I recently finished reading a book called Visions of Vocation where author Steven Garber dives deep into the implications our vocation has on the wholeness of our lives, not only our work like we often think, but also our relationships and responsibilities in the world.

As I read, I found myself continuing to take notes about decisions and the decision-making process, a subject that is becoming a pillar of my own vocation and one I’m endlessly fascinated by.

At the most basic level, making decisions in a better way starts with understanding that we don’t make decisions in a vacuum. There are too many factors at play that give color, texture, and nuance to every single decision we make, even the small ones. As much as we may think otherwise, it’s impossible to approach decisions apart from who we are because our choices are born out of our character.

What we decide is tied to the person we are and the person we’re becoming.

Toward the end of Visions of Vocation, Garber brings up Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables. He points out the life of the bishop in the novel. While the play and the movies that have come after the book only show the part of his life that intersects with Jean Valjean, the novel spends over a hundred pages to show the reader who the bishop was and the story that shaped his life in such a way that he saw the needs of the world and what was his to care for. 

What we don’t know about the history of the bishop, we can infer from the choices he makes. First, he opens his door to a stranger. Then, he shares his table, his home, and his trust. And in the morning, when the bishop discovers his guest has stolen the silverware, he discerns his next right thing is to offer the candlesticks, too.

As Garber points out, “When you get to know the man, you understand why his instinct was to show mercy.”

I guess that’s what’s standing out to me today. Not necessarily the choice itself although his generosity is radical to the point of seeming foolish, but what stands out is the instinct that made the choice so obvious for the bishop. 

Left to myself, my instincts don’t tend toward sharing and generosity. That has to be groomed and shaped. Just like being a writer or a basketball player or a pianist doesn’t happen overnight, neither does being kind, generous, trusting or trustworthy. 

In the fake high school curriculum I often design in my head, I wish, in addition to algebra and history, we might also include Humanity 101: How to become a person whose instinct it is to show mercy to people who don’t deserve it.

That class I’m sure would be standing room only. I joke about it, in a way, but this is the important stuff in life. 

Is it possible to move through a broken world as broken people without wanting to break everything in our path?

How can we learn to pay attention to the pain around us without letting the pain control us?

In Garber’s book, he asks a similar question: Can you know the world and still love it?

These are not simple questions and I don’t intend to resolve them in a short blog post. But when the answers aren’t simple, it may be even more important to continue to ask the questions.

When it comes to pivotal moments in my own life, what does my instinct lead me to do?

“At crucial moments of choice, most of the business of choosing is already over.” — Iris Murdoch

She said succinctly what I’ve been trying to say in 83 episodes — that the decision is rarely the point. The point is the person I’m becoming.

The point is how the decision-making process informs and shapes me in such a way that my instinctual choice is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The point is to understand that the habits in my life, the way I spend my time, the things I choose to focus on — these things are shaping me. And they will always impact my decisions for better or for worse. 

We can’t live our lives distracted, angry, hurt, overwhelmed, afraid, and exhausted and then expect to somehow be able to make a thoughtful, wise, wholehearted decision about our job, our family, or our children’s future. 

As Iris Murdoch said, At crucial moments of choice, most of the business of choosing is already over.

Again, I don’t have easy answers. But I do have simple encouragement. The person you are becoming matters.

The faith that’s being built within you as you move into an unknown future might seem invisible now, but as you continue to move into the world, your faith will be for you a foundation to lean on in times of difficulty.

The patience you’re cultivating with your two year old might seem endless and forgettable now, but it matters. 

That late night conversation with your teenage daughter, the one that only seems to happen exactly four hours after your preferred bedtime but you stay up with her anyway? That matters.

The years you’ve been waiting for answers that seem to never, ever, ever come, every second of those years matter.

The choice to sit in silence with Jesus even though you don’t have words to pray because everything just feels so hard, that matters.

Making the cake, folding the laundry, tending the garden, driving the carpool, writing the proposal, asking the question, cleaning the toilet again. It all matters.

It’s important what job you take, which house you live in, which volunteer opportunities you say yes and no too. But these are secondary in comparison to the person you’re becoming. 

The person you’re becoming will carry on beyond you, in the minds and hearts of the people you love and the people who love you.

