynolds

Dream Big, a podcast by Bob Goff, in which he says about the quarantine, “The world has been sent to its room.

Adopted: A Decision to Love, by Jeff Hutcheon with T. L. Heyer – available for purchase at www.adoptedthebook.com

The Writer’s Book of Days

Notes on Directing, by Frank Hauser