As a shy middle child growing up in the South, I often entertained myself by filling journals with half-finished stories and illustrations. It came as no surprise that I later graduated with a degree in Drawing and Painting, with an English minor.
I married my love-at-first-sight (mine, not his) sweetheart from freshman year right after graduation. I spent the next two comfortable decades tending to family life, and never considered myself an artist or a writer. But in 2000, God guided me back, provided opportunities to paint, and revealing a surprising story I was to write in which He is the Main Character. The Story that God hinted at was too frightening, as it involved me, and my total surrender to a terrifying plan that threatened to wreak my comfort zone. I tried to decline His invitation. But He is God, and I am not, so He had His way. In the process, I got to know this God I previously thought I knew well enough. And I have grown to love Him and trust Him, without reservation.
So I started writing again, because I could not NOT write about what was happening to me. It was more like taking dictation, for the stories I share are more what happened to me, than what I did, and eventually involve all human emotion possible.
When God gave me the title of this blog, Consider It All Joy, in 2012, originally published in Google Blogger, I really had only experienced angst, some minor trials, and mountaintop joy. I was unaware that true suffering was down the road, as it is in every life, if we live long enough.
I’m shocked to find that little aspiring writer and painter is now sixty-nine years old. I’m a mother of four, a grandmother of eleven, and a grateful wife of 46 years. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner from North Carolina, but spent most of my adult life in Maryland. In 2020 my husband, Bruce, and I moved to our home by the Lake in Wild and Wonderful, Almost Heaven, West Virginia. I am blessed!
Consider it all JOY 