Every detour is a spiritual adventure

Maybe spiritual is the new sexy

Life doesn’t always go as planned.

That’s often a good thing – in the rearview mirror.

For years, readers constantly asked me, “When is your next book coming out?” I used to force a smile and say, “I’m working on it.”

And I was. I would write a manuscript, send it to my agent, she would read it and take a pass on it. Then a year went by. Another manuscript was completed, same story. Then another. In all, 9 years passed without a new book in the United States, until this week.

Gray & Company just released my new book Little Detours and Spiritual Adventures: Inspiration for Times When Life Doesn’t Go As Planned.

Why did I publish with a Cleveland company? Well, the publishing process didn’t go as planned. Does anything, really?

My first book, God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours was a grand slam. It sold like crazy. It made the New York Times bestseller list top ten three weeks in a row. It was published in 24 languages.

The second book, Be the Miracle, did well, but not as well as the first book. My publisher Hachette was involved in a long war with Amazon at the time, so who knows?

I wrote my third book, God is Always Hiring, when the economy was rocky. By the time Hachette released it a year later, the economy had recovered. The book didn’t sell well.

Then Hachette dropped me. I’ve been homeless as an author ever since. Unless you count Poland. And I do. Out of all 24 countries that published my first book, Poland became a perfect fit for my voice and their hearts.

So I kept writing books exclusively for Poland. I went on four book tours there. It made no sense to anyone, especially me. I kept writing books and Insignis Media kept publishing them. I sold more than 938,000 books in Poland -- and I don’t even speak the language. One of my books hit No. 2 in the country, just behind the Pope’s. At my last book signing there, 400 people crammed into the bookstore in Warsaw.

Why Poland? I have no idea. A radio host in Poland suggested it was because I have a Slavic soul, since my mother was born in Czechoslovakia. What a beautiful thought.    

So when people asked, “When is your next book coming out?” I said, “I’m working on one for Poland.”

“When will it come out here?” they asked. I had no idea but trusted that God did. Right God?

I tried to trust God to honor the deal we made long ago: I write the books; You deliver them to everyone who needs or wants them. It doesn’t matter if that’s one person or a million. The work of writing the books is my business; the work of delivering them is God’s.       

Of course I was eaten away by self-doubt. I constantly asked myself, What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get a book published in my own country? My author friends kept posting their new book deals on Facebook and my envy grew.

Yet every book signing in Poland felt holy. Every book event felt sacred. One woman took a train for 2 hours to meet me. One young woman tattooed the parachute from the cover of my book on her leg to honor the mother she lost to breast cancer.

Through a translator, people shared the most intimate painful details of their lives, miscarriages, divorces, domestic violence, and I prayed for every single one of them. I posed for thousands of selfies and was hugged by hundreds of readers. What more could a writer want? 

My Poland publisher went overboard to promote me: They posted signs of my book covers five stories high on the side of a building in Warsaw. They displayed my books in the massive windows at the train station and plastered them on the buses. Readers shared thousands of #reginabrett still life photos of my books all over Instagram.

They provided a wonderful interpreter, Olga, and a perfect guardian angel, Dominikah. The entire publishing team, Maria, Tomasz, Pawel, all made me feel like family. I even met their children and parents.

I went to Poland so often that my grandkids would play, “We’re going to Poland” like other kids played house. They would pack a toy suitcase for their pretend trip to Warsaw.

Each visit was a powerful spiritual experience, but that voice of doubt whispered to me, What about the United States? Why not here? Agents here told me publishers want something big and sexy, a best seller, a commercial hit.

But I don’t write sexy. I write spiritual.

How do you convince publishers that spiritual is the new sexy?

Plagued by doubt and shame over not having my books published in my homeland, I went to the Jesuit Retreat Center in Parma. I sat in the chapel, let out a big sigh and opened my heart in surrender. Are you done with me, God? I asked. If so, that’s okay.

Then I placed on the altar all my disappointments and frustrations. It makes no sense that my books were published in Poland but not here, I told God. But Your will, not mine, be done.

At that moment I heard these words from deep within:

And look at what Poland is doing in the world. Look at what Poland has done for Ukraine. This is why you are in Poland.

I wept.

God wanted me in Poland all those years. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Poland opened its borders. Poland responded with courage and compassion in an instant. Poland responded with the kind of love that requires personal sacrifice. In one month, Poland took in 1.5 million refugees.

A sign in the retreat house followed me home. They were an invitation: “The world needs who you were made to be.”

Who was I made to be? I’ve sort of been a mess: A recovering alcoholic. A barely believing Catholic. An unwed mother. A survivor of sexual abuse. A spiritual seeker. A cancer survivor. A pile of wounds, that’s what I sometimes feel like.

The perfect fit for a country where wounded people had to bounce back from Nazi and Communist occupation, where religion was nearly outlawed for decades.

Just serve Poland. That’s what my soul told me.

When I walk up the steps to write in my home office every day, I pass my mom’s birth certificate on the wall. I framed it, along with her naturalization document. My mom was born in Pericin, back in 1930, when that city was in Czechoslovakia. Over time, the borders changed. That city is now in Ukraine.

Ukraine.

It’s not our job to know who we are here to inspire; it’s our job to keep offering our talent and time and surrender them to the world. These words encourage me to keep writing:

Why Bother, by Sean Thomas Dougherty

Because right now there is

someone

out there with

a wound in the exact shape

of your words.

I was sent to bring hope to some corner of the world that was called to offer hope to another corner of the world. That was my holy assignment. What’s yours?

Maybe now, with the release of my new book in America, my holy assignment is, in some small way, to fill people up here so they can complete their holy assignment.

There’s a song that plays often in my head. It’s part of the soundtrack to my soul. The lyrics are from Isaiah 6:8. They both comfort me and challenge me:

“Here I am Lord. Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night. I will go, Lord, if you lead me, I will hold your people in my heart.”

Then I sit down at the keyboard, open my heart and ask for whatever words a wounded world needs most.