Lie Makers and Light: Cheryl Bostrom on Breaking Generational Chains Through Story

Award-winning Pacific Northwest novelist Cheryl Bostrom joins Jan and Marti to talk about the trauma that shaped her early years, the grandmother who introduced her to God through nature, and the faith that transformed generational dysfunction into a life devoted to storytelling. 

Cheryl opens up about her mother's mental illness, the neurodivergent characters she writes with such care, and the concept of "lie makers" — the false beliefs that keep us stuck until we find and release them. 

She also previews her upcoming historical novel set on a 1919 Alaskan fox farm. A conversation about forgiveness, healing, and the quiet, redemptive work of a God who "means everything" when He says He works all things together for good.

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00:00 Welcome & Introducing Cheryl Bostrom
 02:30 "Give Us a Little Testimony": Cheryl's Story Begins
 03:09 An Okie Father, Migrant Camps, and a Tumultuous Marriage
 05:01 Rescued to the Pacific Northwest by Her Grandparents
 05:41 Meeting God Through Nature Before Knowing His Name
 06:43 Salvation at Nineteen and the Long Road of Sanctification
 08:02 A Prophetic Word: Isaiah 30:21
 09:57 "He Means Everything": Breaking Generational Strongholds
 10:28 Writing as Therapy: Sugar Birds and Becoming a Scribe
 12:04 What the River Keeps: Forgiveness Beyond What's Humanly Possible
 13:48 Writing Neurodivergent Characters With Care
 15:16 The Editor Who Kept Burnaby's Story Accurate
 17:23 Inside What the River Keeps: Hildy, the Elwha, and "Lie Makers"
 20:50 Finding the Lies Planted by Dark Spirits
 21:41 Drawing From Her Mother's Story With Gentleness and Care
 22:21 On Writing Happy Endings
 23:14 "We Become Scribes": Creativity as Worship
 24:15 Heaven, Ever-Expanding Joy, and C.S. Lewis
 25:09 A New Historical Novel: 1919, Alaska, and a Fox Farm
 27:55 Sacrificial Love, a Sister's Sacrifice, and Finding Her Voice
 29:23 Holding the New Story With an Open Hand
 29:47 Closing Words: "There's Nothing That Can't Heal"

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I'm Jan Johnson, a seasoned believer who loves relationships and, you know, just talkin' about Jesus.

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Transcript

[00:00] Jan: Hello, everybody. Welcome again to this next episode that we have today with Sheryl Bostrom. Welcome, Sheryl.

[00:08] Cheryl: Hi. Good to see you.

[00:10] Jan: Cheryl has been kind of a friend for a while. We had interviewed on my other podcast, Women of the Northwest,

[00:21] probably three years ago.

[00:23] Because it was your first book.

[00:26] Cheryl: Yeah. Or more.

[00:27] Jan: Or more.

[00:27] Cheryl: I think it was during COVID And it was. Yeah, it was a while ago.

[00:32] Jan: It was a while ago.

[00:34] Cheryl: Now we're officially old friends.

[00:36] Jan: Yes, yes.

[00:39] Marti: Old.

[00:40] Jan: Well, anyway,

[00:42] long friends. We're long term friends.

[00:46] Old too. I suppose so.

[00:49] Pacific Northwest novelist Cheryl Bottom Great Bostrom writes lyrical, surprising fiction rooted in the natural world and the complicated territory of the human heart. Boy, that is so true.

[01:02] Published in 2025, her novel what the River Keeps earned a Kirkus star and Rare Company as one of only two adult fiction titles named a Kirkus Review's Best Indie Book for June 2025.

[01:15] And congratulations, Cheryl.

[01:18] Her previous novels, Sugar Bird and Leaning on Air have won more than two dozen literary awards. Her short form work appears in literary and scientific publications and her substack newsletter, Birds in the Hand, draws readers worldwide.

[01:33] She's currently at work on a historical novel set in the Pacific Northwest. An avid birder and nature photographer, Cheryl lives in rural Washington state with her veterinarian husband and a pack of half breeding trained Gordon setters.

