What if the created world is speaking reminders of God’s presence, healing, and hope every single day—we just need to slow down enough to notice?

What can foggy skies, dormant trees, nesting birds, and changing seasons teach us about God?

Award-winning author, naturalist, and photographer Cheryl Bostrom joins Willow for a beautiful conversation about how creation speaks daily, revealing reminders of God’s character, presence, healing, and faithfulness—even in the seasons when He feels far away.

Cheryl has spent a lifetime paying attention to the natural world. Growing up amid the forests of the Pacific Northwest, she experienced sorrow and heartbreak within her own family and learned early to find solace outside. Those experiences eventually found their way into her award-winning novel Sugar Birds, a story that explores guilt, shame, suffering, belonging, and the questions we ask about God when life hurts.

One of Cheryl’s most powerful reminders comes from an ordinary Pacific Northwest winter day. Fog may make it impossible to see the trees clearly, and thick clouds may completely hide the sun—but the trees are still there and the light hasn’t disappeared. Beneath the ground, roots are growing. Sap is beginning to move. What appears dormant is already preparing for another season of life.

For Cheryl, creation becomes a tangible reminder that even when we can’t see what God is doing, He is still present and at work.

Meet Cheryl Bostrom

Cheryl Bostrom is a Pacific Northwest naturalist, photographer, and award-winning author. Her writing has appeared in Upper Room Disciplines and God & Nature magazine, and she previously wrote for Women of Faith. She is the author of the award-winning novel Sugar Birds, The View from Goose Ridge: Watching Nature, What the River Keeps, and Leaning on Air.

Cheryl began pursuing fiction at age 60, and Sugar Birds went on to receive recognition from the American Fiction Awards, Readers' Favorite Awards, Best Book Awards, and Christianity Today.

Key Takeaways

• When God feels hidden: Remember that unseen doesn't mean absent. Just as the sun remains behind thick clouds, God remains present even when we can't see Him clearly.
• When life feels like winter: Pay attention to what may be happening beneath the surface. Roots grow underground before spring appears.
• When you need to hear from God: Go outside and pay attention. Cheryl suggests photographing something ordinary or beautiful and asking, If this picture could talk, what would it tell me about the One who made it?
• When a dream hasn't happened yet: Don't assume not yet means never. Cheryl began writing fiction at 60 and encourages women to develop their gifts while trusting God's timing.
• When someone else's gift catches your attention: Encourage her. A few simple words of affirmation can help someone find the courage to pursue what God has placed within her.

How This Episode Will Encourage You

Maybe you’re walking through your own winter right now.

Something feels dead. A prayer seems unanswered. A dream hasn’t happened. God feels hidden behind a mile of clouds, and you’re struggling to see evidence that anything is changing.

Cheryl invites us to go outside and pay attention.

Look at the bare branch. Notice the changing seasons. Take a picture of something ordinary and ask, “If this picture could talk, what would it tell me about the One who made it?”

Creation reminds us that unseen doesn’t mean absent. Dormant doesn’t mean dead. And winter doesn’t mean spring isn’t coming.

Whether you’re navigating suffering, waiting for a dream, or simply longing to experience God’s presence again, this conversation will encourage you to slow down, look around, and notice the ways creation may be speaking words of hope right where you are.

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Welcome to the Collide Podcast. We're a growing community of everyday gals colliding with Jesus in our mess, our pain, our joy, and our stories. We value showing up as we truly are.

So that's what you'll find here, walls and masks being torn down so that we can allow Jesus to meet us where we truly are and hear about other women doing the same. We can't wait to collide with.

But you don't have to be a physicist to walk outside in any area on a week like this one. We have an ice fog around us. It's 34 degrees.

You can hardly see 100 yards ahead, and yet you can recognize that even though there's fog, the trees are still there. Even though the sun is occluded by a mile of heavy overcast, the sun, the light, is still there.

So even when we're in the thick of it, the things that anchor and ground us are still present and are still steadfast.

Hey there. Welcome to the Collide Podcast. This is Willow Weston, the founder and director of Collide.

