The Scent of Joy Rises from Our Sorrow

+ The Lord Is My Courage releases this week! 🤯 🎉

Tomorrow my second book will make her way onto doorsteps and bookshelves across the country and world. I’m smiling thinking of you holding The Lord Is My Courage in your hands, suffused by a joy that smells sweeter than I expected. The joy of sharing this book has been made sweeter by the sorrow that preceded publishing it.

sitting in one of my fave spots, on a trail I couldn’t have hiked even a month ago 😭🙌🏼

I almost didn’t get to be part of releasing my own book. You read that right…

I started 2022 with bright hopes and bold intentions, but by the end of the first week of January, my big dreams were laying down beside me, sick in bed. I haven’t felt ready to share a lot of this on social media yet, because—let’s be honest—I’ve been hate-dog-piled by people of a different political persuasion than me on Instagram one too many times…But this is substack. You have chosen to give me room in your inbox, so I’ll let you farther into my life than the crowd. Be gentle with me, okay? 

I’m going to type this up more quickly than I would normally, because otherwise, I might not work up the courage to share it soon at all. This is partly a personal update, partly a description of the strange scent of joy that I can’t help but share with you. (TLDR: make sure you scroll to the end for some really fun bonus gifts when you preorder The Lord Is My Courage.)

Long story short, an infection turned into chaos in my already immunocompromised body, and by March I had spent three months in bed, was struggling to hold my own body up, and found myself answering a phone call from my editor/publisher who said, “KJ, I want you to know that even if you can’t be part of releasing this book when it actually comes out, everything will be okay. You can personally work on releasing it in the Fall—or whenever you are feeling better—but we care more about you being well than we do about a big book release.” (Rare kindness, that.)

I said thank you, told him I absolutely agreed, and then hung up the phone and wept. I’ve worked for two years to release The Lord Is My Courage, but I found myself needing to release my expectations for the book and its publication first. 

Sometimes we must drop our dreams to the dirt. Sometimes we have to watch the ground where we had planted goodness grow cracked and dry. Sometimes, more often than I wish were true, Love asks us to sit back and witness the mystery that death brings life. 

Instead of creating campaigns to release this book with panache, I scheduled specialist appointments for the growing list of concerns with my body. Instead of seeing clients and holding space for their trauma, I canceled all my plans for over a month to tend to my own current trauma. I made the hard choices to care for my body. And I got more bloodwork done than I have had my entire life (My record is now 18 vials at once. LOL.). Real footage of my transition into being a vampire below…

Photo by David Balev on Unsplash

Somewhere along the way, we learned that covid was the culprit of my entire cascade of new health problems. The only reason we hadn’t known it from the beginning was that covid—unbeknownst to most of my specialists—often goes undetected in patients who are as immunocompromised as me. Even with a booster shot in me, covid ripped through my body’s systems, creating chaos at every turn. I shudder to think of what might have happened had I not had a vaccine at all. 

☹️

Let’s just say I am unbelievably grateful to be alive right now.

Before January, I had one disease, which was enough to keep me as dependent on grace as a tree needs light. I now have 7 diseases and conditions, most of which my immunologist believes I will have my entire life. I’m thirty-three years old, and I’m sobered by the fragility of my life. I’ll be starting high-dose IVIG (immunoglobulin infusions) soon to treat several of these diseases at once, including the primary immunodeficiency we uncovered. In six months, we’ll see if it works. If it does, I’ll probably receive IVIG every 3-4 weeks for the rest of my life.

These past six months, I’ve been living the pulse of The Lord Is My Courage in a way I never anticipated. Courage is collective. Courage is practiced. Courage grows in the dark, dry dirt of the dying of our dreams. It smells of sweat and tears and salt. It takes our fear and fragility and fertilizes it into joy.

In March, I hobbled my way into cardiac rehab, where I confessed to the intake nurse that I was subsisting off of McDonald’s fries and green protein smoothies because I couldn’t keep any other food down (turns out you crave + need mass amounts of sodium with my condition!)…but also that I wasn’t sure I could keep living like this. The terribleness of how miserable I was seemed too insurmountable to change. 

