​Last night, I turned on the Chiefs game.
I wasn’t particularly interested in watching it. I had been working in my office, listening to an audiobook that still hadn’t captured me and when I realized it was almost 8:00 p.m., I knew it was time to stop working.
So I turned on the game, because that’s what you do when you live in Kansas City.
Except apparently, I don’t.
Within minutes, I was overwhelmed by the noise. The commercials. The constant stimulation. I wasn’t enjoying any of it.
So I turned it off.
This morning, sitting in the quiet of my house, I started thinking about how much I have stripped away from my life.
Beliefs that weren’t mine. Expectations I inherited. Roles I learned to play. Ideas about what a life is supposed to look like.
The years of my intermission have required me to look at those things one by one and ask:
Is this actually mine?
And lately, I find myself asking the same question about my attention.
I spend most of my days working from home in almost complete silence. There is the hum of the air conditioner, the wind against the side of the house, and the occasional sound of a passing car. Most days, my house is quiet.
And that quiet means something to me.
For a long time, I lived inside someone else’s chaos. There was noise I didn’t create and couldn’t control, yet somehow had to manage. I learned to pay attention to someone else’s emotional weather, to anticipate what might be coming and adjust myself accordingly.
I believe that is why I am so protective of quiet now.
I am also learning more about my sensitivity. I am accepting it without explaining it, apologizing for it or feeling ashamed of it, as I was taught to do.
Right now, I’m still learning to find balance.
The fact is, I spend a great deal of my time alone. There is solitude that nourishes me, and there are times when I need to step out of my quietude and be with people.
I don’t want quiet to become another way of hiding.
And I don’t want noise to become another way of escaping.
That is the distinction I am trying to understand.
Because when I encounter the noise of the larger world now, I feel it differently.
The outrage, opinions and endless commentary. A culture that seems increasingly unable to sit still.
There is an entire world competing for our attention. News alerts and advertisements. Devices designed to be hard to put down. Even things we genuinely enjoy can become another way of filling every unoccupied space.
Sometimes I think we are living through an epidemic of distraction.
Maybe even an addiction to it.
And because distractedness has become so normal, I’m not sure we recognize it anymore.
There is always something available to occupy us. Something to watch. Something to scroll. Something to listen to. Something to buy. Something to learn. Something to improve.
We rarely have to be bored anymore.
And I’m beginning to wonder if boredom might be trying to give us something.
I notice it in myself when I’m not working or writing or outside exploring. When there is nowhere I need to be and nothing in particular that needs to be accomplished, I can feel the impulse to reach for something.
What am I going to do now?
That is the moment I want to become more conscious of.
What do I reach for when nothing is demanding my attention?
Because distraction can give us somewhere to go when the truth feels too close. It can keep us from having to look at what is actually happening inside us.
The grief. The fear. The loneliness. The choices we regret and the ways we have participated in our own unhappiness.
And we are being offered endless ways not to look.
Even healing can become another form of distraction. We can read another book, try another therapy, complete another journal prompt or learn another five-step process.
Some of those things can help. Many have helped me.
But we can read about our patterns forever and still avoid changing them. We can journal about our pain without allowing ourselves to feel it. We can keep gathering tools without ever engaging with what the tools reveal.
And all the while, the algorithms keep feeding us more.
What is all that noise doing to us?
I don’t want to become a person who rejects the modern world. Technology has brought good things into my life. It lets me see videos of my grandson. It helps me run my business. It has helped me create, learn, find answers and stay connected.
I don’t want to confuse discernment with deprivation.
I simply want to choose.
I want to know when I turn something on that I actually want to watch it. When I open an app, I want to ask why I’m there. When I read something, I want to notice what it leaves behind in me.
I want to tell the difference between nourishment and stimulation.
Between quiet and hiding.
Between genuine curiosity and the reflex to fill every empty moment.
Freedom is becoming increasingly discerning about what I allow to influence me.
I’ve spent years learning to recognize the voices I carried inside me that were never really mine.
Perhaps this is simply the next layer.
What gets my attention?
What gets access to my mind?
What gets to shape the way I see myself, other people and the world?
