The Book I Didn’t Finish

On New Year’s Eve 2021, I opened a journal I had begun twelve months earlier.

There were five goals written on the first page.

I had not achieved most of them.

One line caught me more than the others.

Finish my book.

I hadn’t.

At the time, it was easy to see that unfinished book as evidence of something lacking. Perhaps I hadn’t been disciplined enough. Brave enough. Focused enough. I knew how to set goals. I knew how to work hard. I had spent much of my life doing both.

And yet the book remained unfinished.

That evening, I found a letter I had written to myself at the beginning of the year. I had deliberately written it differently from the goals on the other page. Less from my head, perhaps, and more from somewhere quieter.

One sentence stopped me.

“Use your voice and allow the pen to write.”

I wonder now if I understood what I was asking of myself.

Perhaps I thought courage meant sitting down, finishing the book and placing a satisfying tick beside the goal.

But writing, I have discovered, is rarely that obedient.

Sometimes we know the story we want to tell and still cannot quite bring it into being.

Sometimes what looks unfinished is still unfolding.

The Woman I Was Then

There is something tender about reading my old words now.

The woman who wrote them was searching.

In that same journal, I found myself remembering a younger version of me — the woman who had once packed a car and driven from Melbourne to the Sunshine Coast with two small children while Steve remained behind temporarily for work.

Reading my own account of that journey surprised me.

I had forgotten how courageous I had been.

Or perhaps how much faith I had carried.

I was leaving one home without knowing entirely what the next would hold. There were practical decisions, of course, but beneath them was something harder to explain — a trust that sometimes we have to move towards the life that is calling us before we can see exactly how it will unfold.

By 2021, I wanted some of that woman back. I wrote that I wanted to live by faith again, without letting fear roar so loudly.

What I couldn’t have known, sitting there on that New Year’s Eve, was that I would need that same faith and courage again.

This time the distance would be greater.

Australia would remain home, but Scotland would become home too.

I would have to learn that belonging to one place did not require me to stop belonging to another. That sometimes life doesn’t ask us to choose between two homes, but to learn how to live in the space between them.

Perhaps courage had not disappeared after all.

Perhaps it had simply been waiting for another crossing.

The Story Was Larger Than I Knew

By 2019, I already knew there was a book I wanted to write.

Whispers Beneath the Flame.

I knew something of the women I wanted to explore, the world of sixteenth-century Scotland, and the questions that drew me towards the Reformation, Wisdom, faith and the voices of women too easily lost from history.

What I didn’t know was why I couldn’t seem to finish it.

By New Year’s Eve 2021, that unfinished manuscript had become one of the goals I could place in the not achieved column.

There it was among all the other things I had intended to do.

Finish my book.

I hadn’t.

Perhaps that was why the words I had written to myself earlier that year mattered so much:

Use your voice and allow the pen to write.

At the time, I thought I understood what that meant.

Write the book.

Finish what you started.

Be brave enough to put your words into the world.

Five years later, I read those words differently.

Because Whispers Beneath the Flame was not the wrong story.

It simply wasn’t the whole story.

I couldn’t have known then that Fire would one day sit beside Water, Air and Earth.

That one novel would become four.

That the questions drawing me towards one group of women would lead me towards others, across centuries and oceans.

Or that the stories would begin to speak to one another — stories of women, inheritance, silence, faith, Wisdom and the things one generation carries into the next.

Nor could I have known how much my own life would change while I was trying to write them.

The book wasn’t waiting for me to become more disciplined.

The story was still revealing its shape.

And, as it turns out, so was I.

A Chapter Had to Close

There was something else I couldn’t see in 2021.

I was trying to become a writer in the spaces left over from a life already full.

I had spent decades doing work that mattered deeply to me — listening, caring, teaching, counselling and walking beside people through significant moments of their lives.

That chapter deserved to be honoured.

But writing deserved to be honoured too.

For years, I fitted it around everything else. A few hours here. A quiet morning there. The book waiting whenever the rest of life had been attended to.

Even in 2021, I could see the tension. I wrote about wanting to make space for writing, while continuing to work full-time with clients.

Eventually, I understood that writing could no longer live in the margins.

One chapter needed to close — not because it had been wrong, but because it had been lived.

Another was asking to begin.

I had spent much of my life honouring the work I was called to do for others.

Now I needed to honour this calling too.

This is my work now.

There is a tenderness in looking back at the woman who wrote Finish my book on that page.

She thought she needed to finish a book.

She couldn’t yet know how much would unfold before she did.

The story would grow.

Her life would change.

And somewhere along the way, the writing she had been fitting around her life would become part of the life she was called to live.

Perhaps that is what I understand now.

The book wasn’t late.

I was still becoming the woman who would write it.

This letter belongs with Whispers Beneath the Flame.