May we be people whose instinct it is to move through the world as ones who live in the kingdom of God so that our choices always reflect the love of the Father, the power of the Son, and the compassion of the Holy Spirit as we continue to do our next right thing in love.

“As the poet, Bob Dylan once sang, ‘Everything is broken.’ And so we must not be romantics. But the story of sorrow is not the whole story of life either. There is also wonder and glory, joy and meaning, in the vocations that are ours.

There is good work to be done by every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve all over the face of the earth. There are flowers to be grown, songs to be sung, bread to be baked, justice to be done, mercy to be shown, beauty to be created, good stories to be told, fields to farm and children to educate. All day, every day, there are both wounds and wonders at the very heart of life, if we have eyes to see. And seeing is where vocation begins.”

Steven Garber, Visions of Vocation

This post is an adapted version of this week’s episode of The Next Right Thing: Episode 83 and you can listen to it right here. And if you want even more help with discernment and decision-making in your own life, grab a copy of The Next Right Thing  book.

As is becoming our weekly practice, this post is modified from this weeks podcast episode 82: Find the Beginning in the Ending. If you want to listen instead, have at it! Meanwhile, this post includes a few affiliate links where books are mentioned. Glad you’re here!

After two years, I’ve finally earned my Masters in Christian Spiritual Formation and Leadership. Well, almost. Because what my fellow students and I all lamented as we stood in our caps and gowns together before the ceremony as though we were being hooded that day, our assignments weren’t completely over.

We still have two papers due before the end of the month. Talk about pomp and circumstance. More like womp and circumstance. 

(Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)

After the ceremony, some of us went out for burgers and ice cream (as the Lord intended) and then I made my way back to my room to figure out how to pack a mortarboard cap into my suitcase. The next day, John and I flew back to life and to business as usual.

But, I carried a little secret with me and I’m almost embarrassed to admit it to you and that is after two years of assignments, tons of reading, endless papers, and four-week-long residencies, I should be relieved that it’s almost over and frustrated about those two final papers hanging over my head but the truth I’m going to tell you right now is I’m secretly glad I still have these papers left to write.

I know it’s so weird and I quite possibly might have a strange addiction to learning, but once those papers are turned in, then this experience really is over. And while that is the point, it’s also a little sad.

Maybe you’re facing down an ending today and that ending has a few loose ends left to tie up. Are you a little hesitant to move forward too? Are you dragging your feet to the finish line, concerned about what might come after? Or maybe you’ve already ended a thing but it went by without acknowledgment and now, you find yourself a little bit stuck with what to do next.

Today I’ll offer 3 simple things to consider as you discern your next right thing.

1. Put a period on the experience.

Marking the ending of things is embedded into our culture. The parties, finales, celebrations, and farewells are all part of our regular rhythm of life. Even our birthdays technically celebrate an ending. When a baby turns 1, we mark the end of her first year, not the beginning of it. 

When an ending is communal, involving families or groups, the likelihood of us marking it might be greater simply because more people are involved. But just because the group marks a thing doesn’t mean you owned that ending for yourself. Not to mention, that if an ending is more personal or quiet, it might be even easier to overlook. 

It’s important to not rush through the ending, but we still have to have one. One way to do that is to find a period to end things as best we can.

On the last day of school last week, one of our teachers James Bryan Smith gave a short lecture about the ending of our time together. I really appreciated his intentionality to say This is over and it cannot be duplicated. That’s helpful for those who may tend to expect things to carry on as they have been when in fact, circumstances have changed and so must our expectations.

We’ve all been to events done well and events done not so well. For example, at a wedding we love it when the pastor pronounces the couple husband and wife, the bride is kissed, the couple is announced as Mr. and Mrs. for the very first time, the crowd cheers, and the music starts right on time while the bride and groom rush down the aisle together.

What we don’t love at weddings is when the pastor pronounces the couple husband and wife, the bride is kissed, the couple is announced for the very first time, the crowd cheers and then the music doesn’t start right away. The couple doesn’t want to walk awkwardly down the aisle in silence, so they look around and wait, and then everyone is quiet and then when the music does finally start it’s too quiet but they go down anyway. It’s a whole thing and it’s the worst.

In a small way and for the sake of this illustration, the music is the period the ceremony needs. When every part falls into place, when the crescendo comes at the right moment and the rhythm fits the expectation and everyone plays their part, there’s a sense of completion, of joy, and a settled satisfaction.

