Coming August 5, 2026
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?
Coming August 5, 2026
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?
“We spend our whole lives waiting for a thunderclap. Meanwhile, God keeps sending canoes.” — from The Tug
About the Book
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.
Why read it
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.
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.
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.
The Author
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.
Available on Amazon in paperback beginning August 5, 2026. Have a question in the meantime, or want to arrange a speaking visit or a bulk order for your church or group?