[01:49] Cheryl: And half is a. Is a stretch.

[01:56] Jan: That's like. We have a border collie for our sheep, right? Yeah, a wild border collie. Yeah.

[02:04] Cheryl: But they just about speak six languages, right? Border collies. As smart smart as they are. Oh my goodness.

[02:12] Jan: And he does zoomies around the car, around and around and around, stops and looks at you and then goes again, you know, just kind of then turns around the other way.

[02:19] He's like, oh, what did you just stop?

[02:21] Marti: Just.

[02:22] Jan: But when he rides up the sheep, that's a. Yeah, perfect.

[02:26] Cheryl: That's his job.

[02:27] Jan: That's his job. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:30] Marti: So, Cheryl, I just got to look through some material about you and about your books last night.

[02:40] So I am new to meet you in this podcast.

[02:44] Tell us a little bit about yourself, Cheryl. Give us a little testimony about who God has created you to be.

[02:52] Cheryl: Oh, that's a lovely way to ask that.

[02:55] You know, as creative as he is, he allows. And as a photographer, I spend a lot of time in light and dark and working with the presence of light in shadows.

[03:06] And so my story doesn't start out easily.

[03:09] I.

[03:10] I'm the eldest child of five and my dad was.

[03:15] Was an okie.

[03:17] Jan: Who.

[03:17] Cheryl: He was.

[03:19] He was a toddler when his parents sold their mules,

[03:23] bought a jalopy, came out Route 66 to the camps in California. Think four winds and grapes of Wrath.

[03:31] And he spent his formative years in those camps working their way up California and up the coast in all these crops that made for them the same sort of bias and prejudicial treatment that minorities were receiving.

[03:50] And they were really chastised and rejected all the way along there. Anyway, his family eventually landed in Port Angeles up on the Olympic Peninsula, which is where I was raised.

[04:02] And I'm, and I come from fifth generation Port Angelites. And,

[04:07] and he met my mom who was the only child of a prosperous businessman up there and she fell head over heels for him. And my siblings and I believe that their tumultuous marriage was born by him conning her.

[04:22] I mean, he's a con, he was a con man because he saw her as a way to escape his poverty.

[04:29] And so he,

[04:30] when they married,

[04:31] I was conceived on their wedding night, born when my mom was 19.

[04:35] And he hauled,

[04:36] he hauled me and the rest of my ever increasing siblings up and down the coast.

[04:42] Really trying in psychological terms you would understand this, but trying to,

[04:47] trying to recreate and I believe hoping to undo his own story and rewrite it. But instead he ended up recreating it and the trauma recreated. And nobody knew Christ except my grandmother.

[05:01] When I was four, my grandparents came to California where we were living in a rental home with practically no furniture and all of us kids were sleeping in one bed.

[05:10] And they brought me home with them to the Pacific Northwest where my grandparents were lived on this hill overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Morris Creek Valley and the Olympic Mountains.

[05:21] And my grandparents both were real nature lovers. My grandpa didn't know Christ at the time, although he accepted Christ at 73.

[05:30] But my grandmother saw the living God in the created world and she introduced me to him through nature.

[05:41] And I developed a deep love for the natural world at that point. Although it wasn't until I was 19 and in college that a friend invited me to a bring a friend Bible study and I met this God of mag.

[05:53] Of the magnificent creation I loved.

[05:56] Then at that point I couldn't believe it. You mean he can be my friend,

[06:01] he can be my comforter, he can guide me, he can live in me and transform me and forgive me because I was headed down the path to make some of the same poor mistakes that, you know, that my mother had made.

[06:13] And,

[06:14] and, and so the rest is,

[06:17] the rest is history. I mean, you don't I was a very compartmentalized child in that I believed in God from an early age. But once he got hold of my heart, there were pieces of me that I didn't relinquish too easily.

[06:31] And sanctification is a long process.