And one of my favorite things I get to do at my job here is host this podcast every single week. I feel so blessed to be able to sit down with amazing people doing amazing things, seeing God show up in their lives and I today get an interview.

Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including the Upper Room Disciplines in the American Scientific Affiliations, God and Nature magazine for which she's a regular photo essayist. She's a former columnist for Women of Faith and the author of the award winning novel Sugar Birds which we're going to talk about today.

She's also written two non fiction books called View from Goose Ridge, Watching Nature, Seeing Life, and also children at Promise9 principles to help Kids Thrive in an At Risk World with Dr. Tim Stewart.

So today we have so much to talk about and I'm excited to have a rich conversation with this woman who has a lot to say about God, faith and the seasons of life. So Cheryl, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you Willow. It's so good to be here.

Tell us how God unfolded this gift he's given you of writing.

Unfolded it throughout my life, but I usually wrote short, short form nonfiction and then long form nonfiction and I wrote a fair bit of poetry and did a measure of editing for people and then taught English at the high school level. So words have been My steady companion for my whole life. When I turned 60, I just started taking a look at things that I wanted to.

I wanted to do or that I'd always wanted to do, that now that I had this wonderful season of relative freedom from other responsibilities that I could do. And one thing that had always terrified me, literally terrified me, was writing fiction.

Apart from a few short stories when I was younger, I really hadn't dabbled much in it. So I dove in, learning everything I could, and got to work with some marvelous people.

And I was part of a group of writers who gave me a writing prompt that included a girl and a fire. And if I remember correctly, because this was several years ago, I got to choose from a list, and those were the two things that I chose.

So I wrote a sketch about a girl who accidentally lights a fire and then hides in a Pacific Northwest forest. And it was just, I don't know, few hundred words. And members of the class started writing to me.

And the instructor wrote to me privately and encouraged me to continue with this story. And what it did for me was to give me a measure of eligibility that I could pursue this writing form and maybe do some more with it. And.

And also the importance of community in encouraging us in. In whatever avenue of faith expression we choose. So that's the short version.

Yeah. Did you write as a little girl? Did you start writing when you were young? Or was it more something you said? Words have been your steady companion.

Has that been true since you were young, or mostly in your adult life?

I started writing poetry probably when I was five years old, and I still have some of those, and they're just really simple. But the rhythm. The rhythm and the meter and the metrical feet. The whole thing about rhymed poetry was really fun for me. And I'm not a linear thinker.

I'm a very experiential, random thinker. So thoughts often arrive with me as illustrations or that's one reason I love photography so much.

So distilling a piece down to the essence of a poem, or taking. Trying to put words to a photograph that I had taken. I've always loved that as long as I can remember.

Hmm.

It's so interesting to me that at the age of 60, words had been your steady companion, but you were terrified to write fiction, and yet you were challenging yourself to do something you were terrified to do. And you sort of described this group, and they came into your life and they encouraged you to keep going.

And when you were telling that story, I was thinking, what do you think would have happened had those people not taken just that simple step to reach out, encourage, and encourage you in that writing. What do you think would have happened with this idea, with the girl in the fire?

That's a really good question.

You know, I may have written a different story, but I still think that God had this for me and that he was going to accomplish it one way or another in my life and he would have inspired me to write regardless because I, I can't not write. And I think the encouragement is just a sweet gift that he invites others to participate in.

And I think sometimes too, when, when he's given me an opportunity to encourage someone else, the gift is not only for that other person, but it's also for me to be part of what he's doing. And I don't know if that answered that at all.

Yeah, well, I just love that. I think encouragement is free and it's simple. And so often we just get busy.

We think about it, we think about, oh, that was amazing, I should encourage that person to lean into that. We don't go out of our way to actually say something.

And it's really amazing to me and beautiful that God used those voices to tell you to keep doing something you were terrified in doing. And you ended up writing this book called Sugar Birds. And I, I want to hear about it and I also want to hear.

What did it take for you to accomplish wr this book?

Well, it took a lot more than at the get go I thought it would. It's the hardest thing. It's the hardest thing I've ever written. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

But it was positively exhilarating to take it layer by layer and then watch these themes emerge from a story about a 10 year old girl who accidentally lights this devastating fire and then hides in a Pacific Northwest forest.

