by jo | Dec 15, 2015 | Advent, Everyday Stories
I remember being in college, and learning that one of my old junior high students from the youth group I helped with had had his mother die. On Christmas day. Their dad was already out of the picture and life was already hard. For a story I wrote earlier this year...
by jo | Dec 8, 2015 | Reviews/Recommendations
My parents and brother just came out to Kansas for Thanksgiving and they drove the last of my earthly possessions here with them. Which means, I finally have all of my books with me again. As I unpacked the 6 or 8 boxes of books and started to sort them into piles to...
by jo | Dec 1, 2015 | Advent
“Name ten people you met this week,” he said to us. We were sitting in a dining room in South Africa. We’d just come back from a couple weeks in Malawi, Africa, and we were debriefing in Johannesburg before returning home. They’d sent us...
by jo | Nov 24, 2015 | Everyday Stories
If you told me 12 years ago that my world would change forever in a few months, I either wouldn’t have believed you, or I wouldn’t have been thankful at Thanksgiving. Not really. I probably would’ve said that I’d be grateful — good, strong church kid that I was. But I...
by jo | Nov 17, 2015 | Memoir & Essays
He was the first one to buy my work. Two years ago, I started to make art pieces. It happen kind of overnight. I got the idea for one piece — an Audrey Hepburn portrait on book pages — made it, and then I just kept creating. Two weeks later I’d...