[06:34] But by his sweet kindness and grace, I get to be still in this world that he initiated a love in me for.

[06:43] From the very beginning and get to use that to.

[06:46] To share his love.

[06:48] So it's pretty thrilling to me. And, you know, I've been married for 50 years this year to.

[06:53] To my veterinarian husband, who is just my. My rock and my guide and my spiritual leader. And I just love him.

[07:02] Jan: So.

[07:02] Cheryl: Yeah, so he.

[07:03] Marti: He.

[07:04] Cheryl: He gave me my partner, too. That's beautiful.

[07:07] Marti: Isn't it just beyond imagining that we can serve a Lord that is so redemptive that he is able to walk us through breaking the generational chains that we have. Like,

[07:26] you were destined by the world to live like your father and your mother,

[07:34] but the Lord broke those chains through a relationship with your grandmother and then a relationship with Himself and.

[07:46] And look at you now. You're writing novels and feeding dogs and, you know, you just.

[07:53] A relationship with the Lord is you just don't know what is going to happen.

[08:02] And I love your testimony. And one of the reasons why I love your testimony this morning, Cheryl, is because I woke up this morning and the Lord gave me a scripture for you.

[08:14] And just listening to your.

[08:17] A little bit about your life, it's so applicable.

[08:21] It's Isaiah 30, 21. And a lot of people have heard this scripture before, but I believe in my heart of hearts that God wants me to read this over you this morning.

[08:36] Your own ears will hear him right behind you. A voice will say, this is the way you should go,

[08:42] whether to the right or to the left.

[08:45] Jan: Oh, wow. Whoa.

[08:50] Cheryl: Thank you. I'll trust that straight from him through you. Thank you.

[08:55] Marti: Amen.

[08:57] Jan: I think what's interesting too is that just how well God knows us and not only knows us at the certain times in our life, but where we're going to be down the road.

[09:09] And it's like when he asks us to give him parts of ourselves.

[09:15] If we can trust him,

[09:17] he can use that to help us be the best we can be.

[09:23] Cheryl: Exactly right.

[09:25] Yeah, exactly.

[09:27] And how. You know, and there are places in scripture where.

[09:30] Where the Lord actually has laughter at difficulty, you know, because the things that level us are. Are nothing for him to handle. And when he says he's going to work everything together for good, he means Everything.

[09:47] And he doesn't just mean that he's going to placate us or you know, give us a little, you know, a little kiss on the cheek because we've been through difficulty and leave us with all those tears.

[09:57] He says that when eternity comes, there's not going to be any more crying. We're not going, you know, and that death loses its sting. And as generational strongholds have broken in myself and the family that Blake and I have built with God's help together,

[10:15] we have seen,

[10:17] you know, we,

[10:18] we, we have just seen how the death in the story that I just told you has lost its power to destroy and to redirect our lives.

[10:28] And it's huge. It's huge. And, and so as I write these stories, and I didn't even realize it when I was starting it, I thought I was just, you know, and I was writing Sugar Birds for my granddaughter was the incentive to turn that sketch into,

[10:43] into a long form work of fiction.

[10:47] But it's also,

[10:48] writing these stories is very therapeutic because we're, we're affected by not just our own thoughts.

[10:55] You know, they've tested brains to see if manipulating brains with electrostimulation or whatever else can,

[11:04] can initiate abstract thought, they can initiate emotions, they can initiate physical changes, all sorts of things, but they don't initiate abstract thought.

[11:13] And the longer I live, the more I'm convinced I am that yes, human nature can generate thought, but by and large we are,

[11:23] by and large we are listening to voices and we are listening either to the voice of the Holy Spirit or we are listening to unholy spirits that direct us. And then in our either God driven will or our human nature,

[11:38] we obey and respond.

[11:41] And so writing these books has been extremely therapeutic because through these characters he's instructing me as well as he's instructing the story. And I just love that. It's just the coolest thing,

[11:56] you know. And so this, this story which is about really a forgiveness of the deepest sort when you have been betrayed,

[12:04] beyond which it's humanly capable to forgive.