And the ways in which her guilt and her shame for lighting this fire in which through which she believes she's killed her parents, the way, the ways that, that loaded her with this guilt and shame that transformed her worldview is something that really resonates with an awful lot of readers. And so this little girl hides in the. In a physical wilderness.

But it's illustrative of how we as human beings will hide in wildernesses of our own making, spiritual or emotional wilderness, when we don't feel loved.

She had an entire community of people who really cared about this little girl and cared about her family searching for her, searching for her in this forest. And she thought they were going to send her to juvie. She even thought the milkman hated her. And so she hides.

And in the process, she wrestles with this God that her dad has taught her about. And her dad, who is a, his name's Harris.

And he has left the Alaska Forest Service to come back to Whatcom county, where he and his wife have started an heirloom seed business. He knows a ton about nature. He's taught her how to track. He and his wife have taught her about foraging and about just the ways of the woods.

So Aggie's very comfortable in the forest, but when her mother develops an advancing mental illness and she starts losing her mother, this little girl is just besieged by sadness. So her dad sends her into the woods.

He goes into the woods with her, but he encourages her to go into the woods and find these nests of wild birds and then sketch them and in the process to. To learn to hear the father's song and then draw the father's song.

And it's an introduction to Aggie to see the love of God in the created world and to experience the character of God as she experiences his creation.

And so once she is hiding in the woods where she believes she's got her only friends because she's a pretty isolated little girl, she starts to question all the things that her dad has taught her about God being loving or God keeping her safe. And she's memorized the catechism, parts of the catechism. And so she questions safety from God. Does he really keep us safe?

She questions his goodness, Is he really good? She questions his suffering. You know, she questions suffering that he allows to happen. And, and is any suffering too bad to be redeemed?

So through the course of the story, those are themes that she deals with.

And then there's a counter narrative where the 16 year old girl whose dad has tricked her into coming up to spend time to rehabilitate birds with her grandmother, and he's trying to get her away from a friend that's not good for her. While he goes on a job, he brings her up to Whatcom county and she arrives just as the search party for Aggie is beginning.

And her narrative too has her dealing with her suffering and her interest in exacting revenge and her wondering, you know, why she has experienced this abandonment from both her dad and her mother. And so both of these girls who lose their fathers, so to speak, experience a loss that really changes them and they lose their way.

And so then the subject comes in then too, about, about our need for a father, whether he's a physical father or a spiritual father, and how knowing that we are beloved by our father changes our narrative.

Hmm. I am ready to pick this book up right now. Can we just stop this podcast? It sounds fascinating. Cheryl, I'm curious.

I mean, you talk the power of guilt and shame and this girl going and hiding in the wilderness and both girls sort of losing their way. Is there a piece of your own story that resonates with those things?

Oh, sure, yeah. Every character in the book is a composite, both of myself and of people I've known. So there's no one person that you can identify in the story.

And even if they are composites, the stories are markedly changed. So don't try to look for. I encourage readers not to try to look for any one person who is a direct parallel to any one of the characters.

But, but I was raised on the Olympic Peninsula peninsula by, you know, by a pioneer family. My grand, my granddad was an Alaska pioneer. My, you know, generational pioneers. My granddad was raised in Alaska.

The family pioneered the Port Angeles area when it was still the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony. And I grew up in the 50s, you know, when a lot of those old growth forests were still coming down and, and log trucks would travel through town.

Three log trucks with just one tree on them.

And we had a lot of heartache in our family and, and a mother who suffered some of the same, not the same type of, of mental illness, but who suffered some of the same issues as, as Aggie's mother did.

And so I knew a lot of sorrow and a lot of heartbreak as a child growing up and was encouraged by my grandparents to, you know, to find solace in the natural world. And so aggie, as this 10 year old girl climbs to these ridiculous heights in these trees.

She's 10 years old, but her dad's underneath her and he has her. Mostly she's climbing Doug Firs.

And if you've ever looked at Doug Firs, you know that you can climb pretty far up in that tree and if you fall, you're going to bump around a little bit, but it's not going to be, it's not going to kill you.

