I Signed a Book Contract!

In fourth grade, I listed my life’s ambitions in a book titled My Cabbage Patch Kid and Me. I also listed out my Cabbage Patch Kid’s ambitions, which included “sun-bather” and “firefighter.” Don’t ask me how I made those predictions about my yellow-haired doll, but my own list turned out to be pretty accurate:

I had Mother and Teacher covered in my 30s. Sadly, as much as I liked to draw as a child, I will never be any kind of artist. My Cabbage Patch Kid never became a firefighter either, so we don’t always get what we want. 

However, as of today, August 29, 2025, at the age of 48, my childhood dream of becoming a “book writer” is actually happening. I signed a book contract with Gospel-Centered Discipleship, which means I am officially writing a real book that will actually be published. 

When I received the email from the publisher that told me that they were interested in publishing my book, I gave a shriek that just about stopped the hearts of Gil and Josiah, who were the only ones home at the time and assumed a snake had come out of the air conditioning vent or some other catastrophe. They stared at me in astonishment as I went walking and leaping and praising God, and wondered what had come over me, while I blabbered incoherently about “book proposal” and “contract offer,” which don’t mean much to someone who isn’t trying to publish a book. 

I started my book project over a year ago, and learned very quickly that the book industry is brutal. That even if my proposal was accepted, I could expect to sell less than 2000 copies (quenching the hopes of friends who expect I will get rich from this). I spent a great deal of time last fall fine-tuning my proposal to the exact specifications of each literary agent or publisher, while regularly receiving rejections or worse, no response at all. 

Friends encouraged me to self-publish, but I couldn’t summon the motivation – not only because self-publishing requires a significant personal financial investment, but also because I constantly suffer from self-doubt about my writing. I didn’t have the confidence to publish a book that only my mom and husband said was great. I craved a publisher, a total stranger, to tell me that this book is good enough to send out into the world. Hence the shrieking. 

For a whole year, I prayed for a publisher. I stopped writing chapters because the rules of writing nonfiction books state that you don’t write the whole book until you have a publisher. But over and over again, situations would arise in our nation or my church or my life where I would think, “My book would have something to say about this. Lord, let me write this book!” 

What is my book about? It’s about how the half of my life in Africa impacted the other half in America, how it helped me become a better follower of Christ. It is my story of living as a foreigner, the new perspective it gave me, and how it might inspire every Christian.

Today I dug out my Cabbage Patch book to look for the page with my fourth-grade ambitions, and it dawned on me that this silly book from my childhood represents a deeper part of the story in the book I’m writing now. 

Remarkably, My Cabbage Patch Kid and Me survived the civil war in Liberia.  

I was thirteen, and my family was on furlough in California when the war broke out in Liberia. We had planned to be away from Liberia for only a year, so we had boxed up all our possessions and left them in the smallest room, allowing another missionary family to use our house while we were gone. When the war started, the missionaries quickly evacuated, but as the rebels took over more and more of the city, tens of thousands of refugees descended upon the ELWA compound, which included our house. 

There were probably close to a hundred Liberians crammed into and around our little house for a time, desperate for a haven from the orgy of killing and mutilation happening in their country. It wasn’t a safe place for long because the rebels bombed the ELWA radio station and several of the houses. The refugees ran for their lives, again.

A couple of years later (if I’m remembering correctly), during a lull in the fighting, a small band of missionaries descended back onto ELWA. They systematically and reverently went through all seventy missionary houses, collecting and cataloguing any surviving items that the original inhabitants may have wanted to keep. 

One day when I was in high school, a big envelope arrived at our house in California. It mainly contained photographs rescued from our ravaged house in Liberia, many of them scarred, faded, or torn. But also – there was My Cabbage Patch Kid and Me.

It wasn’t what I was most hoping for. I would have preferred to see my sixth-grade journal or the painting from my grandmother, but still – considering the comparison between what I lost and what Liberians had lost, I could only be grateful. It was a childhood treasure, quite literally plucked out of a war. 

Cabbage Patch dolls represented a pinnacle of American commercialism and frivolity – yet this book, which had survived a devastating African war, somehow made its way back to my suburban middle-class bedroom. The incongruity of those two extremes is hard to fathom. Yet, in some ways, that dichotomy has been my life. 

Let me be clear: though I skirted the edges of two African wars, I did not live through either of them. Despite my attempts at belonging to Africa, it was never mine. I straddled two worlds for most of my life, receiving the benefits of the best of two cultures, and often able to avoid the worst of each. It’s an incredible privilege that weighs heavily on me. It’s a big reason why this book is begging me to write it.

How extraordinary to think that when I was nine and penciled in my ambition to one day be a “book writer,” that very childhood memento would pass through two continents and forty more years and be opened again on the day I signed a book contract. 

You, my faithful readers, are a big reason why I keep writing. Your encouragement and support keep me going. You may not see me as much in this space in the next year, but I can’t wait to one day introduce my book to you.