I recently finished Salt Garden by Cindy Martinusen. A story of gentle intrigue and beauty at one level, at another it is a whisper of the soul. I lay awake for a long time thinking about the book—and wondering why I pondered it so.

Part of it was my enjoyment of the sheer crafting of Cindy’s words. Sometimes they flowed felt like music in understated perfection—turns of phrases I reread for the simple enjoyment of reading them again.

But there was more—nuggets about life, pain, and God that captured my soul. Sentences I read twice, thrice, four times because I wanted to grasp the truth within them.

The theme that most captured me was of a woman who’d forsaken her passion, her calling (which happened to be as a novelist) because of pain. I wanted to be angry that she’d given up, that she’d allowed grief to make her quit. Yet, at the same time, her life, though secluded from the world and horded away, brimmed with grace. Though she quit in one sense, she never quit in another. She pressed into the heart of God, learning HIM. She spent hours on her knees praying prayers nobody ever knew about, praying for people she didn’t even know.

I think it put me off balance because I wanted it one way or the other. I wanted it to be okay that she’d given up her gifting, that she’d quit, or I wanted it to be wrong that she had. Black and white—yes or no, a clear cut answer about her choices.

But it couldn’t be that way because of grace. It wasn’t either/or. It was if/and.

God met this character where she was and received what she could give as a fragrant offering. He gently led her out of her grief and pushed the boundaries her fear had built. In the novel she never returned to publishing her books, but she stepped through fear and began to live again.

Will I ever get this grace stuff? Will I ever grasp a God who meets us in our frailty and loves us in our failings?

The other reason I lay awake was that I was thinking about my own writing journey. I felt such a sense of God in the writing of that first novel. It was written as I healed and I was full of new answers that the world needs. And I think they are still valid answers. If I hadn’t found them I don’t think I could have grown past them and begun to live in this place of and/if. I would have lived forever in either/or and never known Jesus as I do now.

Many times I’ve been tempted to let that first book go, to count it as a practice book. But when I do someone inevitably comes along who has read it and who carries a belief in all it has to offer.

I again questioned its validity after reading The Salt Garden. I wondered about it because I have grown to a place where I question more, dig deeper, love and let myself be loved with more abandon. So many rules have slipped away and in their place is Jesus. And grace. I want to write from this place.

My question is this: is that first novel still for someone out there? Someone who is where I was? Or is that book just a step to who I am becoming as a writer? I know I don’t want to camp as a writer. There are too many questions to be explored, too much depth to plumb.

I’ve wrestled with this thought most of the week. Part of me wants to just move on and part of me struggles to let go. I’ve asked the Lord which part to listen to and I’m reminded that I promised Him I’d keep walking forward as long as He opened doors—and they continue to open.

Yesterday I re-worked the first chapter. A funny thing happened. My character became more real—less either/or and more and/if. Perhaps this is what the book has been waiting for.
And so, until the Lord tells me differently, I’m not abandoning that first heart project that I love so. I’m just adding to it the benefit of the growth I’ve had since I wrote it the first time. I’m letting it round itself out into something a little deeper, a little less secure, a little less full of answers—it’s metamorphosis is similar to my own as we become a little less black and white and a whole lot more purple and yellow and pink and blue.