Maybe one reason you’ve not been able to move forward into your next right thing is because there’s an ending lingering in your life that never ended with a period. Maybe it’s even been years. So instead, you just kept on going without acknowledging the thing was even over at all. 

Maybe it ended abruptly and there was no time to recognize it, much less grieve it.

Perhaps it ended badly and it was too painful to look at so instead you chose not to.

Or maybe it’s simply that life got busy. Yes, you met that goal, reached that finish line, or achieved that accomplishment, but there was dinner to make and errands to run and you never had a chance to mark the moment. 

All of these things could be reasons why we are having trouble of moving on to the next right thing. We’ve been unwilling, unable, or maybe simply unaware that we needed to put a period on an ending.

2. Don’t let the stuff outweigh the sacred.

In high school, my best friend Heather and I started to hang out with two guys who were also best friends. When she and one of the guys started to date, it only “made sense” the other guy and I hung out a lot more and started to date as well.

(It was high school so you know, the things that make sense in high school might not make sense when we are grownups, but have mercy.)

Eventually, we all went to prom together and for a few months we had the best time laughing, going to soccer and baseball games, and hanging out at each other’s houses. 

For a while the four of us were inseparable. But our days were numbered together and we knew it because that summer, one of the guys had to move away. I held on to notes, photo albums, journal entries, and other memorabilia from that fun spring and that was my way of trying to hang on to the experience. But those things were not the experience, they were the evidence that the experience was real.

In other words, they were the stuff.

But, I was young and my brain wasn’t fully developed so I focused only on the loss and the memories lived mainly in the stuff that I couldn’t bear to get rid of.

There’s nothing wrong with keeping the stuff, but I didn’t yet understand the importance of letting the stuff lead me to the sacred — specifically how my experience with my friends changed me, how it formed me, and what I was grateful for as a result. So I kept the stuff but because it was sad to go through it, I put it all in a box in the top of my closet which resulted in memory clutter and deferred grief.

For much of my life, I’ve allowed the stuff to swallow up the sacred.

Who can teach us how to let the stuff lead us to what really matters? Sometimes I wish it was my job to design a few classes that every student has to pass before graduating high school — how to do online banking, how to structure your day as a working adult, how to say a healthy goodbye. There’s so much we have to learn on our own, isn’t there?

3. Hints of your next right thing can be found in your last right thing.

I have always found this to be true. Every book I’ve written has seeds of the next book embedded within it. If you look closely and have nothing better to do with your time, you can find all of those hints because endings always also carry the first string of new beginnings. 

We celebrate the first year of a baby but it heralds in her second year, too. We celebrate the wedding that ends the engagement but begins a lifetime together. We celebrate a graduation that ends the time of structured study but begins a time of continued learning in the world.

The sacred things we mark from the ending will be brought forth into our beginnings, not necessarily because of an external thing we bring with us, but because of the person we have become. 

When things end, we come forth changed.

We would do well to take some time to pay attention to those changes, to mark them, to honor them and see how they might lead us forward.

When I’m facing, or in the midst of, or just beyond an ending,

Have I become more confident?

Has my heart expanded as a result of my experience?

Do I see gifts in small things?

What corner of the kingdom do I feel drawn to most?

When I look at people, do I see the image of God more quickly now?

In some ways for me and my own ending, school is safer than not school. School means someone else tells me what to focus on, where to spend my time, and what is important to remember. And while I’ve been a grown up for quite a long time by now and I know how to do things, I admit it’s been nice for these last few years to trust someone else to design my learning curriculum. Because not school means now I have questions to answer, pathways to choose, and more decisions to make. 

It always comes back to that, doesn’t it? Decisions, choices, this path or that one, which way to go?

God is always forming us. And so often he uses the decision making process to do it.

Can you think of something in your life that ended without fanfare or acknowledgment? Maybe it’s time to name it.

Is there a small thing you can put a period on an ending in a life-giving, appropriate way? 

Maybe its time to say a formal goodbye, have a small (or big!) celebration, or even simply to light a candle to mark a memory.

What about all your stuff?

Have you put the stuff of your experience into a box to go through later? 

