The Tug

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

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.

“The people we are given are never an accident. They are sent to wake us, to shape us, and to turn us toward the road we were meant for.”

An Excerpt

Introduction: The Tug

Let me start the way I start almost everything — with a confession and a joke.

The confession: I am not a man who likes change. When our household switched from whole milk to two percent, I phased into it over six months, mixing a little more two percent into the whole milk each week until my tongue forgave me. When we moved the couch two feet to the left, I had us move it an inch a day for two weeks so I could adapt.

So you can imagine my surprise that the central message of my entire life — the thing I have preached from a hundred pulpits and the reason you are holding this book — is about following a voice that asks you, again and again, to change everything.

Now the joke, which I have told from more pulpits than I can count:

A devout man is caught in a flood. A neighbor comes by in a canoe. “Hop in, I'll paddle you to safety!” The man waves him off. “No thank you. I have faith. God will save me.” A rescue boat pulls up to his window. “Climb aboard!” “No thank you. I have faith.” A helicopter drops a ladder. “Grab on!” “No thank you. God will save me.” Well, the man drowns. And when he gets to heaven, more than a little annoyed, he asks God, “I had faith! Why didn't you save me?” And God says, “I sent you a canoe, a boat, and a helicopter. What more did you want?”

I love that joke because it is about me. It is about all of us. We spend our whole lives waiting for God to show up in a thunderclap. And meanwhile, God is sending canoes. God is sending that small, persistent, easy-to-ignore feeling in your gut that something needs to change — that there is another road, and you already know which one it is.

I call that feeling the Tug.

Available Aug 5 on Amazon

Inside the book

Twenty-some chapters, one quiet thread

From the farm and the pond to the boy with the briefcase, the teacher who saw something, the song in his head, sixteen years, the voice in the shower, the donkey and the limo, the leap, and the long road that turned out to be exactly the right one.

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