[12:11] How do you forgive that? How does that pattern break? And so it was just a natural for me that here we have this river that has destroyed that the incarceration of which has destroyed this tribe and destroyed this ecosystem and which no one thought could,

[12:26] could have had, had dams that no one thought could ever come down.

[12:30] These dams come down and this river is restored. And then Hildy's life is a direct parallel to that. And that's really how the natural world has instructed me as well.

[12:40] And it's, it's just. When you finish the manuscript. When I finish the manuscript and I look at it and I go,

[12:46] wow, that's what happened. That's what happens. And I've since,

[12:51] and before too, you know, come alongside people who are breaking,

[12:56] who are in whom God is breaking strongholds all the time. And how there's nothing,

[13:03] nothing that can't heal. I don't care how bad your circumstances are. And I had some pretty bad stuff happen. And I have friends who've had some horrendous things happen. But in Christ, all things are possible.

[13:16] I mean he can heal that. He, he takes the, he takes trauma.

[13:20] And as he enters memories outside of time, he can enter our memories and transform them. And as that death loses its sting,

[13:31] that trauma simply becomes pain. On our timeline, the shadows that make the light shine all the brighter.

[13:37] And I know that sounds rather theoretical, but I've lived it. Yeah, it's funny. It's real.

[13:45] Jan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[13:48] So,

[13:49] so you have three books, Sugar Birds, you had Leaning on Air and what the River Keeps. So river, what the River Keeps is the one you were just referring to.

[13:58] Throughout those you have had characters that were neurodivergent.

[14:05] How did you think to do that? How did that, where'd that thought come from to, to enter those characters?

[14:11] Cheryl: The neurodivergence,

[14:12] you know, as you remember, is always deeply tied to the scientific world. They're scientists, they're, they're high achieving autistic characters.

[14:22] And though my world has been populated with those, though they may not be diagnosed as autistic. You know, I taught school and I had a number of neurodivergent kids in my classes, kids who were mainstreamed, they weren't non verbal, they weren't non functioning, they were highly functioning.

[14:40] But I really came to,

[14:43] to love and treasure the different way of viewing the world that these people have. And for those of us who think that we're normal and they're the ones who need fixing, we need to rethink that.

[14:56] You know, as Burnaby, as Burnaby learned both early on in Sugarbirds, his mom did, and then,

[15:03] and then in Leaning on Air, that there are things that he could do to mitigate the socially compromising things about his personality, whether through diet or through learning or through repetition or through flooding.

[15:16] And there are a variety of things and I understand that's not always possible, but I did have an editor who's, who had a fine, a high functioning 30 year old autistic son at the time.

[15:28] And she has written a number of books about autism. And so I had her review the manuscript, too, just to make sure that these characters were represented accurately. And she did steer me off of one thing which probably would have really derailed the book, and that was when,

[15:44] you know, when Burnaby was touched quickly,

[15:52] you know, by his friend and didn't respond. She says, he can't be touching him. He knows he can't be touching him. He can't be surprising him with touch.

[16:02] And so that helped me to make this one thread in the story where Burnaby is married to a very passionate woman.

[16:12] And his passion,

[16:14] you know,

[16:15] their differences can be overcome in passion,

[16:19] in marriage.

[16:20] But for her to touch him, incidentally,

[16:23] drove him through the roof. And so they have to figure out, how do we love each other? How do we best?

[16:28] How do you know? And then learning, what does love look like? Do we just give love that looks like what we want, what we think it looks like, or really what the other person needs and how they're created to do.

[16:40] And it's this process of becoming other centered, Christ centered, of dying to self. So there's a lot of that in that book.

[16:47] Jan: Yeah.

[16:47] Cheryl: And that had a lot to do. In answer to your question,

[16:50] those were things that my husband and I grappled with with him as a very stoic. He's not autistic, but as a very stoic,

[16:58] disciplined scientist. And I'm a little bit more out there.

