It's Not How You Start—It's How You Finish

The crowd grows silent as the runners take their marks on the track. Heads up, muscles engaged. The crack of the starting pistol reverberates through the arena as the contestants rise from their crouch and spring forward into motion. The crowd roars with excitement as the announcer’s voice fills the air.

The race has begun, there can only be one champion.

Preparation for that prize began long before the runner ever leapt off his mark. And it is that discipline that will determine—not his start, but his finish.

On My Mark

White Harvest Media was not born in a grand scheme. It honestly wasn’t even a thought to me until sometime last year. Writing, dreaming up stories and connecting them to biblical truths was how I often passed the time washing dishes or folding the laundry. Publishing, editing, formatting—learning KDP, IngramSpark, MailerLite—never even felt possible

In truth I have always wanted to write a book or ten. Motherhood, homeschooling and homesteading had a way of keeping me busy enough, that writing was a “maybe someday” for a good while. Then last year, my faith got put to the test in a painful and sometimes terrifying way.

Get Set..

When I was eighteen I was rear ended on the freeway. I was at a dead stop, the driver behind me was going sixty miles per hour. The accident left me with an occluded right shoulder, and traumatic brain injury that would go undiagnosed for the next nine months. Those days were dark and it is only by God’s grace that I am alive today to tell my story.

At a routine appointment, my neuro-ophthalmologist tested my midline. Something was off. An MRI confirmed it—my midline had shifted fourteen degrees to the right.
It was a miracle I was still walking.

Special lenses corrected the shift but the damage persists, flaring in times of stress. Last year was such a time. My husband and I were preparing to downsize from a large ranch house, to a four hundred square foot fifth wheel. We wanted to be debt free, including the mortgage. We wanted him home more, tired of a job that had demanded fifty and sixty hour weeks for twelve years of our marriage. This was our chance.

We remodeled the fifth wheel, I worked on it on weekdays after schooling and he worked on it on weekends. Every day for two months. Then in January 2025. My body rebelled. I would spend the next one hundred ninety days in bed. My TBI had flared. Migraines, memory gaps, and the kind of thousand yard stare that frightened my family became my normal.

To hold my thoughts steady, I had to write.

It helped.

It wasn’t always pretty, but it was story. Written words bridged the gap between what I could not articulate in reality, and what I needed my family to know. Processing anything required committed time to putting words to paper. The more I did it, the better I was able to focus.

I drafted over thirty stories last year. All unique, all integrating a different aspect of faith in the God who is bigger than trauma and setbacks.

Go!

Bethan’s Identity was not the first of the stories I drafted. It had actually been sitting in my filing cabinet since that accident eighteen years ago. It had reflected the darkness of that time, and I was determined to never publish it. At least not as it was. Too dark, too broken, too uncomfortable.

I told myself it would require too much of my reader, that I would have to clean it up, make it easier.

With maturity I have found the easy thing is rarely what endures. In the words of Abbie Halberstadt I have learned that “hard is not the same as bad.” I even let one of my character’s quote her in the book.

So where does White Harvest Media come in to all this? The truth is that I could independently publish my stories and be content. But last year, God was working on something else too. Not only do I enjoy writing, I enjoy helping others to write as well. A veteran with a memoir, a missionary with translation, a fellow author with wanting to take his books to audio.

The time I had spent on my back had left me with hours of time to research, methods, practices, and advice from those who had trailblazed the way to independent publishing success.

By the end of last year I was back on my feet. My husband and I sold our house in just five days. We are now living tiny with our four beautiful children, on land we own outright. A portion of proceeds from our house sale purchased my ISBN’s to own my own distribution rights.

All of this has prepared the way for me to start an imprint dedicated to telling the kind of stories that have weight. Stories that walk the reader through the cost of endurance when it would be easier to quit. Stories that question the lenses through which we view the the world. Stories committed to truth; Honest about sin, showcasing redemption and relentless about sanctification.

Press Toward the Prize

White Harvest has started well. But the start never matters like the finish. There will be other flares. Other setbacks, more trials. The work will be slow, tedious and mundane at times. The excitement of a launch will fade when sales slide or bad reviews land.

But if White Harvest is to become anything useful to the God who gave me the idea. Then that endurance is measured in quiet moments, not the loud ones. The days when a migraine steals my breath, or the better portion of my time was rightly poured out on my family first; those are the days when faithfulness to calling has both cost and reward.

Because the measure of success in the Father’s economy is never finishing first—it’s finishing well. As for me, when I finish this race, I hope to leave with nothing left.