So my sister and I, even though in the story Aggie climbs a lot of different trees and she moves between the trees pretty handily, mostly my sister and I climbed Doug Firs.

And while we did move between trees a bit, we didn't do it as nimbly or as extensively as Aggie does, but we climbed these tall trees and I can remember a couple of instances where we went to those ridiculous heights and I'm talking 60, 70ft up in the air.

And yet in the story, Aggie's experience of her father being underneath her is what gives her the courage to do extravagant things, these wild, wonderful things in the forest that she does. So there's a parallel there.

And then of course, with celia As a 16 year old, there's some of my 16 year old self that shows up there along with, you know, the angst that, that a number of 16 year olds I taught in high school as well show up.

There's one character who's a secondary character, but he has a very large presence in the story and his name is Burnaby and he's a 17 year old autistic savant.

And I've had some wonderful connections with people on the spectrum in my life and I wanted to have a character who was beautiful and beloved and interesting, not in spite of his autistic traits, but because of them. And so Burnaby has a lot to do with the theme of resurrection in the story. And he likes Celia is a math lover and a nature lover.

And so those two find a connection that becomes very meaningful to Celia and then they both show up in the sequel that I'm writing that takes place 20 years later. So, so that's fun.

Oh, wow, you're writing a sequel. I didn't know that. Cheryl, what do you hope happens in the hearts and lives of your readers?

Well, I think for Christ followers, I hope that they'll be encouraged to, to recognize what. What we've all learned in so many different ways through the word of God is that our God's a redeemer and that he's absolutely near.

And there's nothing too horrible that can ever happen that can't be restored and that can't be. That can't be made new. And that they will also recognize in some of these characters their own stories.

And that there is a song that transcends any type of suffering that we could be going through.

For non Christian readers or for just those who are not looking for a piece that has spiritual themes in it and who've just picked this book up as a, as an adventure story in the general market, I hope it will give them pause to consider the created world as an expression of the character of God and that through the story they too will look at their own areas of suffering in ways that they may have rejected God through that. And just consider maybe the possibility that he has been near all the time and that there is beauty that can come out of even the very worst things.

And that would be my hope, and that it would start the discussion. So often now, anything that transcends the visual or the immediate physical world or a world that's wrapped in self doesn't get talked about.

And the themes that are in this story are relevant to every human being. It's a book about hungers and it's a book about love. And we all have to make decisions about what we're going to do with both of them.

We live in what some are calling the anxiety culture. We worry as friends, daughters, mothers and grandmothers. We're getting gray hairs because we're nervous Nellies.

We're taking chill pills because we're worried sick. For some of us, one second we can be doing okay, and the next a Facebook post sends us into anxious fill.

As you engage scripture, read personal stories and reflect on questions that invite you to new places, you will be challenged, encouraged and inspired by this study. We can't wait for you to dive in, so go to wecollide.netstore to get your copy of the Birds and the Lilies. Now,.

You say that creation speaks daily.

And for someone who's listening right now, who needs a word from God, they they're yearning to experience God or hear from God or feel like they've prayed a thousand prayers and haven't heard from God. How do you experience experience God speaking to you outside in creation? And what does it require of us to experience that too?

That's a really good question. Early on, I became a student of nature and a student, a student of the scientific application of God's truth.

And I have, in fact, I have a friend whose faith and whose prayer life developed because of the uncertainty that's present in quantum physics. But you don't have to be a physicist to walk outside in the winter in any area.

And I realize this will go to those who live in sunny climates as well. But in any type of season that is less than idyllic.

Here in Northwest Washington, we can walk outside on, well, like on a week like this one where we have an ice fog around us. It's 34 degrees, you can hardly see 100 yards ahead, and yet you can recognize that even though there's fog, the trees are still there.

Even though the sun is occluded by a mile of heavy overcast the sun, the light is still there. So even when we're in the thick of it, the things that anchor and ground us are still present and are still steadfast.

In January, roots are growing underground.

The buds, the SAP starts moving in the trees that will make leaves that will bring back the life and the greenery that we feel like, that we feel has deserted us.