Might it be time to pull the box out and allow the stuff to lead you to the sacred gifts the experience has to bring your way — the transformation that happened in your mind, your body, and your heart as a result of that time in your life?

If you’re not ready, that’s okay too. Our friend Jesus can help you to know when the time is right. You can trust him with that.

Maybe you’ve marked the ending, you’ve allowed the stuff to lead you to the sacred work, but you’re still wondering what your next right thing might be.

Take a little time to be silent and to be still. To be watchful. To bear witness. 

If you can’t yet see a new spark, a small shoot, or the start of a new thing, take heart. Ask Jesus what you are to look for. Remain open to seeing things in a way you might not expect. 

If nothing comes, be gentle with yourself. We don’t stop living just because we are unsure. We continue on, trusting in the King of the Kingdom as we simply do our next right thing in love.

“Everyone has lost sight of your heart And you can see nowhere to put your trust; you know you have to make your own way through. As far as you can, hold your confidence.

Do not allow your confusion to squander this call which is loosening your roots in false ground, that you might come free from all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here is your mind, and it is difficult and slow to become new.

The more faithfully you can endure here, the more refined your heart will become for your arrival in the new dawn.”

John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

If you want even more help to discern your next steps, grab a copy of my new book The Next Right Thing.

In an effort so serve those who aren’t podcast listeners I’m sharing the majority of this week’s episode of The Next Right Thing Podcast here on the blog. If you’d prefer to listen, tune in to Episode 79: Find Relief From Regret. Where books are listed here, I’ve used my affiliate links.

We talk a lot here about making decisions always with the simple mantra of doing the next right thing.

One thing we haven’t talked a lot about? What if you try to do the next right thing but later you look back and realize it wasn’t the right thing after all? What do we do when our next right thing turns out to be wrong? And how do we deal with regret?

If you’ve struggled with this question in your own decision-making, I hope to offer a little relief today.

Maybe you don’t struggle much with regret. It could be because you haven’t made regrettable choices in your life. But it could also be because regret can only be uncovered upon reflection and you’re not a person who lives in the past.

This could be a function of your personality or your own coping skills, and being a forward-looking person has its gifts, to be sure. But there may also be regrets that linger beneath the surface for you that you’re running from and you don’t even realize it.

There’s also the other extreme. You may be someone who is so wrapped up in regret that you can’t see straight, can’t find the joy, and can’t untangle yourself enough to move forward in a healthy way. Regret is holding you hostage and I hope your next right thing is to be set free today.

I want to invite you to simply listen in to a couple of stories I have to tell. They’re both about regret — one that belongs to someone else, and one that belongs to me. In both, there’s hope. And during this Holy Week, I hope you see it and can find a little hope of your own.

***

My dad drank beer every day until I was ten years old. I didn’t have to go to college to learn what ‘passed out drunk’ looked like. He snored on the floor in the early evenings while we watched TV. We tossed a shoe or twenty in his direction during Little House on the Prairie because his snoring was so loud we couldn’t hear the details of what was happening in Walnut Grove.

I thought all the world’s dads came home and fell asleep on the floor. It was normal and it didn’t feel like a big deal. It was only years later, that I realized the reason for his long evening naps.

Beer was as much a part of my family growing up as stockings at Christmas, white cake on our birthdays, and the kittens living in our shed. I didn’t question it, didn’t wonder about it, and didn’t know to blame it for my own insecurities.

Dad stopped drinking when he was thirty-five and I was maybe around ten or eleven. He didn’t stop because someone said the right thing, lectured the right way or loved him enough. He didn’t stop because I was a good girl or because mom made his favorite breakfast or because any of us asked him to. He made the choice to stop drinking because he wanted to stop.

I see it as a miracle.

Even though addiction is part of our family story, it isn’t the whole story. And it isn’t the finished story. Addiction didn’t win. But for years, it seemed like it would.

If you talked to Dad today and asked him if he regretted those years, I’m not sure he could find the words to tell you how much.

Today, my parents have been married for over 45 years. We look to them for wisdom and for counsel. We consider them friends. We laugh together. We plan together. We work together. We’ve dreamed together.

The same God who turned water into wine turns alcoholics into dreamers.

It doesn’t make sense and those two things don’t seem to go together, but they do, somehow. And I don’t have to understand it for it to change my life.

