Thank you.

My boyfriend is usually right.

It’s too bad because isn’t it my God-given privilege as a woman to always be right? Kidding of course. But seriously, my man has a freak-ton of insight, and he is often right. Which is why it’s time for me to come out of the closet: I want to be a writer. When he suggested it was time, I had my ammo ready: Doesn’t every third person in the world want to be a writer? Aren’t they all better than I am? Don’t they all have stacks three miles high of rejection letters? And he said, “So? You have a story to tell.” And I said…nothing because I felt lucky all over that God put a man in my life who believes in me that much.

So here’s where this is all coming from. Someone once said whatever vocation works to end the thing you hate most and bolster the thing you love most is the vocation you ought to be in. (Unfortunately, I did not take this person’s identity to heart like I did the idea itself, so let me know if you know where I got it. I suspect it’s someone ripping off Buechner’s quote.) For me, the thing I hated most when I started preparing for a career was that many kids go home every afternoon to places where they are never told how priceless, how necessary, and how on purpose they are. Alternately, the thing I loved most was, and is, magic. And language is a form of magic. How is it that I can make certain vocal noises or write certain squigglies that transfer thoughts from my head to yours? Why does that work? You can imagine, then, that getting to teach 95 people a day how to do it in another language is incredibly special to me. So, if you want to combat teenagers’ low self-esteem and you love magic more than anything else—and if you’re me—you become a French teacher. You spend your days telling teenagers how pricelessly valuable they are while you introduce them to magic. It’s perfect, and I have no plans to quit.

But seven years later, I now know a broader scope of both loneliness and magic. Sometimes kids aren’t the only ones lonely. Sometimes wives are. Sometimes husbands are. I know that loneliness. God blessed me—and I do mean blessed me—with sexual dysfunction, divorce, miscarriages, and complete brokenness before him. And then he blessed me with the grace and peace that come from allowing him to fix the whole crappy mess and make it beautiful, make me beautiful. He healed my heart completely, even from all that junk. Without having gone through the past five years, I don’t know how I would’ve ever come to understand his love, compassion, and eagerness to redeem. I don’t know how I would’ve so intimately learned his presence if I hadn’t had to hold onto him. So now what I love most in the world is Jesus and his unbelievable redemption—which is in my mind the very highest form of magic. And what I still hate most is that some people’s reality is loneliness. When I put together that love and hatred, I get…writing my story.

I tell you this to say thank you, thank you immeasurably, for the encouraging comments and emails. No words exist to express how grateful I am for your willingness to read my story and share yours. I don’t know what form my writing will take—it may be something that exists only in small circles at my own church—but it is the burning in my heart. I want everyone to know that Jesus heals, Jesus rescues, and Jesus loves. I am proof.

And I have to thank JB, without whom—literally—my blog would not exist. In a Gmail chat last May, she said, “Maybe you could write a blog about all this.” So I did because I have learned that, like my boyfriend, she is usually right.

Which brings my gratitude full circle. I anticipate many more moments of saying (slowly and with a French accent), “You are riiiiiiight,” to my man, who will in turn smile and say more nice things to me. I am just that lucky.