But because we know seasons and we know the rhythm of the seasons, we know that when things seem dead and they seem broken and they seem gone, that life returns and God is present and, and the earth keeps spinning until he has a different plan. And those are just super fit. You know, those are just simple, simple illustrations. But, you know, here's a beautiful one.

Okay, so this last summer we had those 108 degree days and it was right in the heart of nest, bird nesting season. And the birds had, had. They were sitting eggs all over the place, these little passerines around our land.

And we know where a number of those nests are. They were sitting on eggs. And those eggs of a sparrow, for instance, shouldn't live past 104 and a half degrees.

And yet there was one nest down in my currents from which three of the four eggs hatched even after that unbelievable heat.

So you have this sense that we, where we think we know the extent of possibility of healing and life in the natural world, we will see exceptions to that all the time. And we will see God as a healer. And God is a life giver and a life bringer, even though, humanly speaking, we can't grasp it.

And it seems beyond us, seems impossible. And then he does it again. And a new season comes and life is restored. It's beautiful.

I could listen to you talk about this all day. I personally have been through the last six months a rough season. I lost my mom and a whole host of other things.

And in my kitchen just two weeks ago, I have this yellow frame chalkboard and I try to write some sort of inspirational thing on there that I need in my own home. And I wrote, the tulips are at work underground. And my teenager came downstairs and she said, what is that? No, but I know what it means.

It means that there's good and there's life coming out of winter, springs coming out of winter. That there's life coming out of debt, that there's hope right underground. And though we can't see it, it's coming.

And tried to explain it to her and I think she was looking for me to write something, you know, like hope, peace and joy or Something.

But I shared that because just listening to you talk, I think it's so powerful sometimes to just go be outside and be reminded of some of these simple truths and to hold on to them when things are really, really hard. I mean, you wrote another book called the View from Goose Ridge, which is a collection of devotional nature essays. And I'm just kind of curious.

If you could give people an assignment in nature to go on some sort of field trip, what would you have them do?

Oh, boy. I would say. I would say take your. Take your phone or your camera outside and start taking pictures of things large and small.

Maybe a scene that you think is beautiful, but maybe something you think is very common or something that you've seen every day. And then.

Because sometimes it's hard to live in the moment, sometimes it's hard to spot things right then and know what God may be saying to you through them. Then go back through those pictures, enlarge them. You know, look at them on your computer or make them big on your screen or your tablet.

And then ask yourself, if this picture could talk, what would it? Tell me about the one who made it. You know, about the one who created it.

So let's say you take a picture of a winter branch that's got nothing on it, and you'll hear stuff. You know, ask God to.

What is that? That's weird. No one knows what that means. And I was like, pictures.

Or even if you're just on a walk, ask him to anoint your imagination with the Holy Spirit's eyes to see things you've never seen before. And if you're patient and you're.

And you're just willing to keep doing that, and let's say you give yourself 10 minutes a day to carve that time out, to go out into the created world and just look at something and think about it, trusting that God's going to give you a word. You're just going to be astonished with beauty and joy in his presence, because that's just what he does.

And he loves to do that because he invites us out there.

Yeah.

Makes me want to rest.

Carol, you. You mentioned seasons a few times, and how you. Watching what happens in creation in the outdoors through seasons often speaks to you about God.

And I just wonder, you know, you're a woman who's gone through many seasons. You. You have been a mom. You are a grandparent. You're now your adult kids don't live with you, and you're a grandparent. You have gone through that.

I can't begin to understand in this short podcast.

But when you think about all that you've gone through as a woman, all the varying seasons, if you could rewind and go back to you in your sort of early twenties, what do you wish you would have known about the seasons a woman's life goes through? What do you wish you would have known about God and life and faith, then that would have helped you through the varying seasons?

I've thought about that, actually.

I I think I would first off, I would not worry or I would ask God to help keep me from worrying because I'm convinced that nothing, nothing is that that worry does not solve anything. It solves nothing.

And it and it wastes time in which I could have gone to the Father and asked I by nature in my early God through raise, you know, building in me the fruits of the Holy Spirit has made me patient in my you know, now that I'm a woman of a certain age.