The regret didn’t turn to hope overnight. But it did turn. And that’s where the hope comes in. That’s the first story.

Here’s story number two.

***

My husband’s dad, Frank, was diagnosed with lung cancer in October 2010. By spring, it was clear the treatment could only prolong his life by months, not years, and we started to approach his care from the perspective of peace and comfort rather than any expectation for long-term remission.

During this time I was preparing for the launch of my very first book. I was setting meetings, creating a launch plan the best I knew how to do at the time as a new author, and I was making plans as it related to that book. Part of my marketing plan for that book was to partner with a marketing team who lived out of state so I made plans to fly them into Charlotte and have a day together.

I bought their plane tickets on my own dime and scheduled the hour and a half drive to Charlotte for a day that worked both for them and for us in late July. John and I talked about it and we both felt like this date would work. We knew his Dad wasn’t well, but there was no way of knowing how well he would be doing a few months from now and besides, we couldn’t put everything on hold could we? We still had to make some plans.

The date came for the team to arrive and it was during a week when John’s dad had taken a turn. Still, the doctors and nurses said he could go on like this for many weeks even a month, and so we carried on with our plans as normal and I just did the next right thing I knew to do at the time. The team flew in, I drove down to Charlotte, and we had our meeting. I stayed in touch with John throughout the day.

But as our meeting came to a close, John’s messages became more dire. I left the meeting to try to make it home, but as I sat at a stoplight still in Charlotte, behind a line of cars headed toward the on ramp to the highway, my phone rang and I knew what John would say on the other end of the line.

Frank had died just minutes before as the family stayed beside him in his hospital room. I still had an hour and a half drive in front of me. The sadness and regret descended on me like a weight and if I think about it too long right now, I can still feel it in my chest nearly 8 years later. 

I should have been there. I should have canceled my meeting and stayed home. Why didn’t I cancel? What was I thinking?

Regret always shows up pointing a finger, chanting a string of unanswerable, impossible questions. The questions repeat their minor chord, refusing to resolve, stuck in your head on a loop.

If you could sit and talk with Dad, I’m sure he could tell you how much he regrets those years he sacrificed at the altar of addiction. He wishes he could go back and choose differently.

And if you could talk with me right now, I’ll tell you plainly how desperately I wish I could take back my decision to drive to Charlotte that day. I wish I could go back and choose differently.

These are different kinds of regrets, but the feeling is similar: time lost that you can’t get back, choices made that you wish were different, steps taken you wish you could undo.

Regret can take on many forms.

It can be a result of a poor or immoral choice, an uninformed choice, or simply a choice or direction that was maybe innocent on it’s own but it ended up leading to a complication, an embarrassment, a difficulty you wish you could have avoided or a grief you wish you could have helped ease.

When it comes to life decisions that we regret or wish turned out differently, I want to gently invite you to turn with me to the only place that offers any hope at all. And that is into the presence of God.

Here in the midst of this week before Easter, it’s one thing to consider the events of the crucifixion from history, that this is something that really did happen to an innocent man all those many years ago. It was a historical event and this is one way to see the crucifixion.

In one of my Lenten devotionals, Bread and Wine, Barbara Brown Taylor says this:

“He offered himself as a mirror they could see themselves in, and they were so appalled by what they saw that they smashed it. They smashed him every way they could.”

This is the second way to see the crucifixion that is also true. Not only was the crucifixion a historical event, it was also a personal one. Many pastors and teachers this time of year point out that because of our own sin, we are the ones calling for him to be crucified. Like Taylor says, we smash the truth we see of ourselves in His presence. We can’t look upon our own inadequacy with any peace. It’s just too terrible.

Sometimes regret feels like that. Rather than face it, we want to smash it and refuse to look at the consequences, or we dwell so deeply in regret that we can’t find our way out.

But there’s a third perspective and too often we stop short of getting there. Because it’s another thing altogether to look at the truth of scripture and remember this: When he died, I died with him.

Instead of the impersonal observer watching from thousands of years later or imagining myself among the dirty crowd who killed him, Jesus brings me closer. 

He puts me on the cross with him. He hid me within him and absorbed the punishment on my behalf — my poor choices, my uninformed choices, my flat out wrong choices — and there, in that place, he sets me free.