What am I reaching for when I say I am bored?
And when I am alone, am I choosing solitude or withdrawing from life?
I don’t know that the answer will always be the same.
But I know that living consciously is learning to ask the question before I reach for the noise.

Pages From My Journal
Monday, September 14, 2026
Lord, thank you for waking me up this morning to the bright red sliver of light cresting the sky in the end of darkness. For a moment, I was mesmerized by the textures and contrast until it was replaced by an overcast morning sky, which presented its own subtle beauty.
I have a busy day ahead, but this time with you to pause helps me turn inward to peace.
It’s still fairly dark, but I can see the silhouette of a hummingbird against the charcoal sky. She is resting on top of my deck post. As I watch her head scan her surroundings, two more enter the feeder area, and I immediately feel sadness and hope for them.
What must it feel like to migrate thousands of miles? Does she stay close to her flock, or is she a solo traveler on this journey? If there are dangerous obstacles, what will she have to endure?
I want to offer her protection. It really does hurt my heart to think of her unknown journey ahead.
But right now, she has fresh food and a safe space to rest her amazing body. I know she is equipped for the journey, but I wonder: is this her first trip, or is she a pro?
Be safe, little girl.
I’m going to miss you more than you know. My mornings won’t be the same without you, but you remind me of nature’s gift and the change it brings.
I promise to continue to notice until you return.

I have been thinking about a woman lately.
I haven't seen her in seven years.
It is August 2019, and she has just moved into an apartment. She is putting furniture together, trying to make the unfamiliar space feel like a home. One weekend, she is building a desk for her office.
She is also trying to build a life.
She doesn't know how she is going to do it.
She doesn't know what the next few months will bring, much less the next seven years. She is carrying wounds of abandonment and rejection she doesn't yet fully understand. And when someone from the life she is trying to leave reaches back toward her with what seems like an emergency, she opens the door just a crack.
He gets in.
For the next month, she will lose herself again.
For a long time, I looked back at that period through the lens of what happened to me. What he did. What I allowed. What I should have recognized. The red flags. The manipulation. The crumbs I picked up because, at the time, crumbs could still feel like love.
But something different came to me recently.
I don't want to analyze her anymore.
I want to be her friend.
And so I began imagining something that feels a little like time travel.
What if August 2019 is still happening for her?
What if she is still there in that apartment, building that desk, scared and uncertain and trying to convince herself that she is going to be okay?
And what if I could go back to her from seven years in the future?
Not to warn her or to stop her from making the choices she is about to make.
What if I could simply sit beside her as her inner mentor?
I think I would bring her here.
I would take her for a walk. I would bring her home and let her sit on my deck. I would make her some tea, and we wouldn't have to talk about anything she wasn't ready to talk about.
I would let her experience the quiet.
I would let her feel what safety feels like.
I would let her see the life she cannot possibly imagine from where she is sitting in August 2019.
And eventually, I think I would tell her:
You don't know me yet.
But I am you.
Seven years from now, you will live a peaceful life.
You will learn that safety isn't something another person gives you by choosing you. You will stop negotiating your worth through other people's attention, approval, presence, or absence.
You will discover that the abandonment you fear most isn't someone else leaving you.
It is leaving yourself.
And you will learn how to stay.
You will walk thousands of miles, some across another country, many within yourself. You will write. You will tell the truth about your life. You will meet versions of yourself you haven't met yet, and slowly, you will stop asking the world to tell you who you are.
Most importantly, you will find your way to a place inside yourself where God has been waiting all along.
I wish I could tell her that she won't get hooked again after that August weekend.
But she will.
I wish I could tell her that once she moves into that apartment, the hardest part will be over.
It won't be.
She still has to live through things because knowing something intellectually and knowing it in her bones are entirely different.
She doesn't yet know how not to abandon herself.
But I do.
That's why I have been thinking about her now.
Healing sometimes moves backward through time.
We spend so much of our lives imagining our future selves. We ask what our lives might look like five years from now. We set goals. We make plans. We visualize the person we want to become.
But lately I have been wondering about the opposite.
What if the person we have become could go back?
What would she say?
