WHEN WISHES CHANGE

It was more than coincidence. I had told my husband I knew I was supposed to write our daughter’s story, and maybe a day later one of those cookies-in-your-brain ads showed up on my Facebook page: Need to write your novel? Take this class!
The site touted author and teacher Mary Adkins. My forehead scrunched: How do I know that name? The picture by the name was of one of my best friends’ sisters, and what are the chances? I called Katie Beth and, sure enough, she put me in touch with her sister Mary. And the course was so life-changing that this paragraph is a product placement.
Fast forward a year. My first draft was written. After a two-month hiatus, I began to edit . . . and it turns out I’m no editor. Pouring my story onto paper had given me energy. Trying to polish it made me want to head out for a run and never stop running.
One rainy Sunday afternoon in January, I waved a white flag. “I have no aptitude for this,” I said to God. I shut my laptop and closed my mind. Two minutes later, with my computer still on my legs and evidently not all the way shut, I heard the bing of an incoming email. It was a note from Laura Pfeil--a science teacher from school, by no means a close friend or anyone I talk with often.
Hi Tricia, she wrote. I’m thinking about you and your daughter Annabelle, and how you loved her during the time she was with you. I recall that doctors discouraged you from continuing the pregnancy, but a lot of people are better because you took the hard road. I pray for many, many blessings to you and your family. – Laura
This interruption in my self-pity, timed even better than the Facebook ad, had me wiping tears before I laughed out loud. Does God lead us? In the Bible he speaks to us, I know that. In my daily life, he whispers and points in impressions and events that come between long stretches of not knowing. His nudges are more than coincidence, less than an email or text, and what I choose to do with them calls for faith, prayer and courage.
Okay, God, I said looking up from the email, I’m listening for real about this book thing. Editing outstripped my skills, but Annabelle’s life outsized her days, and if her story had a place in God’s story, I trusted him to help me get it told.
A month or two after Laura’s email, still struggling with book details but certain that a lot of intel is a podcast, a google search, or a conversation away, I made a phone call. I’d just read another piece by Peggy Wehmeyer, mother of two of my childhood friends. When her daughters and I were kids living across a creek from each other, Peggy was the religion reporter for ABC World News Tonight. Now her essays ran in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Dallas Morning News, and I read every one. She draws on her life to show how faith factors in the real world, and that speaks to me. Just as important, her writing stands up and walks off the page, which I wanted for Annabelle’s story.
Peggy thanked me for the compliments and shared the credit with Nancy Lovell, her editor and longtime friend. “Nancy makes it sparkle,” she said, and I thought, sparkle: good verb, and in a moment similar to the Facebook ad and the email, I knew who I wanted to edit.
By the end of my first lunch with Nancy, I also knew what to name the book. It’s more than a story, I was telling her. It’s like a travelogue through a hard time with scenes people relate to, and human nature . . . and humor. My readers are saying they laugh and cry and get a new picture of God’s love--and that’s the point.
In our common love for Annabelle, God changed what I knew of trust, marriage, faith, perseverance, overcoming, sports, community, obedience, humility, mystery. . .. Because of the child who rewrote the book on a rare condition, a day came when, still grieving her death, I could also praise God for it. I’m not sure of all I told Nancy that day over tacos for me and tuna salad for her, but she jotted something on a notepad with her. When I paused, she said, “That phrase you used, ‘when wishes change.’”
When Wishes Change is an endurance love story, a mother’s version of scaling Mt. Everest, an account of how I got to my child, and the handles that grew out of sheer rock once I committed to the climb. Annabelle’s birth and death are an open-eyed look at sometimes blind trust, and it matters to tell it because trust is the lesson we humans keep having to learn.
Recently, during some unexpected changes in my life, I confided to a friend that I felt ignored and devalued. I was doubting myself. Even as I wrote about the trust I’d gained through Annabelle, I was having to submit my knee-jerk anger and hurt, my wishes, again, to God’s sovereignty. As Joseph learned when he was sold by his brothers and betrayed by Potiphar’s wife, I was relearning that whatever happens, for whatever reasons, God means it for good.
That alone may be the message of When Wishes Change: God means it for good. When the only school on your list turns you down, when your boss lets you go or the coach passes you by, when your fiancé meets someone else or there’s no fiancé at all, when a tumor is malignant or a parent dies . . . when a remark wounds, a friend pulls back, a bank account evaporates, a setback lands, the world crashes into pieces . . . your story has more to go. God is involved, loving you, working in the pain to give you more than you could have dreamed.
When Wishes Change is my path from “God, please, please, please” to “not my will but thine.” Part I, What You Wish For, goes from expecting the world, to straining just to finish the day. Part II, A Wish in Time, breaks into days and hours--sometimes moments--the kind of perseverance that hurts the most and leaves the fewest regrets. Part III, Wish Again, is the far side of trusting God with my longings. The Bible speaks of the treasures of darkness. As God continues to turn up the light on my darkest hours, I can see what some of those treasures are.
Short version: This book is my story and your truth. We have desires, we have hard times. When the two collide and everything changes, the good news is that God does not change . . . and that we can.