In a very real, very strange and mysterious way? Our life perspective as believers is one of a people who have died. And when Jesus rose again, we rose up, too.

Even while we walk the dusty roads of this gritty, beautiful, heartbroken world, we have been made new.

This Holy Week, let’s not simply remember something that happened to Jesus. Let’s remember something that happened to us.

“If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin, because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.” Romans 6:5-7

Good Friday promises that nothing can separate us from the love of God because love chose to be separated from Himself instead.

God turned on himself for our sake. 

He tore himself apart so that our brokenness, our betrayal, our addiction, our mistakes, our poor judgments, our regrets and our if only’s wouldn’t be the end of our story.

Jesus was separated so you will never have to be separate again. 

Even when it seems like you’re fighting a losing battle. 

Even when it seems like hope is dead.

Hope did die. But Hope didn’t stay dead.

You don’t have to undo things.

You don’t have to pay for your own wrongs.

You don’t have to wallow anymore.

You may be in the valley of the shadow of death but you do not have to slow down, lie down, or stop. In Christ, you walk through. There is hope. And you are free. 

Be relentlessly gentle with yourself today. Starting now, what is your next right thing?

If you’re struggling with regret and can’t seem to shake it, my prayer for you is that during this Holy Week, our friend Jesus would be the kindest of companions for you, with you, around you, and within you. His hand extended toward you is not one that holds a grudge, a list, or a reprimand. 

He just wants to be with you.

“I hope you see hope and good where you are right now. I hope you accept that each moment is a step on a journey and part of a bigger and better thing, but the journey can be scary. I hope you grow in connecting the dots between the moments, the scary journey, and the bigger, better thing.

I hope you think and dream, but pursue your hope with faith and action. I hope you spend more time pursuing than regretting, second-guessing and woe-is-me’ing. I hope you accept confusion, questions, crooked lines, fatigue, fog, loneliness, darkness, rejection, and low self-esteem as part of the journey of hope . . .

Finding strength in the Lord your God is no guarantee your hope will be fulfilled. But it is strength for one more step than you think is possible. Sometimes the next step is all you’ve got. Take it.”

— this is from a little e-book called Scary Hope that Dad wrote years ago. In fact, my dad Gary Morland, the now sober alcoholic wrote down our family story in a whole book called A Family Shaped By Grace. 

We all approach decision-making in uniquely different ways. Want to know your decision-making style? Visit this page and take the short quiz by clicking quiz in the top navigation.

If you’re curious about what went on during the book launch party, you can listen in right here! Learn more about The Next Right Thing right here.

Okay so it may not be a comprehensive list that everyone can follow.

But after 5 published books I finally figured out to have a launch party that works for me. In some ways this list is applicable to every book but for the most part, it’s super specific to this book. And me. And my friends. I’m sorry! But also you’re welcome because some of these ideas are definitely replicable!

1. Have the party the night before the book releases.

I’ve done this all kind of ways and so far this was my favorite way. We had a party to celebrate and then we still had the next day (launch day) to look forward to! Plus it gave the book a lot of momentum going into release week.

2. Stay in your lane.

My lane, as the author, is the message of the book, setting the tone for the evening, creating the content, and hosting the night. My lane was to drive the ship. But that doesn’t mean I had to build the ship.

My assistant Traci organized all of the details, including finding artists and a support team who could make everything happen.

3. Hire people to help you and say yes when people volunteer.

These photographs are (almost) all courtesy of Barrie Johnson of Barrier Photography who sent me a message a few weeks before the party and offered to take photos for free. My friend Jason Winsdor did the same thing, offering to bring a little camera and take some footage.

Megan Mazzucco did the balloon arch. My sister was all-around consultant and flower provider. Cookies of the night were from Sweet Stuff by Meredith and Morenike Fox.

4. Make the gathering shareable beyond the guests who can come in person.

As I mentioned before, this is my 5th book. Here’s how we celebrated the first 4 books:

• Grace for the Good Girl: We hosted a private dinner at a restaurant for close friends and family (no public photos of this one) but my sister and mom also hosted a beautiful book signing event at my sister’s house (this was back in 2011!)
• Graceful: I brought in two musicians to our church and we hosted a night for the high school girls and their moms a few weeks after the book came out (it was a book for teen girls)
• A Million Little Ways: We planned a half-day workshop type event a few months after the book released
• Simply Tuesday: We had a fun event at my sister’s barn in Charlotte (I loved this party)

These were all absolutely lovely ways to celebrate the releases of my previous four books. And having a private party is wonderful.