What if the woman sitting in that apartment in August 2019 could somehow sense me sitting here in August 2026?
What if, in one of her most frightened moments, something inside her whispered:
Just keep going. You have no idea who you become.
Maybe that voice was hope.
Maybe it was God.
Or maybe, somehow, it was me.
Seven years later, coming back for her.
Because she deserves to know I never forgot her, and this time, I won’t abandon her.

​Pages from My Journal
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Good morning, God.
What a beautiful morning!
Would I still think it was beautiful if the weather didn’t suit me? I’d like to think so. I’m more inclined these days to be grateful for a day of pure potential (which is every day) than for what the weather happens to be in the moment.
But today, I’m in tune with the movement of the sun a few notches to the right as it rises. I’m noticing the cooler temperature, and I’m in tune with my hummingbirds, who are still showing up for me even in the absence of food. (The raccoons broke the feeder while I was out of town, but a new one is on the way.)
I feel like I’m their caretaker. I know there are other food sources, but my hummingbirds, well, they’re mine. I give them a safe space to rest their weary wings, and they speak to me. We connect in spirit.
Sometimes I feel like Snow White in the way I connect with birds and nature. I feel like a child in Your natural world, and that makes me think about something my son said to me this weekend:
“Mom, you can now live your life as if you are six years old. Your whole life is ahead of you.”
God, that made me feel so warm inside.
He’s right. My whole life is ahead of me. My entire life, yes, but also my WHOLE life: a full, true, authentic life.
And I’m going to live it fully.
P.S. While writing this, the feeder was delivered, so I stopped to fill it and set it up. As I finished this final sentence, she came right up to my face to thank me.
What a beautiful morning.
This photo was taken at the exact moment I finished my journal entry. I had no idea she was in the shot. It is not AI. Photo credit: me!

“Every authentic act of creation changes the creator before it changes the creation.”
—Karen Carmack
This quote came from my friend and teacher, Karen, after she taught me to shape a ceramic bowl. And ever since she said those words, I haven’t stopped thinking about how that moment has “shaped” me lately.
The last 45 days have been very creative for me. I've been writing, of course. But I've also been moving things around my home, seeing familiar spaces differently. I've worked with clay, lumber, screws, brackets, art, and photography. And every act of creativity has been an open process, with a fair amount of figuring-it-out-as-I-go.
I think the spark was ignited when I stood by my (SELF) and said out loud, “Hold on, because what unfolds next is going to be freaking extraordinary.”
At the time, I didn’t know any of these creative moments were connected.
Then I sat down with a lump of clay.
As I shaped that little bowl with my own two hands, I noticed something about myself.
I wasn't trying to make it perfect.
I pressed patterns into the clay without worrying whether they were evenly spaced. I let lines wander. I left crevices where they appeared. The bowl wasn't perfectly round or smooth, and I didn't keep working it until it was.
I just let it become what it was becoming.
There is a version of me who would have struggled with that.
She would have wanted the pattern uniform. She would have smoothed the rough places and evened the edges. She would have kept adjusting and correcting until everything looked the way she thought it should.
But sitting there with clay in my hands, I didn't feel the need to do any of that.
And it was incredibly freeing.
I don't even know how the bowl will turn out. It still has to be glazed and fired. Maybe I'll love it. Maybe I won't.
Who am I kidding? I will absolutely love it, no matter how it looks.
Because Karen's words helped me realize something: the bowl isn't the most important thing I was creating that day.
Something was changing in me.
Over the past month, I have stumbled upon all sorts of hidden creative treasures, not only in my writing, but in my home, on my deck, and in things I never would have thought of as particularly creative, like the process of making my London Fog tea.
And I think they all began with an openness.
A realization that has been slowly settling into me:
I am no longer living for someone else.
And I am no longer living solely from the parts of me that learned how to manage my survival for 56 years.
Those parts served me well. They learned to anticipate, manage, perfect, explain, accommodate, and control. They helped me create a life that felt safe.
But survival and creation ask different things of us.
Survival wants certainty.
Creation asks us to stay curious.
Survival looks for the “right way”.
Creation wonders, What if I tried this?