[17:04] And so over the years, you know, just learning how to treasure each other in ways that the other person would really feel treasured,

[17:12] and how he likes to be treasured is not how I do. And so we learn.

[17:20] Jan: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was beautifully written in there. Yeah.

[17:23] Tell us more about what the river keeps.

[17:27] What you know, you've got your themes of the forgiveness and the betrayal and that part of it. But walk us through a little bit more, the plot and how things.

[17:38] Maybe some other things that through.

[17:41] Because as writers, we always put a lot of ourselves or our experiences in there. So how they relate to some of your experiences.

[17:50] Cheryl: Okay,

[17:51] my. My mom and I say this with great gentleness and care, but she has had mental illness issues,

[17:58] and I believe that I. So I drew from some of my experience with her for Violet and Hildy's relationship. It's not the same, though. It's very different.

[18:11] But,

[18:11] you know, when. As things heal in your own life and as they're no longer driving,

[18:17] driving. I'm speaking myself, but I know it's true for others as well as they're no longer driving us.

[18:22] They're great writing materials. They're just great.

[18:26] And so.

[18:27] And so with.

[18:29] With that. When the story opens,

[18:32] Hildy sees a couple of demons come off of her uncle when he's killed at the Elwha River Bridge.

[18:40] And she has returned to the Elwha river as a fisheries biologist because she's going to help with the reclamation of this river as these dams come down.

[18:48] She's very afraid to go back to the Elwha because her mother is struggling with dementia.

[18:55] And that is the reason she knows she has to come back.

[18:58] But she also has had a childhood that has been haunted by memories that aren't true. And so she has become a hoarder of memory.

[19:09] And she represents that through journal entries.

[19:13] They really aren't journals. It's just a diary ledger where she writes down every single thing that happens to her. She keeps other people at bay because this occupies so much of her time.

[19:24] She keeps rocks and feathers or tiny mementos of these memories, and then she's constantly reviewing them in her head.

[19:31] And so when she comes and moves into an old cabin on the resort where she was raised, right there on the Elwha river,

[19:39] she loads her walls and the rafters in this cabin with these mementos that tell her what she's remembering. And what she remembers is real, even though it absolutely contradicts what she's been told is real.

[19:55] And she thinks she's losing her mind,

[19:58] but what comes out is that a variety of surprises that I don't want to spoil for you,

[20:05] but she meets a guy who's suffered his own calamity, but it makes him very patient with her. And he comes to understand that her process of uncovering her story and her truth is going to take the caretakers of this.

[20:22] Of this resort who are looking after the place because Hildy's mother no longer can and because her dad has disappeared,

[20:30] tell Hildy,

[20:32] Otis in particular,

[20:34] tell Hildy that her anxiety and all the things that she worries about and all the things that she's trying to do will be resolved if she can ditch her lie makers, if she can find the lie makers in her life, find the lie.

[20:50] And she doesn't get that at first. She pushes back against it. But he. He calls those demons lie makers.

[20:57] And so that has become a reality. And it.

[21:00] In my understanding,

[21:02] when people can uncover the lies in their lives which are planted by dark spirits,

[21:10] they can heal psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. And so that's the process that she's Going through in that. And it's a process that I also had to look at. I had to find what were the lie makers in the generational strongholds in my life, you know, how did my mom end up with my dad?

[21:27] What sorts of lies did they both believe about themselves and about life and about God and about truth that drove them into such a highly dysfunctional experience?

[21:38] So I don't. Does that answer your question?

[21:41] Jan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[21:43] Marti: You. I have to read it.

[21:45] Jan: Have to read it.

[21:47] Marti: This morning, Cheryl, before we,

[21:49] we signed on with you,

[21:53] the joy and the excitement that Jan was telling me about when she was talking about your books, which is. It was like I was tasting something really good. Like it was great, like a piece of cake or something.

[22:08] I know I'm gonna have to go back and, and read this book. And especially now that you're giving me a little snippet of,

[22:16] of.

