I wrote lots of stories when I was little. Inspired by the Fudge books (Judy Blume), when we were in the fifth grade my best friend and I used our spare time to write “chapter books.” After we finished our classwork, we pulled out our Trapper Keepers and added a little more to the stories we were each working on. When we got home from school, we went to our rooms, picked up the phone, and read to each other the portions we’d written that day.

Through the years, the writing I did came in the form of letters to the editor (I’m opinionated, can you tell?) and work emails that my husband needed help with. We homeschooled our two children, and I taught a language arts class for other homeschool families. It gave me the chance to nerd out on grammar when we diagramed sentences, and it also afforded me the pleasure of helping students learn the writing tools they needed to get their ideas onto paper. Seeing young students get excited about formulating their own stories and learning to communicate well was a true blessing. I’m pleased to say my own children were well-prepared for college, having written many papers while in middle school and high school.

When my children graduated and went to college, I wondered what was next in life. I’d spent two decades caring for them and helping our family by being a mom who stayed home. Around the same time as the children were getting ready for college, my mother-in-law was placed in a nursing home. My husband and I soon found ourselves spending most of our free time volunteering at the nursing home as we began to see how lonely the residents were. Quickly that volunteering turned into both ministry and advocacy, which ultimately led to our formation of a nonprofit that serves nursing home residents in our state.

During the pandemic, our ability to get inside the nursing home and visit with our elderly friends was halted. We had to look for ways to help them from the outside. One of the things I did was to create a little resident newsletter called Faith and Funnies. It contained jokes, activity pages, Bible verses, and devotionals. At first, I copied and pasted short devotionals I found online, but soon realized that they weren’t always suited for the residents I knew. So I decided to start writing the devotionals myself.

When the doors opened again and we were able to get back inside nursing homes, I began to hear comments like, “I really enjoyed your stories; you should write a book!” One activity director, upon meeting me and realizing who I was, hugged me and said, “Oh, wow! Thank you! You have now idea how much your Faith and Funnies helped me get through the pandemic with my residents! I couldn’t have made it without you!” That totally blew my mind. But it also got me to thinking. I continued to produce Faith and Funnies, and soon they were being sent out and read by over 1000 people. Then my dad said he needed some content for his church’s Facebook page. He suggested that I send him the devotionals I wrote each week for Faith and Funnies. He started posting them, and I was surprised by how well they were received. I realized that maybe I DO have something to say that people might find inspiring, helpful, or encouraging. So, here I am, very late to the world of blogging, but excited about the possibilities.