That is what has felt so different about this season of my life, Act III. I am giving myself permission to make things without knowing exactly what they will become.
And somewhere in the making of all of them, I am being made, too.
The bowl may come out of the kiln imperfect.
I hope it does.
And I will love it every time I see it sitting front and center on my table.
Displayed for all to see.
Peace,
J~

Thank you, God, for this day.
I am worthy of your love, and in this season, I have come to know it deeply.
Yet how is it so easy to lose sight of your love in the autonomy of this world?
I wear independence fiercely. It’s a badge of honor. But it might be that my independence has been the very trait that causes the most distance.
Aha, maybe.
Maybe that’s what you meant by bridging the gap, narrowing the space, shortening not only the distance that I feel—but that we feel—in this world.
And when I visualize it, I realize that may be why I tend to linger so long in my time with you each morning.
Closing up the abyss.

There are days when everything feels just right.
I wake up early, giving myself extra time to linger over coffee and my journal. A new audiobook keeps me company on my morning walk. My work flows effortlessly, and I accomplish more than I expected. I catch up with a friend on the phone, and the conversation leaves me feeling connected. Even dinner turns out perfectly.
As the day draws to a close, I settle into that familiar feeling I call GJP.
Then I notice it.
A slight tightening in my chest.
A whisper of anxiety.
What's happening?
Why am I anxious?
I've experienced this often enough to recognize the pattern.
Nothing has gone wrong.
No crisis.
No bad news.
Just an unexpected descent into searching for what must be wrong.
I've always called it spiraling.
Until I read this by Henri Nouwen.
"You can look at your life as a large cone that sometimes becomes narrower the deeper you go. There are many doors in that cone that give you the chance to leave the journey. But you have been closing those doors one after the other, making yourself go deeper and deeper into your center.  Every time you close another door... you commit yourself to go deeper into the heart and thus deeper into the heart of God."
I couldn't stop thinking about that image.
For years I’ve pictured myself spiraling downward into something dark, something to escape before I went too far.
But Nouwen offered me a different image.
A cone.
Instead of circling out of control, what if I had been moving inward? What if each return to the same questions wasn't evidence that I was stuck but an invitation to go a little deeper?
As I pictured the cone, I imagined small doors all along its sides.
The door of distraction.
The door of busyness.
The door of needing approval.
The door of immediate relief.
The door of certainty.
Some of those doors look harmless. Others even look wise. Harmless or not, each offers an exit from the inward journey.
Nouwen reminds us that healing comes when we stop hiding our weakness and allow our divided selves to become whole.
Perhaps that's why the inward journey can feel so unsettling at times.
But as I reframe my view, I see myself being gathered together, not falling apart.
As the cone became narrower, there was less room to carry everything I thought I needed.
The need to be understood.
The need for certainty.
The need to figure everything out.
The need for someone else's approval.
One by one, there simply wasn't room.
My life didn't become smaller. It became simpler.
Eventually there's only enough room for what has always been true.
At the center...
I am already beloved.
Maybe what I've been calling spiraling wasn't a sign that something was wrong.
Maybe it was an invitation to go deeper.
The next time I catch myself saying, I'm spiraling, I hope I'll pause before reaching for the nearest exit.
Instead, I want to ask:
Is this taking me away from myself... or toward my center? 

I have experienced many life changes over the past seven years, but the most profound change began in 2023. And honestly, nothing really happened.
I moved into a new home.
I became a grandma.
I declared it my pivot year.
I chose myself.
There wasn't one dramatic moment that changed everything.
Just a slow year of pivot, surrender, and self-uncovery.
It felt as though a fog had begun to lift, drawing me into a deeper life of contemplation.
I believe we all enter the world with something uniquely our own. A temperament. A personality. A soul already known by God. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." — Jeremiah 1:5
Yet we also enter the world completely dependent on the environments that shape us. Long before we're old enough to choose, we're learning to belong. We discover which parts of ourselves are welcomed, which feel like too much, what earns approval, and what feels safest to hide.
As children, we don't consciously decide to do this. We adapt.
Those adaptations help us navigate the world we've been given. But over time, they can become patterns. Eventually, it's difficult to tell the difference between who we truly are and who we've learned to be.