But I was not patient at all when I was younger, and I would often lose my connection with him through impatience and feeling that I had to do things myself or that I had to figure out solutions. But the verse that's come to mean so much to me is trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding.

In all your ways, acknowledge him and he'll make your paths straight. And that lends itself to the development of patience, God centeredness, humility, loss of loss of self, sustenance and dependence on Him.

It just that that verse in and of itself, which of course is just a touchstone on which so many other truths land would be, that would probably be one that is accessible to a young person that would have been more accessible to me if I had dwelt on that every day. And I think I wasted a lot of time, you know, and then I ran into the verse that says he restores the years that the locusts have eaten.

So I was all over that.

I'm all over that too. You here you are in the season where you are, I would imagine seeing some of your dreams come true.

Having written all of these books, you've recently won a lot of awards. I'm going to read some of them off to you that I, in my stocking of your life, have heard about.

When you do all this work, because I would imagine as someone who writes but is younger than you and obviously haven't won all that, but sometimes you wonder if your writing is for not. And you spent years and years and years writing and putting out books, and now you're winning all these awards.

What does that feel like for you to be awarded for your work and, and your work?

Well, it's. To God's glory. It's pretty, it's pretty fun because I, I wouldn't have, you know, I wouldn't have seen my work in that position.

But I think what it does is it, if it.

To the extent that it gets recognition for the work and might compel a reader to pick up up the book, it expresses God's creativity in, in how he gets his word out. I guess, you know, it's been pretty. It, it has, it has been fun because it opens doors to my next project and then the project after that.

And there are some things in the works, and I really like that. But I also recognize that it's only 15 minutes. You know, what do they say?

You know, an award, an award comes and then it, you know, then the next, then the next person gets awarded the same thing, and then the next person. So I don't take myself too seriously, but I do take God seriously, and I think that he empowered that.

I think a big thing is that the first awards that this book won were in the general market and they weren't evaluated by. In a Christian context.

But then, but then when it crossed over into Christianity Today's, that award of merit, it officially then crossed into the Christian market. And that was extremely gratifying and joyful to me because I'm one who likes to express the view that all truth is God's truth.

And that if, if I can express truth in fiction, then it's relevant in any market to every human being. And that's my prayer that it will, that it will have, have the potential to make lives better, maybe even be transformative.

Although that will be up to God, not up to me, but. But I love that.

Yeah, that's so cool.

Cheryl, did you ever have seasons where you longed to write words that God could take and transform people, but you had moments where you're giving up on that becoming a reality for you when it came to writing?

Oh, yeah, because I did an awful lot of writing in my head, mowing the lawn, wondering how in the world where it would go.

But I had the coolest thing happen to me that Just again showed his God's hand and his, you know, delight yourself in him and he'll give you the desires of your heart. And sometimes that means changing the desires of your heart, but other times it means affirming them. And I was.

You know, I taught when I was first married. When I was 22, I. I started teaching at a little country school while my husband and I were in graduate school in Colfax, Washington.

And while I was there, I had a student named Chris Burai. And one year I went to a conference in San Diego with my husband,.

Who.

I went to a conference in San Diego with him, and we met for lunch with Chris Buri and his wife because they lived in San Diego and Chris was working down there. And I'd always really liked to this kid and, you know, who's now an accomplished professional and working in San Diego area.

And he asked me what my dream was. And I said, I would love to write for women looking for. Looking. Looking for God in daily life. And, you know, to. To.

To try to, you know, maybe women who are disenfranchised, women who may not even have a church home, but who are being called by the Holy Spirit maybe, or at least to recognize that there is an element of life that's spiritual that we can't ignore. And. And so I said that. I don't know how I said it, but I said, it's something like that over a salad and a sunny day in San Diego.

And a few years later, Chris calls me and he says, and at this time, he's working for New Way Ministries. And he says, Cheryl, he says, you know, you've heard of Women of Faith, right? And I said, well, yeah, I'd been to their conferences.

You know, they used to. For 20 years, they had conferences all over the country. And he said, they're looking for. They're looking for a columnist for their new website.

Do you think you've got something in you that you could write for this? And so I said, well, how long are these pieces? He says, oh, 300 words. And, you know, and it was a.

