Joy Leanne

I am not sure you can be on social media these days, as a women, and miss the fact that we, as a culture are craving something. Call it community, call it a village, call it a tribe, we all want to be part of SOMETHING. Our hearts ache and long for the connectedness that seemed to come so naturally to the generations before us. Sort of. It seems that no more than a week or two can go by without a blog post popping up on my Facebook wall about the loss of “the village”. For awhile these really resonated with me. As a young mom raising three kids I often feel lonely and isolated and long for the tight knit community my parents had when I was growing up. Then, a few weeks ago, I read a post that just rubbed me the wrong way. I don't mean to bash other writers online, and I am sure the author is an amazing woman, mother, and writer. However, this particular piece just didn't sit well with me. While she was presenting a very real issue, the tone of the article came across...

This was going to be an Instagram post, but it got to long and I realized just how much this topic has been sitting on my heart lately. It's been over five years since my  now sister-in-law then brother's girlfriend brought me this adorable mug. I asked her stop and pick something up a Walmart for me one day and she showed up with my thread, chocolate, and this mug. Years later it broke but I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. So I found another purpose for it. Broken but useful. Its brokenness changed it's purpose, but not its ability to be used. There is a lesson in this. For me. For all of us. Our church has been doing a series on 1 Corinthians the past few months and the past two weeks have had a overriding theme. Broken but useful. And my heart aches at this. I understand broken. I understand it all too well. Useful gets complicated for me. When I first came face to face with depression I lived in a culture that judged harshly. I was crit...

I wasn't going to write today. There are a million reasons not to. I started purging the kids clothes yesterday and after hours of work the house now looks like a Children's Place exploded in the living room. I'm in the middle of prep for a huge local craft show I participate in twice a year. My toddler is running screaming up and down the hall way (my husband is watching her so it's not that she NEEDS me). I am exhausted and a nap sounds REALLY good right now. I've dealt with a number of disappointments this week and I am feeling a little defeated. But God has given me a word for this year when it comes to my writing. “Brave” And today writing feels like the brave thing to do. It's easy to write when there are dead lines and guaranteed audiences. It is easy to write when we know the outcome. But taking the time away from other things to write when the outcome is unclear... that takes some bravery. Showing up fully in anything takes a certain level of brav...

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)...