CALLED FORWARD

You picked up this book for a reason. Maybe you’ve been lying awake at three in the morning, running the same loop in your head. Stay or go. Hold on or let go. Is this God… or is this just me? Maybe you’re exhausted in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. The kind of tiredness that lives in your bones and your spirit, not just your body. You show up every day. You do the right thing. You follow the rules. And still, something deep inside you keeps whispering, this is not where you belong anymore. Maybe you’ve been ignoring that whisper for months. Or even years. And maybe, just maybe, the reason you’re reading these words right now is because you’re finally ready to stop ignoring it. The question isn’t whether God is speaking to you. The question is whether you’re ready to trust what you’re hearing. The Problem With Playing It Safe We live in a world that rewards staying. Staying in the job you’ve outgrown. Staying in the version of yourself that everyone around you has already decided you are. Staying in situations that are slowly suffocating something sacred inside you, because at least staying feels certain, and certain feels safe. But here’s what I’ve come to understand; safety and calling are not always the same thing. Sometimes God’s direction feels like peace. And sometimes, maybe more often than we’d like, it feels like a door slamming shut behind you before the next one has opened. It feels like standing at the edge of something vast and being asked to step forward anyway. That’s not a crisis of faith. That’s faith working exactly as it was designed to. Why I Wrote This Book In 2021, after thirty years as an Emergency and ICU nurse, I walked away from my career. Not because I stopped loving medicine. Not because the work had stopped mattering. I walked away because staying would have required me to violate something that felt non-negotiable. My integrity, my convictions, and ultimately, my calling to serve people in the fullest way I knew how. It was not a tidy decision. There was no divine memo slipped under my door at midnight. There was fear. There was grief. There was the very real professional consequence of speaking out when the system expected silence. And there were long stretches of uncertainty where I genuinely didn’t know what came next. But there was also something else. Underneath all of it, underneath the noise and the doubt and the sleepless nights, there was a deeper knowing. A quiet, unshakeable, almost inconvenient knowing that this was the right thing to do. That I was being led. That even if I couldn’t see the road ahead, I was not walking it alone. That knowing saved me. What This Book Is, And What It Isn’t This is not a memoir. My full story — the miracle that brought me back to my faith, the years away, the road that led me here — that is its own book, and it will be told in its own time. What you’re holding is something more immediately useful than my story. It’s a framework. A set of discernment tools built from lived experience, integrative health practice, and decades of walking alongside people in their hardest moments — as a nurse at bedsides, as a coach in conversations, and now as someone who has stood at her own crossroads and chosen to leap. Each chapter addresses a distinct question that people in transition almost always face. You’ll find practical frameworks, honest reflection prompts, and enough of my story to know that the tools I’m offering you are not just theoretical. They’ve been tested. In real life. In a real and raw kind of way. What You’ll Walk Away With By the time you finish this book, my deepest prayer is not that you’ll simply know what to do next. It’s that you’ll believe — truly believe — that you are always guided. Always protected. That the God who placed the calling inside you is the same God who is walking you toward it, even when the path is unclear and the stakes feel impossibly high. Trust and obedience and action — taken together — are not reckless. They are the most powerful combination available to a person who is willing to partner with God in building their life. You are always guided. You are always protected. And when you trust, and when you act — everything changes. Let’s begin. With faith and love, Debbie-Jane