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?