The Diaries of a Teenage Pilgrim: The Early Journey is a coming-of-age memoir about finding your spiritual identity under pressure, when your family moves from rural Wisconsin to Israel. What do you remember most vividly about the moment you learned you were moving to Israel?

I already had a firm foundation in the faith before we moved. I was baptized at nine years old and had a charismatic experience of speaking in the “tongues of Canaan” at that age as well. Being a pastor’s kid was not always simple, and there were seasons of struggling on a tight budget where I could not always afford what my peers had. During my tweens, my heart was not as close to the Lord as it once was, but in my thirteenth year, I experienced a spiritual revival and a growing sense that He was preparing me for a great adventure with Him.

In some ways, the move did make my faith more fragile, but that fragility drew me closer to God. Fragility can do one of two things: it can ruin you, or it can cause you to lean on the Good Shepherd. I chose the latter, and it was in that leaning that my love for bridal poetry was born.

Readers who want to follow that thread further will find it woven throughout my next memoir. There, I hope to continue the journey, sharing my experiences in the Israeli-Lebanese borderlands. The story builds toward the Israeli withdrawal from the buffer zone in 2000, when my father’s work in South Lebanon was brought to a close. The story does not end there. The series is intended to continue well into my adult years, as there is much more of the journey still to share.

How did moving across cultures affect your understanding of faith? Did your beliefs feel stronger, more fragile, or simply different during that time?

When I was thirteen, and my parents said, “We’re going home” to Israel, I thought, but I am already home. However, home for me was Spooner, Wisconsin: the smell of pancakes with real maple syrup, mom’s piano filling the rooms, Dad home and not deployed, and hours of rollerskating on a Friday night. That was my definition of home, but it would keep changing.

Then the whole story flipped. I would spend years as a Third Culture Kid searching for home, crossing oceans, borders, and the wreckage of my own expectations.

A romantasy reader knows this, even if she has never opened a Bible. She knows what it is to be hunted by a love that will not be reasoned out of finding you. She knows the moment the Beloved crosses every border and descends into every darkness, not because you were worthy, but because you were wanted. She has felt the shock of being seen by someone who walks straight past every wall you built and finds the thing you buried deepest. He found me a displaced teenager with fifteen moves under her skin, and He said, “You are not a stranger to me. You are lovely, and you are mine.” Now, suddenly, it did not matter where I was. He was where I was. Home was not a place I was trying to reach; rather, Home was the One who had already reached me.

One day, I will go home to Him: into that final consummation that Revelation calls a wedding. However, in the meantime, in the liminal wilderness years, His Holy Spirit had already taken up residence in me.

He did not call me “stranger.” He called me “lovely.”

Yes, home can be a place. But at its deepest, truest, most unshakeable sense, home is a Person who chose you before you knew His name, who crossed every wilderness, who makes displacement holy ground and wandering a romance.

Here is what I know now that I did not know at thirteen, about to embark on a lifelong pursuit of finding home. He did not just come to bring me home. He placed the road inside me.

There is a song by Petra that resounds in my head:

There is a road inside of you, inside of me, there is one too — no stumbling pilgrim in the dark, the road to Zion’s in your heart.

If you could speak to your teenage self, what would you tell her?

Writing this book was itself a way of speaking to her. Going through my journals, I awakened memories I had long since forgotten, some of them buried for good reason. One that surfaced was a fight scene involving the entire boys’ hockey team, a memory I had blocked out for years. Writing it was harder for me than even the car accident scene, because embedded in it was a deep shame I had carried silently. Shame in the lies that had been spoken about me, and shame in having fought back, because I believed we were called to be peacemakers.

However, writing as a pilgrimage changes you. It makes you look again at what really happened. As I sat with that scene, I started to view it differently. It was the turning point of the whole journey. That was the moment I stopped looking for an earthly hero to save me and began leaning on my Heavenly One. God saw me in that very moment. He knew my name. He was not leaving me to walk alone as a stranger in a strange land.

So what would I tell her? I would tell her not to be ashamed of who she was and not to carry false guilt. I would tell her to be brave, to believe, and not to be afraid of becoming what her Beloved Heavenly King had destined her to be.

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