Hi Friends,

A little timeline for you—last Tuesday’s:

Under unsettled skies, Blake and I retrieved our pup Doozy from the trainer near Spokane, then drove south—past Steptoe Butte . . .

and deeper into Washington’s greening Palouse. By the time we set up camp on the Snake River and returned uphill for a Leaning on Air book event in Colfax, I’d taken all sorts of photos.

Hours later, I got word that More to Life Magazine had published a piece I’d written for their Intersection Column.

So . . . I thought I’d stir the pics and words—and spill them for you here.

Enjoy!

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If You’d Told Me I Could Lean on Air

Ha! Lean on air? Back when I was a newlywed, if you’d suggested I’d eventually do exactly that, I’d have laughed outright.

Consider the physics. Who can lean on air?

It took me a while to learn that I can.

We’d been married a sneeze over two months when Blake and I packed his Mustang and my old Chevy Impala to the gills, locked up the house we’d tended for my traveling grandparents that summer, and crossed the state to hilly Palouse country, where we settled the sum of our belongings into a rundown cabin sandwiched between railroad tracks and a river culvert.

Our new address: the tiny town of Colfax, Washington, where I’d soon teach English and drama to wheat farmers’ kids at the local high school. Come fall, Blake would commute twenty minutes to Pullman to continue his veterinary studies at Washington State.

We bought a secondhand couch. I wrote lesson plans, made curtains and lasagna. Played house.

And had absolutely no idea how to be married.

Fresh from a broken, faithless home, I had trusted Christ for only four years. A distractible spiritual baby, I was a classic Hebrews 5 milk-drinker, for whom the sparkling concept of Trinity-mimicking oneness in my new marriage was as foreign to me as that Alioth star in the Big Dipper’s handle. Light years away.

Regardless, I was determined to build a marriage and home unlike the one I’d known.

How hard could it be? I’m a bootstraps sort of girl . . . a resilient, goal-oriented self-starter, and I keep my word. Since I’d promised Blake at our engagement that I’d travel whatever deep space necessary to assure our love lasted a lifetime, I believed I would simply do my part alongside the rock-solid man I’d married. Straightforward, start to finish.

My unverbalized mantra in those years? Coach me, God, then turn me loose to perform for you. I’ve got this. Watch me.

Right. If you’ve stayed married for any length of time, you’ve been weeding that strategy from your garden every time it sprouts—just as I do. The longer I’m with my man, and the better I know myself, the more frequently I instead lean on, and into, holy air—the Breath of God that holds me when life’s storms and detours, wonders and routines test me.

I was thinking about those early days when I conceived my Sugar Birds sequel, Leaning on Air. The prospect of writing a story experienced through lenses of Burnaby’s autism and Celia’s unbelief (and set in the breathtaking Palouse I love) cloaked the tale in layers of meaning for me.

As I shaped characters, I identified with ornithologist Celia in a number of ways. Our shared love of birds was a given. On a deeper level, she approached her relationship with equine surgeon Burnaby with self-dependence and relational evasiveness characteristic of my youth. As my own did, her upbringing had hurt her and made her skittish.

In an experience unique to Celia, however, autistic Burnaby’s explanation of how quantum entanglement and the Three-in-One Godhead illustrated their future oneness baffled her. The night he asked her to marry him, a confused Celia pondered his views:

“His science told him they would meld into the single identity of conjoined atomic particles, and his faith said they would become one in a spiritual world she knew nothing about, a world where he and she and this God of his would be indivisible, body and mind and spirit. Marriage would breach every boundary she’d worked so hard to fortify, every barrier she’d built against pain.

“She shoved him, and he pushed himself away, his palms on either side of her, his arms posts for the roof of his body above hers.

“ ‘What?’ he asked.

“ ‘I don’t want to disappear.’

To avoid spoilers, I’ll only say that she doesn’t vanish—but instead learns physically, emotionally, and spiritually to lean on air.

Because of Love’s holy physics, I have, too.

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Speaking of air and marriage, when I endorsed Kendra Broekhuis’s new novel Between You and Us, I said this:

“Broekhuis extracts love’s essence in a story so creative and vivid, so tender and compelling, I scarcely came up for air. Smart, flawless dialogue and fluid plotting build to the unthinkable—and a woman’s decision for her family that readers will ponder for a long, long time.”

Here’s the gist:

When a grieving woman unexpectedly steps into a different version of her life, she must choose between the husband she loves and the daughter she lost in this brave, gripping novel.
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Two possible lives to live. One impossible choice to make.

When Leona Warlon heads across the city to meet her husband, David, for a rare dinner out, she hopes they can share a moment of relief after their year of loss. But Leona quickly realizes this is no ordinary date night. She hasn’t just stepped into an upscale ristorante; she’s stepped into a different version of her life. One in which her marriage is no longer tender, in which her days are pressured by her powerful in-laws, and in which her precious baby girl lived.

Now Leona must weigh the bitter and sweet of both trajectories, facing an unimaginable choice: Stay in a world where tragedy hasn’t struck but where the meaningful life she built with David is gone? Or return to a reality that’s filled with struggle and sorrow but also deep and enduring love?

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📙 📙 📙Would you like to win a copy? Reply with “BETWEEN,” and I’ll drop your name in the hat. (You’ll need to subscribe first.)

I’ll draw a winner next Friday, May 31.

Subscribe now

BTW, I just bought the Titanic soundtrack. When you come for dinner, I’ll play it for you.

It’s syncing right now.

Love,

Cheryl