I didn’t think I would ever say it to one of my children, but then one day it just fell out of my mouth.

“Why do I have to practice piano before I watch Sponge Bob?”

“Why can’t both of the cats and the dog sleep in my bed with me?”

“Why can’t I jump off the wall into the swimming pool?”

And there it was. “Because I said so.”

Throwing out the quick response wasn’t always done because my children couldn’t understand the possible consequences. The majority of the time I gave them a quick answer was because I didn’t want to take the time to explain the reasons they needed to obey.

Lately, I have heard God whispering those four little words to me.

Working through my devotionals, alone in my quaint little home, driving along the highway looking at the desert landscape–all of these times I have heard a holy whisper from God telling me to finish a project I started. I have told God all of the reasons why I shouldn’t finish this project and insisted we talk about something else, but he keeps bringing it back up.

When I ask him why it is so important to him that I finish THIS particular project, he simply replies, “Because I said so.”

The project is one that began several years ago as a story God had placed on my heart. Questions arose as I watched a friend live courageously while dying of cancer. I met Irene through a book club. I was invited into a group where I knew none of the other women. The ladies were reading “The Art of Racing in the Rain” in which one of the characters has cancer. Irene had already been fighting her own battle and she spoke freely about the things she read in the book that were transforming some of her thoughts, as well as those things with which she disagreed. I was immediately drawn to her because not only was she one of the most passionate women I had met in a long time, but she was also one of the most honest. There was no tip-toeing around an issue with Irene. She was blunt and straight forward. In many ways, she was everything I wished I could be. I never became her, but somehow, through God’s grace, I have a daughter who is a lot like Irene.

Watching Irene drift away was devastating. She died in her home in July of 2012. I wouldn’t claim to have felt the pain as deeply as others. She has three children who survived her death, and a handful of very close friends. They are the ones who have had to live life without this soul to remind them of their beauty and their worth. They are the ones who have had to make decisions without her input–knowing full well that she would have had an opinion! But with Irene my closeness to her didn’t matter, because she had the ability to pull in people who barely knew her. She could make everyone feel included in the heart of whatever was happening.

When I first met her she was fierce and strong, like a lioness. Granted, she was a lioness in leopard print with a bright pink bow, but fierce none the less. In her sickness she was becoming frail and weak, like a kitten. Watching this strong, beautiful woman who was close to the same age as myself, slowly drift away was alarming, and made me question my own significance.

One day, before Irene was too weak, we had gone for a hike in Marshal Canyon. This hike is more like a walk through the trees, and Irene begged me to take her. While walking I found myself confessing some of my deepest fears about my own identity to Irene. Even though I would come away feeling selfish for talking about myself to a dying woman, she didn’t make me feel that way then, and I don’t think she would see it that way today. She listened to the fears I had about sins I was fearful I might be capable of committing, and the confusion I was dealing with in regards to my marriage.

It was on this hike that she encouraged me to take my questions, fears, and doubts and give them to God in the form of a book. She told me that the greatest strength I would have over these areas of weakness was to talk about them.

It was shortly after that hike that I began to write “Kimly’s Trade”. The tale of a woman who in the middle of a marital crisis travels to Thailand desperately searching for significance. One of the key verses that came to me as I told her story was Matthew 16:25. I began to realize that the question I was trying to answer could be found in that verse.

Then I set it aside.

Even though God had called me to write it and take it to completion, I didn’t. Perhaps it was pride, perhaps it was fear–maybe it was just plain laziness. Whatever the reasons were, or the mixture of reasons, I put aside the story I had written, and I didn’t finish what God had told me to do.

So many things happened after that.

I turned my back on writing. I turned my back on transparency.

Now, here we are several years later and hundreds of miles away from that hiking trail, and God has called me to finish what I started when I first penned Kimly’s Trade. Through the last year and a half of blogging and reading God has allowed me to see areas where my writing can be improved, He has given me new insight to old struggles, and he has removed a lot of the fear that once held me in restraint.

Tired of resisting God, and fully aware of how things turned out the last time I resisted Him, I returned to the keyboard, doing a lot of cringing and some major rewrites on Kimly’s Trade.

Finally, knowing this venture would require a step of faith, I submitted to him completely and started the fundraising campaign with Indiegogo to raise the money to get the manuscript in front of a professional editor and published. I did the research and put together a plan.

Ironically, the very day that I was set to start the campaign, I received some bad news that left me feeling more depleted than I had felt in a long time. My heart was sad, but I did not fail to recognize the coincidence in the timing of the bad news with the timing of taking this step. Stopping was not going to glorify God. Moving forward in obedience was all He was asking.

Even today, as I look at what is required to make Kimly’s Trade fully honoring to the Lord, I am filled with doubt. I find myself waking in the middle of the night and praying for God to help me with the rewrites and take the characters to a greater depth. Do you have any idea how strange it feels to be praying for fictional characters? Can you imagine how vulnerable a person feels when they find themselves discussing non-existent beings with the one who created every being in existence?

Without understanding why God would ask me to do something so silly, my fears set in and I ask God, “Why can’t I just blog? Why do I have to tell Kimly’s fictional story?”

And He responds, “Because I said so.”

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Where do you come in? Quite simply, we can’t publish Kimly’s Trade without your help.