The Tug is now on Amazon — Kindle, paperback & hardcover

Now available on Amazon

The Tug

A memoir of failure, faith, and the quiet voice that's been guiding you all along.

What if the failures and wrong turns you most regret were never detours from your path — but the path itself?

In Kindle, free on Kindle Unlimited, paperback & hardcover · read an excerpt

The Tug, a memoir by John J. Goehle — book cover showing a canoe on a still lake at sunrise
“We spend our whole lives waiting for a thunderclap. Meanwhile, God keeps sending canoes.” — from The Tug
The Tug book cover

About the Book

The wrong turns were the path

The Tug is not a memoir of a remarkable life so much as a mirror held up to your own. Through the quiet, persistent voice he has spent decades learning to follow — the gentle pull he believes is the Holy Spirit, though whatever you call it, and whether or not you share his faith, you have already felt it — John Goehle offers his life as proof of one freeing idea: that the wrong roads were never wasted, and the failures were the path home.

By turns funny, tender, and profound, with a cast that includes Colonel Sanders trying to bribe the Pope, an anxious golden retriever, a diamond forgotten in a closet, and a sixteen-year-old who taught the author how to live.

Available in Kindle, free on Kindle Unlimited, paperback & hardcover.

  • AvailableNow on Amazon
  • FormatsKindle · Kindle Unlimited · Paperback · Hardcover
  • Kindle UnlimitedFree to read for a limited time
  • AuthorJohn J. Goehle
  • GenreMemoir · Faith & Inspiration

Why read it

A book about your life, told through his

Honest & human

A preacher's gift for taking a true thing and helping it land — funny, vulnerable, and unafraid to admit the milk really did take six months to switch.

Faith you can feel

Born of twenty years in the pulpit, these are stories that let Scripture light a life from the inside — not a lecture, but a conversation.

Freeing to read

One idea you'll carry: the road you regret was never wasted. The leaps were real. The losses were real. And they were leading somewhere.

John J. Goehle

The Author

John J. Goehle

John Goehle has been an entrepreneur and a lay pastor, a community-theater director and a healthcare executive — an ordinary man who needs six months to switch his brand of milk, and who has, again and again, leapt off cliffs of faith that terrified him.

For nearly twenty years he has served as a pulpit supply pastor and a sought-after speaker who has spent a lifetime helping others discover how their own story is still being written. The Tug is the fruit of those years — his actual life, held up to an ancient light to see what it was always trying to say.

Get your copy of The Tug

Now on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover — and free to read on Kindle Unlimited for a limited time. Have a question, or want to arrange a speaking visit or a bulk order for your church or group?