When A Story Becomes A Life

This Friday, Promise: Comfort will be released.

I've written those words several times over the past few weeks. I've put the date on calendars, prepared images, scheduled trailers, checked files, and worked through all the other things that come with releasing a book.

But this one feels different.

Friday isn't simply the release of another book.

It is the completion of Peter's journey.

When Peter's story begins in Promise: Struggling, he is seven years old. He doesn't know where his life will take him. He doesn't even completely understand why he so often feels different from the world around him. He is simply a boy trying to make sense of his family, himself, and eventually a promise made when he was far too young to understand how long he would carry it.

In Promise: Coming Alive, the world begins to open.

There are new people. New places. Music. Friendship. Possibilities Peter had never allowed himself to imagine. And, perhaps most importantly, the gradual realization that finding where you belong doesn't necessarily mean finding a place where you can finally become the person everyone expects you to be.

Sometimes it means finding the people who allow you to be the person you already are.

And then comes Comfort.

For a long time, I thought of Comfort as the story of what happened next.

I've come to realize that isn't really what it is.

It's the story of what Peter built.

Because lives aren't built primarily from the moments we would put in a photograph album.

They're built on ordinary Tuesday mornings.

They're built around coffee cups left on the table and conversations that last longer than expected. They're built from music drifting through a room, children growing older, dinners that somehow turn into traditions, arguments that eventually become forgiveness, and people who keep showing up.

They're built from laughter.

They're built from loss.

And sometimes they're built simply by reaching across a table and knowing the person sitting on the other side is still there.

That is the part of life we don't always recognize while we're living it.

We tend to remember the milestones—the graduations, weddings, births, moves, accomplishments, beginnings and endings. They're easy to mark because they come with dates.

But somewhere between those dates is where most of our lives actually happen.

Comfort gave me the opportunity to tell that part of Peter's story.

Not simply whether he found love, but what happened when love had to survive ordinary life.

Not simply whether he found a family, but what happened as that family grew and changed.

Not simply whether he found a home, but what eventually made that home his.

And not simply whether the frightened, uncertain boy we first met found happiness.

But whether he finally found peace.

There is something strange about reaching the end of a story that has occupied so much of my life.

Beginning Friday, someone will be able to meet seven-year-old Peter in Struggling and keep walking beside him until the final pages of Comfort. They will be able to see the people he loses, the people he finds, the mistakes he makes, the love he discovers, and the life that grows around him.

For the first time, the entire journey will be there.

And perhaps that is what I've been thinking about most as Friday approaches.

We spend so much of our lives searching for the moment when everything will finally make sense.

I'm not sure that moment exists.

Maybe, instead, we build it.

One person.

One room.

One conversation.

One ordinary morning.

One cup of coffee at a time.

Until one day we look around and realize that somewhere along the way, without even noticing exactly when it happened, the life we had been searching for became the life we were living.

Promise: Comfort releases Friday, September 11.

And Peter's journey will finally be complete.