For years, I fell into the self-discovery loop. Read a book, check off the list. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
But it was that year of deep self-reflection when I realized that I'm not on a quest to discover myself.
I'm on a quest to uncover myself.
The woman God created has never been missing. She has been layered beneath expectations, survival strategies, fears, and the quiet adaptations that once helped me belong. I don’t need to discover her; I need to uncover her.
By 2023, I thought I had already changed dramatically. Divorce had reshaped my life. I had rebuilt my home. I had begun healing.
But I had only scratched the surface.
It wasn't until 2025, while writing Untucked, that I went even deeper into my own self-uncovery.
Even now, I wouldn't say I've arrived. There is no final destination. It feels more like gently untucking another layer, then another, allowing the soul to keep unfolding. Which often returns me to the little girl I remember at five years old.
She was curious. A little sassy. Full of light. She talked with God as though He were sitting beside her. She hadn't yet learned to measure herself through someone else's approval.
Somewhere along the way, life began teaching different lessons. And it’s my body that remembers the lesson before my mind does.
It remembers the sting of criticism.
The fear of abandonment.
The feeling that love could be uncertain.
So I became very good at criticizing myself before anyone else could.
And I became the first to abandon myself before anyone else could leave.
Until eventually, I became whoever I thought I needed to be, depending on who stood in front of me.
And it wasn’t until recently that I found myself standing in my living room, looking around at the life I've slowly built. And almost without thinking, an old question surfaced.
What would they think of my life now?
Maybe for you, "they" is a parent.
A spouse.
A friend.
Someone whose approval once mattered deeply.
And in that moment, I realized the conversation wasn't happening in the room.
It was happening inside me.
My life has finally become mine. I no longer need to imagine their judgments or opinions in my mind. I don’t need to arrange my life so it makes sense to someone else.
I have nothing to prove.
These walls hold no secrets.
So I really do have to ask myself, where am I still creating a narrative around another person?
The gift of that moment wasn't the answer.
It was noticing the question at all.
I realized I wasn't actually answering to them anymore.
A pathway that had quietly existed for decades was simply closing.
I almost missed it.
I released the expectations that had quietly traveled through relationships and generations.
I released the belief that love must be earned.
I released the version of myself that was still asking for permission to become who I already was.
I don't write these words to diminish anyone's memory.
I write them because healing requires honesty.
Every person in my life has shaped me in some way. Every season has left its imprint. I wouldn't erase any of it. Even the hardest chapters became part of the story that formed me.
But there comes a moment when we must ask ourselves:
Do these patterns still belong in the life I'm creating?
The old patterns don't usually disappear all at once. Sometimes they return disguised as second-guessing, over-explaining, or quietly looking outside ourselves for permission. But now I recognize them for what they are, just familiar habits quietly asking whether they're still needed.
For me, that has become the deeper work of self-uncovery.
Uncovering the person who has been there all along.
The woman God knew before I took my first breath.
The woman who no longer needs to fit in because she already belongs.

Peace,
​J~

​Making Room
I hadn't planned on redecorating my home this summer.
It all started with a chair!
When you are short like me, finding the perfect chair becomes a quest because furniture, like many things in our world, is not designed with shortness in mind.
That quest turned into moving bookshelves, pictures, and mementos I had carried from one home to another because they once meant something to me or had been passed down over the years.
Some held beautiful memories.
Others quietly belonged to a life I no longer live.
Letting Go…
I love objects around me that tell stories. A vase full of stones from hikes and travel, an old photo, a book from my childhood. These things remind me of where I've been. I’m sentimental like that.
But now, I find myself asking, do these things still belong in the life I'm creating?
Healing has a funny way of showing up in ordinary moments.
Like standing in the middle of my living room, holding something I’ve looked at every day for years and realizing it no longer needs to occupy my space or my attention.
Over the past few weeks, I've donated furniture, rearranged rooms, replaced pieces that no longer felt like me, and welcomed more openness into my home.
And in that feeling of openness, I see why I kept parts of my past within eyesight. They were familiar. But it wasn’t about the item; it was about the version of myself it represented.
