Joy Leanne

They say to write what you know. This is what I know. I know an ordinary life. I know play dates and dinner dishes. I know bus stops and first grade home work. I know bed time routines and sticky hands. My life is quite. It is wonderfully beautiful in all of it's ordinariness. I see a trend on places like Instragram to celebrate the simple, small wonder of our every day lives. It's a wonderful trend. But I wonder, have we romanticized the every day. Are we afraid to acknowledge that the mundane can be as exhausting as it can invigorating? None of us want to be whiners, but I wonder if in our desire to offer hope, we have painted the world with rose tinted water colors ( or instragram filters.) I love a good movie quote. You've Got Mail is full of them. One of my favorites is when Kathleen Kelly is writing to Joe Fox about her small life. "I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't bee...

We are in a season of change at our house. We are writing a new chapter of our story. The first six weeks of the year included God actively taking some things out of our lives. I can't even say “we let go of things” because we really didn't have a choice. The changes were swift and out of our hands. It would be easy to dwell on the loss of these things. To mourn what no longer is. They were good things. Things we loved and had prayed over and had chosen for ourselves. They were good things they just weren't “right now” things. In her book “The Best Yes” Lysa Terkeurst talks about trees having to let go of their leaves to survive winter storms. There is a season for leaves and a season for snow, but if a tree holds onto its leaves too long it can't hold the weight of winter storm. We can't move into a new season with out letting go of something. And so we let go to make room for new things...and this is where it get's slippery for me. I love Instagram and fo...

  Have you ever read A Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis? If not I encourage you to. Actually I would encourage any one who hasn't read through the entire Chronicles of Narnia series to do so. It will change the way you see the world. I promise. Depending on what order you are reading the series A Horse and His Boy is either the third book you read (if read chronologically) or the fifth book you read (if read in the order written). Either way it is an interesting departure from the formula used in all the other books. In each of the six other books children from our world are transported to a magical world. In A Horse and His Boy however, all of the characters are from the world that contains Narnia. In this unique book Lewis explores the concept and idea of story in a number of ways. Particularly the idea that we each have our own story, and that we are never told stories that are not our own. Over and over people tell their stories and . in some case, have their stories told to t...

February 12th 2012, the day we announced our pregnancy to friends. Trigger Warning: This post is about pregnancy and loss. I realized recently that I never really wrote about or shared my miscarriage story. At the time it wasn't really something you saw much of on blogs. Trust me, I searched. In the years that have passed I have had a number of friends experience this type of loss and many of them have written beautifully honest posts about their experiences. But, one of the things I have noticed is that still, the people who write about their loss are those who have been through extraordinary circumstance. Be it ectopic pregnancy, late term miscarriage, laboring after a miscarriage, multiple losses, all of their stories have been intense. My story is not. I did some research and numbers are confusing and fuzzy, but most studies seem to agree that between 15-20% of confirmed pregnancies end in miscarriage. A confirmed pregnancy, in this case, means a normal (not early detection)...

Has this ever happened to you? You are sitting there having your quite time, maybe you are reading your Bible, maybe it's a devotional, when all of the sudden a phrase lodges itself in your brain and won't budge. You go about your day, but that phrase or verse just stays there, stuck in your brain like an annoying commercial jingle playing over and over. This happened to me the other day and, since I am trying to pay attention to the things that clearly stick with me, I took some time to sit down and do a art entry in my journaling Bible. A lot of times I will sit down and write out my thoughts on a verse that sticks with me, but this time I couldn't quite pin point what it was that drew me to the passage so I decided to just sit with a bit. I let my mind work the words over and over while I painted and created. I spent about 20 minutes with it and in the end felt like I had wrestled through some of the Lord was saying to me through these words. The exact verse from the E...