I just turned my Dallas hotel room upside down looking for the marked-up copy of The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming that I’ve been using for readings on this book tour. I see now that I must have left it on the airplane, or in my hotel room in Atlanta.

The old me (= me before going out on this tour) would have reacted to something like this by saying, approximately, “#%:*&@!”, and being really angry at myself and at the situation.

I surprised myself, though, by thinking, “Well, that’s a shame, but maybe it’s God’s will, because the person who finds that book really needs to read it, and wouldn’t have otherwise.”

You know what it is? Meeting so many people in this past week who have responded so strongly to this story of Ruthie and her community, and who have spoken to me of their own pain and loss, and the hope they have taken from either reading Little Way, or hearing at the reading about what’s in the book. People having me sign the book for an estranged child, parent, or sibling, saying they hope this story will bring healing. I told some Dallas folks yesterday that writing Little Way, and going on the road with it, and meeting and talking to people who have been so affected by the story, has left me with the increasing feeling that my vocation as a writer is changing. I’ve spent my entire professional life making arguments. Arguments are good and necessary to make! But I’ve hit a wall. Now it may be more important for me simply to tell stories.

We’ll see. The thing I wanted to write about now is how the grace that has come to me in the past week through you readers I’ve met, in seeing how Little Way is changing you, has affected me in a small but surprising way. I mean this: seeing and hearing from and talking to readers and potential readers who are carrying so many heavy burdens, and who see in this book the hope they need to ease those burdens, and heal the wounds inside themselves or between them and their loved ones, has put my own pettiness in perspective. Ruthie’s oncologist told me that even at the very end, when she was skin and bones, and couldn’t really walk, only shuffle, you would see her moving slowly through the chemo room at the Baton Rouge General, visiting with the other chemo patients, smiling at them, patting their arms, doing what she could to lighten their load. No self-pity, no anger, no despair: she turned her own suffering into a source of comfort and encouragement for others.

She was dying of stage four lung cancer, and yet all she saw was others, and their needs, and asked herself, “What can I do for them? What would God have me say to them to help them?”

So I’m going to get upset over a lost book? Really?

Here’s the thing: It’s just not my way to lose a book I really need for my work, just before a whole day of media appearances and a big reading, and in response to shrug and say, “Oh well, maybe God knows that somebody needs that book more than I do.”

But it was Ruthie’s way.

Is Ruthie’s way.