When I started cardiac rehab, my doctors and exercise physiologists had me working on holding my body up in bed for two-hour stretches at a time. I could barely make it two minutes long on the gentlest exercise machine (the one even the oldest heart attack patients barely used…😬). Week after week, I kept showing up. Many times, the work of moving my limbs wore me out so much, I’d spend the following 24 hours in bed. 

Manny, Mel, and the cardiac rehab team greeted me with kindness every single week. They didn’t shame the tears that fell when I told them about new diagnoses. They didn’t laugh when I cried for joy at finally being strong enough to move from the recumbent bike to the treadmill. They looked me in the eyes and said, “You are doing amazing. This is huge.”

“Courage is not something we can cultivate on our own. It is something we hold in common, a gift we confer on each other. It is the communion we offer with our faces, in safe spaces, with words that break the bondage of yesterday’s shame and harm, rooting us in the reality that Beloved is who we are.”

—The Lord Is My Courage, p. 229-230

On Friday, I graduated from cardiac rehab. Mel stood by my treadmill as I came close to my final cooldown and said, “KJ, I want you to know that witnessing you show up here has been beautiful. You have come so far. Do you realize how sick you were when you started? What you are capable of today is stunning.” And I got to look straight back into the eyes that saw way too many of my hard moments for comfort and say, “I couldn’t have done this without you.”

“I couldn’t have cared for my body in the way she needed without your support. You gave me the courage to care for my body in a way that was too hard to do on my own.”

Mel put Brandi Carlile’s “The Story” on the speakers, per my graduation request, and I cooled down to the sound of this season becoming part of the story of courage creating communion and joy. After the other heart patients and I stretched to finish, Mel walked out to my car with me, where I got to give her one of the first copies of The Lord Is My Courage and tell her, “Your work matters more than you know. You confer courage on your patients in ways we can’t conjure up on our own.”

here’s me, fresh from crying after graduating from cardiac rehab + giving thanks for the support that got me here

The trauma of this season was too much for me to take. Until I had tender, skilled folks stand on the cracked dirt of my days with me. 

Yesterday, I stepped outside my apartment to switch over our laundry (yep, I live in an apartment and don’t have my own washer and dryer. My life is *glamorous.*), and all around me, the earth perfumed joy. I stood there on the asphalt of our parking lot, mist rising up from the hot, wet ground, and savored the earthy scent of petrichor. Petrichor is the scent the soil makes when, after a long dry season, water falls. The scent of summer. The scent of the earth’s smile. A scent that is only possible after the land has been parched.

Some scientists coined the term petrichor after the Greek word petros, which means “stone,” and ichor, which means “the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods.” Just like rain expresses the scent of sage or flowers, it breaks down a molecule made by bacteria in the dirt, geosmin, and releases its scent into the air. What was cracked becomes fragrant. What seemed dead becomes alive. Out of the broken earth, we are given a scent that soars.

Courage comes from our cracked places. There is more happening within us, under the cover of darkness, where the substance of others’ kindness and support meets the dirt of our dying dreams and even despair.

Do not curse your cracked earth.

The rain will come. And the most stunning scent will rise.

Every dying thing and dream is the start of new life.

With joy, with love, and with wonder at how the water we most need always comes through the darkest valley (and, yes, you can read a helluva lot more about how in The Lord Is My Courage TOMORROW),

—KJ

The Lord Is My Courage releases in mere hours! But if you preorder one or more copies today, you can claim some fun bonus gifts. (Make sure you fill out the form on my website to claim your gifts!)

Preordering a book is the number one way you can support authors you appreciate. Preorder sales + sales in the first week make a huge impact on helping new readers find the book, getting on bestseller’s lists, getting on more bookshelves, and beyond. Thank you for supporting my work and this message by preordering. I can’t express how encouraging it has been to watch so many of you rally behind the message of a Good Shepherd, of honesty about harm, and the courage that is possible in the midst of fear. Now onto your presents:

Preorder one copy, and you can claim:

• A free downloadable print for the book

• Access to a preview of the audiobook

• Early, exclusive access to a preview of the book

Preorder two or more copies (this counts even if you preorder say, the audiobook + your paperback copy, or if you get one for yourself + one to give to a friend) + you can claim:

• A totebag with graphic elements from the book*

• A sneak peek at my next next book (yes, I’ve been keeping some secrets…), releasing Winter 2023!