Hi, my name is Wendy Zahorjanski, and I wasn’t always an author. In fact, I never planned to become one at all. But as a cross-cultural worker, there were some stories that happened over the past 15 years that I just couldn’t keep to myself. They were too precious to hoard. When I started sharing those stories with friends and family to encourage them, I realized that it was natural for me to want to invest in others in this way. Enter a friend who wouldn’t take no for an answer (who just happened to be an editor and book writing expert), and I realized I couldn’t run from my calling anymore.

It all started with the story of a girl who wanted to read more fiction. Wait, what? Yeah, you read that right. When I was growing up I read a ton of missionary biographies because for every nonfiction book I read, my mom would allow me to read one work of fiction. Over time I came to love the missionary biographies best. I began to dream that one day I could follow in the footsteps of the real-life adventurers in my books. And if God wanted me to go, then I was on the next plane. I thought it would be easy because—well—I was 19. What could be so hard about living in a different culture and learning a completely different language, right?

Then the struggles came. They exposed something I hadn’t wanted anyone to see: pride and self-reliance. But instead of giving into shame, which was the temptation, I tried to embrace the hard moments of the life I had chosen. I did that by embracing the God who was leading me through them. He has used the ups and downs of diving into a new culture to reshape my heart and now, my passion has become helping others see the treasures hidden in the moments that feel too hard. I have learned that hard is only half the story. Getting stuck in that half is easy, so I am here, ready to befriend and encourage anyone ready to discover the other half of their hard.