Why I wrote this book

I didn’t set out to write a book.

I set out, four years ago, to write one honest paragraph for my kids — something they could keep in a drawer for the day they hit a wall in their own faith. I wanted them to know that the path I had walked was not as straight as the family photos made it look, and that the Savior had been with me anyway. Especially anyway.

That paragraph turned into a page. The page turned into a notebook. The notebook turned, over a couple of long winters, into the manuscript that became Learning to Walk with Him.

What the book is — and isn’t

It is not a how-to. It is not a five-step program. It is not a polished theological argument.

It is a memoir of discipleship in the slow, ordinary middle of a life. It is the story of a reluctant nineteen-year-old who showed up to his mission scared and distracted, and the longer story of what came after — the years where I was supposed to have it figured out, and very obviously did not.

It is built around five lessons, each one I had to learn the hard way:

1. Faith — trusting Him before you can trace Him.
2. Focus — what you give your attention to becomes your life.
3. Surrender — letting go of the script you wrote for yourself.
4. Repentance — the mercy of starting again, daily, sometimes hourly.
5. The Savior’s love — the center that holds everything else together.

Why now

A few reasons.

Some of it is timing in my own life — I’m at the age where I’m watching my kids and the people I love start to walk into the harder parts of faith, and I wanted to leave them something honest. Not the sanitized version. The real one.

Some of it is that I keep meeting people — at church, in airports, in the comments under a small Instagram post — who feel like they’ve fallen behind on their own discipleship. Like they’ve waited too long, or doubted too loudly, or fallen too far. They haven’t. The Savior is patient in a way our pace doesn’t expect. I wanted to put that on a page.

And some of it, frankly, is that writing it has been good for me. Saying out loud what He has done in my life is one of the most strengthening things I have ever done.

What I hope you find here

If you read the book — or even just hang around this blog for a while — I hope you come away with three things:

• You are not behind. Wherever you are in your walk, you have not missed the train.
• You are not alone. He has been closer to you, in your worst seasons, than you let yourself believe.
• You can keep walking. That is, in the end, the whole instruction. You don’t have to run. You just have to keep walking.

Thanks for being here. There’s more coming.

— Ken