He actually was offering to hire me for Women of Faith to write this column. So I gave it a shot. And he says, just try it for a month to see what you think. So I started writing this column for Women of Faith.

Another writer named Karen Linneman who you. Whom you may have heard of. And I each wrote a column, a weekly column for this Women of Faith website.

And, you know, the conferences were going on and at one point that. At one point that those columns were getting a million downloads a month.

And it was before we even understood, before I even understood what Platform was. But it had a huge presence. And the View from Goose Ridge book came out of a collection of those columns.

And then, you know, and then I wrote the other half of the book specifically for that. But to me, that was absolutely God's prompting of Chris to think of me in that moment when there was that spot.

And it was something that I could never. Would never have orchestrated or even thought of on my own. And it opened the door to devotional writing for me.

That has been really gratifying to be what I consider to be in partnership with God on that. That, you know, or at least his.

At least his little UPS girl delivering things he would have, say just through my life and through the way that I would put it into those columns, which again, is from him.

So, Cheryl, I'm so glad you shared that piece of your story, because I think a lot of people can see the now and not hear that season where you wondered if this dream that you had, whatever, come true. And I think about women listening right now who have big dreams for their lives.

And they, they, you know, you talked about should their, their plans change, the desires of the heart change, or should they be affirmed? Which is a good, A good word. I, I wrote it down myself.

But for women who have big dreams and they want to see those dreams become a reality, what's your advice for them in this season of waiting, in the season of God preparing your heart in the season of not yet?

Well, I would say to be careful because we can have pretty big dreams that are our own concoctions, and we, we sometimes want to do things for God rather than with God and the ego.

And I'm.

I'm only saying this knowing myself and knowing things I have thought in different years. I'm not assigning any judgment to anyone.

It's just as I have become more knowledgeable about myself and my, you know, areas where I am inclined to go it alone and to believe that it's up to me to define my identity. I'd say be careful, be patient.

Because if God has this for you, you know, develop the skills, learn what you need to do, you know, take the next steps, but keep giving it back over to him. Because I've watched women in huge hurries. And have even done some of this myself, who maybe when their children were of a certain age, where the.

The real task before them was more of a quiet, private coming alongside those who really needed them.

And they sabotaged that and sabotaged themselves and their relationships with their children or with their families because they're pursuing this dream that they believe God has given them. You know, true, it may be a dream from God, but don't let your timing screw it up, you know, because your. My. My ways. God's ways are not my ways.

And my timing is not his timing. I mean, I'm going to be 68 in March and I am getting to write these novels.

And if you would have told me when I was in my, you know, when I was in my 20s or 30s, that this part of what I had wanted to do my whole life.

Life.

Would come to fruition in my old age, I would say, well, you know, that's a Sarah story. It's not my story, but Sarah had a baby when she was, you know, in her 90s. You know, give it time. There's no hurry. It's gonna happen. Just trust him.

Trust him because he's faithful and he will do it. He will do what is the very best thing for you. And I. I believe that with everything in me now, you know, even as I'm.

I don't know if I'll be able to finish this next book. I hope so. I think know, Lord willing, I'll be able to finish this next one. But I've got a few more. I've got.

I've got a few more after that that I'd like to write. I'll be in my. How old will I be? Sheesh. I'm going to be old. No.

I love that you're still dreaming, Cheryl. I could talk to you all day. I love so much of what you've imparted today. Thank you for hopping on.

I know there'll be people who want to grab your book. How can people do that?

Yeah, if online, you can get it through bookshop.org of course, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, any place books are sold. It's also in Audible and on audiobooks from all kinds of platforms, from Kobo to, you know, authors direct to, you know, to Amazon's platform.

And it's read by the amazing Jane Entwistle, if you like audiobooks. But you can find it. You can find it all over.

Thank you so much for sharing. And for those of you who hopped on today, I hope that this conversation blessed you in some way.

I hope that you are reminded that you are beloved and you have a father who's underneath you as you climb that adventurous tree you're on, and knowing that changes everything. I hope you'll keep gliding with him this week and we'll catch you next week.

Thanks for tuning in to keep up with us.

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