[22:17] Of what I'm gonna get. It's gonna be great.

[22:20] Yeah. Thank you.

[22:21] Cheryl: Well, I love the ending of this story more than. I mean, I,

[22:25] I believe in happy endings because I think if you haven't reached a happy ending as a Christ follower, you haven't reached the ending yet.

[22:33] No. But,

[22:35] but the story, the ending of this story, I,

[22:37] I know I wrote it, but I still can weep when I read it.

[22:40] It's just, it just.

[22:43] Jan: Yeah,

[22:44] but it is fun, I think, you know, just as an author too, to pick up some of your former books or something, you go,

[22:50] oh, I wrote that.

[22:51] Marti: Huh?

[22:52] Jan: That was good. I wrote that. I love that part. I thought that was.

[23:01] Marti: Go ahead. I've gone back and I've read something that I wrote and I thought, who was, who read. Who wrote that? That wasn't me. That was good.

[23:14] Cheryl: Which again tells us how we become scribes. You know, we're scribes and as we're inspired by the Holy Spirit and as that wondrous act of creation is duplicated through our pen or our computer,

[23:30] you know, we get to participate in that. And I think it's just a smidge of the taste of what God must have.

[23:35] Jan: Oh, yeah.

[23:36] Cheryl: Experienced at the creation of the world. And he's in,

[23:40] in cooperation with,

[23:41] you know, the Trinity as a family is, is doing this work and ah,

[23:48] yeah. It's inconceivable. I know you can't conceive it.

[23:52] Jan: Absolutely, absolutely. I always think about, with creation that just seeing God,

[23:57] Jesus, Holy Spirit, like, like, oh, look what I made. You know, and they'll go,

[24:02] you know, like, oh, it's just a chicken. Okay, look at this. Peacock that I just made, you know.

[24:08] You know, just spurring off of each other just with their design and, and the fun thing, I mean just having

[24:15] Cheryl: fun, delight to joy. The joy of it. Yeah, yeah. And then thinking too. We had a pastor once who talked about heaven and as being this place of ever expanding capacity, you know, and there's some who talk about the expanding universe and maybe that is illustrative of what will occur on the new earth,

[24:35] you know, the new heaven. And the new earth is just this ever increasing capability for joy and creativity and beauty and light and.

[24:45] Jan: Ah, yeah.

[24:46] Cheryl: You know, you think about C.S. lewis's. I think it was in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader where they, they say they have to stop part way and eat this special food.

[24:55] Do you remember that?

[24:56] Before they. Because the light's getting so bright, they can't bear it unless they ingest this.

[25:01] And I just think for us who are looking through a glass darkly, we can't even conceive of it. We can't begin to.

[25:09] Jan: Absolutely, absolutely. So you're now working on a new book. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

[25:17] Cheryl: Yes.

[25:18] Jan: Okay.

[25:19] Cheryl: And again, it's not, it's not pitched yet, so I can just give you the, you know, the get go on it and the basic stuff, but it's it, it begins outside my grandparents, my granddad's hometown of Wrangell, Alaska, on an island fox farm.

[25:33] And it starts in 1919.

[25:35] And that was the boom time for fox farms in Alaska. And the government leased islands for 25 bucks a year. And there were hundreds of islands. It was Alaska's third biggest industry,

[25:49] fox farming, in that time period.

[25:51] And they would turn these foxes loose on these islands and they'd decimate the bird populations and the shoreline populations and then eventually they'd end up feeding them sea mammals and MASH and.

[26:02] But fox pelts would give one fox pelt could be five times what a,

[26:08] a laborer's wage was per year. The beautiful fox pelts that were silvers. And. And so it was just crazy funny money stuff.

[26:17] And so she's on this fox farm with her mother, my protagonist, 18 year old protagonist, with her mother and her sister.

[26:24] Her sister finds out she's pregnant by.

