Why, Bill?

My wife has asked me a fair question.

Why are you doing this?

Why put so much of yourself out there?

Why risk the snickers, the criticism, the people who misunderstand you?

Is it worth the backlash?

Why, Bill?

I have been thinking about that.

Recently, four of my books have been read all the way through:

The One Who Stayed

The Man Who Stayed

Advocate and Witness

Still Functioning

At first, I saw them as four very different books.

Then I realized they are not.

They are four different ways of telling the same life.

The Man Who Stayed is the most literal. It carries the family, the work, the hospital rooms, the fear, the responsibility, the days when you are tired and somebody still needs you.

Still Functioning comes from that same place, but asks a different question: what do you do when life does not wait for you to feel ready?

Advocate and Witness is the lawyer in me—the part that has spent decades asking what conscience requires when the easy answer and the right answer are not always the same.

And underneath all of them is The One Who Stayed.

Faith.

The deepest question.

Would I have stayed?

I honestly do not know.

That may be why these books expose me more than I realized when I wrote them.

They are not all autobiography.

But they contain me.

My mind.

My heart.

My body.

The things I have carried.

The people I could not fix.

The people I could not leave.

The questions I have asked God.

Which brings me back to Sophie’s question.

Why would anyone deliberately put all of that where strangers can see it?

Maybe because some part of me needed to bring it into the light.

The early Christian Church knew something about bringing what was hidden into the open. Public confession, in different forms, was once part of the life of the Church.

I am not comparing writing a book to sacramental confession.

But I sometimes wonder whether writing has become my own kind of public telling.

The fear.

The exhaustion.

The mistakes.

The love.

The failures.

The things I still do not understand.

Maybe the soul knows things before the fingers can type them.

Maybe somewhere inside us there is an instinct that understands the freedom of release before the conscious mind catches up.

And perhaps