But for a book launch party, it was important for me this time for it to serve two purposes: celebrate and sell. Sell-abrate? No that’s too much. Too much!

The way we shared it with readers and listeners of the podcast was two-fold: we live streamed it through Instagram and we recorded the whole thing and made it available as a bonus episode of the podcast (that you can listen to at the top of this post.)

That’s my friend Alisa on the front row. She held my phone for the Instagram Live for the whole hour! She’s a rock star with a forearm of steel.

Caleb Peavey of Unmutable drove to and from Atalanta in one day just to record the night for the podcast for us. He’s  not only my marketing partner in crime, he’s become a dear friend and I’m grateful.

5. Celebrate people as much as you can.

It’s a book launch, but it’s also a way to thank everyone who has helped shepherd the book up to this point. If you listen to the live show, you won’t hear all the thank you’s as we cut those out of the recording, but rest assured there were thank you’s at the actual event.

The above photo is a small group of our hope*writer members who joined us to celebrate and below is a group of The Next Right Thing launch team members. What a lovely crew!

6. Sell books at your launch party.

Over the years I’ve done many books signings at our local Barnes & Noble so we’ve made connections with some of the staff there. For this party, we weren’t sure if they would, but we asked if Barnes & Noble would be willing to come to the party and sell books for us.

In the past I’ve always sold them myself but it was one less thing to fiddle with. And lucky for us, Barnes & Noble said yes! They brought a giant cash register and sold books all night.

7. Read a portion of your book.

Leave a little time to read a short chapter or a few pages of your book at your launch party. For me, this was a sweet time to settle in and enjoy the room but not have to think about what I was going to say next because all I had to do was read.

8. Get a photo with your family.

With events like this, often the people you love the most stay on the sidelines and you forget to capture their presence. Put it on the schedule and make sure to get a picture of you with your closest people before the night is over.

9. When it comes to the decor, a few bigs are better than lots of smalls.

My sister can speak to this way better than I can, but basically she always says if you have a few statement or large pieces, then you can get away with less stuff. We were able to host this event at the Cadillac Service Garage which, as you can see, makes a statement all by itself. Plus the floors matched the book so . . .

The giant windows, tall ceiling, exposed brick and stellar floors did a lot of the talking. We just brought in a giant green balloon arch and some lovely flowers and that’s about all it took.

10. Don’t expect a party to do everything.

Know the reason why you want to have a book launch party and then stick to it. The publisher doesn’t require you to have a party. (And also they don’t pay for it). You can do it on actual launch day or two months later (or not at all). It can be private or public. You can sell tickets or make it free.

There’s no wrong, but just know why you want to do it and then let that be what it is.

What a fun night!

I’m grateful to everyone who helped make this night happen as well as all of the guests who showed up.

After the hard work of writing and preparing to launch a book, a book launch/live show felt just right.

The Next Right Thing is available now! Grab a copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you like to buy books.

My new book, The Next Right Thing, is available at bookstores nationwide today! We’re extending the offer for the free bonuses through Friday, April 5th — so if you order online or purchase in a bookstore, you can receive my online class and the audiobook for free! Head on over to NextRightThingBook.com to redeem your free gifts by this Friday night. Once you claim them, you’ll have access forever. Get your book, then claim your bonuses here!

My last two years of college I was a commuter student and every day I dreaded the task of finding a decent parking space. I tried to arrive on campus almost a full hour before my classes started so I could ease the frustration of frantically circling campus for a space.

To my great delight, I discovered a radio program hosted by author Elisabeth Elliot that helped me pass the time. The program was called Gateway to Joy, and it was broadcast daily from 11:15 to 11:30 a.m. Countless mornings, I sat in my car before class and I listened to her open her show with these words:

“You are loved with an everlasting love and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

At that time in my life in college, her daily assurance of God’s everlasting love was a welcome mantra, one I embraced and repeated often. Something else she quoted, both on her show and in some of her books, was a poem called “Do the Next Thing.” She never offered the author of that poem, only ever citing it as an anonymous writer.