[26:28] By their hired man, who's a good man and he loves her and he's asked for her hand. But the dad, so very materialistic, very ambitious,

[26:38] has refused the hand. He doesn't know about the pregnancy, but the girl's only 16.

[26:43] Anyway, when he sees this pregnancy showing,

[26:47] he spins her, he spins the younger sister as she's carving on this seal carcass on the beach and the knife slashes him and kills him.

[26:56] And at that point there are nods to Les Miserables throughout this story, which, which gives me the spiritual opening, but also the opportunity for it to be mainstream market.

[27:08] There are all kinds of,

[27:10] you know, you know, my books. Yeah, I mean, they're pretty layered. But anyway, the older sister, Alice, this 18 year old girl who hates the fox farming because she's a whiz with these foxes.

[27:21] She's a magician with them practically. She understands them, she helps them thrive, she wants them to be wild. And yet every December they're pelted and it's very contraindicative to everything she believes in.

[27:34] So anyway,

[27:35] when this accident happens, a fisherman declares it intentional and then the law comes.

[27:42] They secret this girl away to an island where in their.

[27:48] That's part of it, but they give her an alibi and it's Alice who takes the heat, sacrificially for her sister.

[27:55] She flees with two of these foxes and heads south on this steamship and then builds a different life. But meanwhile, the clock is ticking. This Marshall's after her. And so I won't tell you any more of that, but it's, it has themes of what does love look like, what does sacrificial love look like?

[28:15] And, and what do you do when,

[28:17] when it's not returned? And.

[28:20] And then there's a thread in there about the longing of,

[28:24] of the mother whose husband has been killed. Alice, the protagonist's mother and her daughter who write toward each other, but they can't correspond because this Marshall is monitoring all of this correspondence.

[28:38] So there's that whole thread. And then the one other piece that's interesting in this is that this girl has a tongue tie.

[28:46] Alice has a tongue tie. So there's a lot about voice in this story, about a woman's voice in that period.

[28:53] And how does a woman find her voice in,

[28:55] in this time? And how do you build a life with someone who knows you and hears you when you can't speak?

[29:04] And, and so I, I just, I love the way these threads all dovetail and there's some other. Other surprises in there that have to do with a lighthouse and mercury that I won't talk about yet.

[29:15] But I, I love this story and it's just, you know, it,

[29:19] so. But if it crosses your mind to pray that I can pull it off. I don't know.

[29:23] Jan: I don't know.

[29:24] Cheryl: I've, you know, I'm well into it. But it's. It has the potential to be a very meaningful, beautiful story. And, and so I, I don't want to get perfectionistic about it.

[29:34] I want to hold it with an open hand. But yeah.

[29:38] Jan: Yeah.

[29:39] Marti: Exciting.

[29:40] Jan: Oh, gosh. Oh. Well, we're almost out of time. And what would you like to leave our listeners with?

[29:47] Cheryl: Well, I, I think through all of these is that no matter what you're going through,

[29:52] no matter what you're going through, that there's nothing that can't heal. And that love is worth it.

[29:58] And that you don't have to do it alone.

[30:00] And that the Holy Spirit, as you trust him, will show you the path. And I just think of your Isaiah 30, 21.

[30:08] Yeah. Shows he. He will guide you. He will guide you.

[30:12] And I'd love. If anybody wants to,

[30:15] wants to follow me, you can go to my substack@cheryl graybostrom.substack.com or just look me up on substack.

[30:23] And I do a lot of giveaways, have a lot of nature photography, and my website is cherylbostrom.com but I'd love to have you join me.

[30:31] Jan: Great, great. And I'll put those in the show notes as well. Yeah. Anything else?

[30:37] Marti: It has been such a pleasure to meet you, Cheryl.

[30:40] Cheryl: Likewise.

[30:42] Jan: Okay, thanks, everybody. And if you haven't subscribed to either the audio or the YouTube version of this, do it, do it, do it so you don't miss anything.

[30:55] Thanks for.

[30:55] Cheryl: Thanks for having me. Chan, so good to see you again.