In the past seven years, I've redesigned so much of my life. I’ve spent time discovering what matters to me and how I want to live my most authentic life. So why was I still making space for pieces that belonged to someone I’m no longer?
It was a recent EMDR session that seemed to unlock something in me. I found myself standing in my quiet living room imagining the opinions of people who are no longer part of my life. Some have passed. Others have simply moved on.
The conversations weren't real. But the feelings were.
It made me think of how often we continue decorating our lives around voices that are no longer in the room.
And that felt like another level of growth…
Recognizing that the people who shaped us don't have to continue shaping every decision we make.
We can honor them without living beneath the weight of their opinions or expectations.
We can love them and still choose differently.
The Quiet After…
As my home has changed, I've realized something else has been changing too.
The constant hum inside me has grown quieter.
For much of my life, I lived in survival mode. I didn't know what it felt like to move through the world with a settled nervous system because I'd rarely experienced it.
Now I catch myself simply being.
I can't seem to stop looking around my home.
For the first time, the space around me feels like it reflects the life within me.
Every piece feels like it belongs.
So do I.
Peace,
J~

I've begun to notice that when life becomes quieter, different questions emerge.
The past few weeks, I've found myself wondering how much of our lives is part of a divine design and how much is shaped by circumstance, choice, and free will. Are we born with a purpose already woven into our souls? Are the people who cross our paths placed there long before we ever meet them? Or are our lives simply the unfolding result of countless decisions made by ourselves and others?
I thought about the people who have shaped my life. My parents. My former husband. Friends who appeared at exactly the right moment. People whose lives unfolded in ways entirely different from my own, yet somehow our stories intersected. How many events had to occur for our paths to cross? How much was chosen? How much was given?
Of course, I don't expect to solve a mystery that theologians and philosophers have wrestled with for centuries.
But as I sat with the questions, I noticed something more important than finding an answer.
The questions themselves have changed for me over the years.
There was a time when my questions were born out of survival.
How do I get through today?
How do I keep everything from falling apart?
What do I need to fix next?
When the nervous system lives in a constant state of vigilance, there isn't much room for contemplation. Every ounce of energy is devoted to getting through the next hour, the next day, the next crisis.
Lately, though, I've noticed something unfamiliar.
A quiet within me.
My nervous system no longer seems to believe that every moment is an emergency.
From that quiet emerged not only different questions, but a different way of inhabiting my life.
What is life inviting me to notice?
Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of healing.
The spaciousness to wonder again.
I do believe that some of the story was written long before I arrived. Maybe certain scenes were always going to unfold. And maybe there is more improvisation than I will ever understand.
I don't know. And that’s the beauty of it. I don’t have to know.
My calling is not to read the entire script.
My calling is to be fully present for the scene I'm in.
To deliver my lines honestly.
To love the people who share the stage with me.
To trust the Director even when I cannot see the next act.
For so much of my life, I was simply trying to survive the performance.
Now, I find myself awake within it.
And as I sit on my porch in the quiet of the evening, watching the sun set after the rain, and feeling the peace that has slowly settled into my nervous system, I notice something else has changed.
I'm no longer asking, Who do I need to become?
Instead, I find myself becoming more aware of the One who has been present all along.
Transformation doesn't happen when I finally convince myself that I am enough, worthy, healed, or whole.
It happens when I stop trying to define myself at all.
Identity isn't something I achieve; it's something I receive.
Life doesn't begin with a declaration of who I am.
It begins with the quiet realization that I have always been seen... always been known... always been loved.
The more I rest in that Presence, the less I feel compelled to define myself by labels, achievements, failures, or even healing itself.
Perhaps this is why the questions have changed.
The need to know has slowly given way to the freedom to wonder.
To trust that whether my life is a sacred contract, a tapestry of countless choices, or some beautiful mystery of both, I do not walk it alone.
I simply have to be present.
Present to this moment.
Present to the people before me.
Present to the quiet whisper that has been there all along.
And perhaps that is what it means to live Untucked. Not finally knowing who I am, but resting in the One who has always known me.
 Peace be with you,
J~