Years later, when I started work on a podcast all about doing the next right thing, I became curious about where that poem came from, the one I heard her repeat so often.

One afternoon, I was determined to use the powers of the world wide web and do a little digging until I finally found it. The poem was, as far as I could tell, originally printed in a little book called Ye Nexte Thynge by Eleanor Amerman Sutphen, published in 1897.

Now the book itself is a bit odd but also sort of charming, about a group of young people who wanted to see other young people active and involved in their church and committed to God. They were led by a minister named Rev. Mr. Bacon. Here’s a few lines from the book about him:

“His desire was to get his people out of the old ruts, and to start them forward along new lines. But the spirit of self-satisfaction is a hard ghost to lay; and the young minister realized, therefore, that his task was not an easy one.”

The story goes on and it’s not exactly a riveting page-turner, but a close read shows a depth of spirit and truth that a casual glance doesn’t at first reveal. But I was most interested in what comes before chapter one. Because there, in the first pages of the Sutphen book, is the poem that Elisabeth Elliot quoted so often on her broadcast.

It’s printed in its entirety and at the end credit is given to its author, Mrs. George A. Paull. A little more research showed her name is actually Minnie and she was a musician, a minister’s wife, and a writer.

I tell some of this story in chapter four of my book, but what I don’t include in the book is this next part.

The day I found this quote on the Internet, I clicked to the front pages of the Google book to find out who the publisher was. And when I saw it printed there I could hardly believe it.

That little book called Ye Next Thing by Eleanor Amerman Sutphen, the one with this poem by the writer Minnie Paull printed inside, was published in 1897 by Fleming H. Revell company, the very same publishing company who published my book, The Next Right Thing, releasing this very week.

Here we are, 122 years later, still hanging on to this wise advice, still paying attention to what is right before us, still trusting God to tell us what we need to know when we need to know it.

When we do our work, offer a prayer, lend a hand, or continue to move through the ordinary tasks of our regular days, we never know how people years from now may be impacted because of our faithfulness. That’s not to say we have to get it all right. In fact, Minnie, the woman who wrote that poem, struggled deeply with doubt.

Part of her own journal reveals that. She was writer so she wrote down a lot of her experience. Here is part of what she says:

“There is just one thing to keep me from being blissfully happy, and strangely enough it is the last thing that I ever imagined would trouble me. I wish I could make up my mind about the reality of God. Though I believe in a vague sort of way, I have hours of anxious self-questionings, and cannot bring myself to the intense realization of the truth which I feel to be necessary.

I am groping blindly, and though I am trying to see God, yet a cloud is before my eyes, and I cannot even believe that he is behind it.”

Isn’t that how it goes?

This woman who wrote a poem so thoughtful, so faith-filled, she herself recorded her own struggle with doubt and with questions. But she continued forward through mixed motives, through the shadows and the sun, through her own next things even in the midst of her struggles.

And now her words continue to encourage us today, all these many years later.She could never have known the impact.

As you continue to carry your decisions with you, we’ll use a portion of Mrs. Paull’s poem as our prayer. Imagine God walking with you, issuing a kind invitation to release the burden of both heavy and daily decisions into his care.

From an old English parsonage down by the sea

There came in the twilight a message to me;

Its quaint Saxon legend, deeply engraven,

Hath, it seems to me, teaching from heaven;

And through the hours the quiet words ring

Like a low inspiration: “Do the next thing.”

 

Many a questioning, many a fear,

Many a doubt, hath its quieting here.

Moment by moment, let down from heaven,

Time, opportunity, and guidance are given.

Fear not tomorrows, child of the King;

Trust them with Jesus: Do the next thing.

 

Do it immediately, do it with prayer;

Do it reliantly, casting all care;

Do it with reverence, tracing his hand

Who hath placed it before thee with earnest command.

Stayed on Omnipotence, safe ’neath His wing,

Leave all results, do the next thing.

***

I can’t thank you enough for your kind support and I’m grateful to be able to offer you a whole book that I hope will serve as a kind companion to both you and to people in your life in the midst of their own decision-making process. Get a copy of The Next Right Thing anywhere books are sold, including Barnes & Noble (in store or online) or Amazon. Then don’t forget to claim your free gifts by April 5 right here!