And my insides did somersaults in fear.

I felt so nervous and couldn’t stop thinking about it…from a perspective of fear.

I knew and loved Jesus. And I knew Jesus would someday come back…but that was all I cared to know. The rest felt too scary. Revelation?! Scary! Destruction? Flee to the mountains? Mark of the beast? Famine? SCARY!

But why fear if I know Jesus?

Why do so many people fear this topic? So many avoid discussion of the end times because, well, it sounds scary and crazy. It feels unfathomable that our life on Earth could suddenly come to an end, it’s hard for our human minds to imagine what may come next. And all of the things that will happen in the end…those things bring enough tons of questions in and of themselves.

Will I have to endure all that craziness that Revelation talks about? Or am I saved from that time? Or will I have to go through some of it? Will my kids have to endure the chaos of the end times? Some of it? None of it?

I had some wonderful friends who were slightly ahead of me in the journey (Lisa and Jessica), and I listened to them discuss all things end times, prophecy, scripture. They recommended podcasts and books and Instagram accounts. And, although I trusted them, it all made me nervous.

They would talk about these things, throwing around terms like the Tribulation, pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, millennial kingdom, a-millennial, pan-millennial, Daniel’s 70 weeks, the rapture, and so on and so forth. And I was so confused, thrown into a whirlwind of asking myself should I study this stuff or not?

Did I want to know? Did I want to understand the end times more thoroughly? Because if I did, I’d have to think more about eternity, because that’s what comes next. And the idea of eternity is scary too.

If I studied it and understood, I’d have to do something with that knowledge.

With more knowledge and understanding comes more responsibility, right?

Well, it seemed everywhere I looked and turned and listened, God was making that decision for me, saying, yes, Jenna. You will learn this stuff. (Said in the kindest, most loving manner, of course).

So now, for the past year or so I’ve been on this wild, crazy, revelatory journey of learning things I didn’t even know there were to learn, diving into topics I didn’t even know were in the Bible and finding that the more I dove into these topics with God, the fear slowly morphed into hope, joy and even excitement for what is to come.

Yes, excitement.

Because a proper understanding of the end times does not produce fear, it produces hope.

And so, here I am, writing about it.

I’ve felt God asking me to write about the things I’m learning for a while now. But I’ve been slow about it because, well…because it’s a lot. And knowing where to start is hard.

But I’ve learned more in one year about the Bible and the story it actually tells than I did in all my prior 37-years combined and so what can I do but talk (write) about it?

One way I’m going to write about it is through commentaries. I’ll listen to a particularly helpful podcast episode or read a good book on the topic or watch a video or…whatever it may be, and then I’ll summarize it here to help you learn from what I’ve learned.

Otherwise, I’ll share stories from my own life as I walk in step with the Holy Spirit, or I’ll share my own revelations from scripture or stories from friends.

Subscribe now and be sure to continue tuning in! And share this Substack with others because the things I’m going to share will be helpful for anyone and everyone!

So much love for you.

Jenna

Sometimes beautiful things can grow in the cracks.

I’ve loved to write since I was a kid, it’s not a new passion. It’s just one I stuffed down because it felt vulnerable. And unstable. And insecure. I grew up in a very secure household. Everyone I knew chose stable careers, stable degrees. Stable, secure, safe.

So, I became a nurse: stable, secure, safe.

But I always wanted to write. I always longed to take one of the many ideas hammering at my brain and let it out in the form of a novel. And then my mom passed away at age 64 and I was wrecked. But as time helped remove me from the wreckage, my perspective also shifted, and I grew as a person. I realized, in a completely new way, how short life is. My mom died at age 64—far too young—and life is so short.

So, I figured, if I want to write a novel, I should write a novel. Who cares if anyone reads it or likes it, just do it because it’s a dream and this life is but a vapor. Here one second and gone the next.

I set out to do so and, after two years of writing, editing, writing, editing some more, publisher researching, searching, researching some more, more editing, cover design and reworking and reworking again and again and again….okay, you get the point, it’s not a quick and easy process. But after all that, in December of 2025, Skunk Cabbage was released. My first beautiful baby book.

And it has gone…pretty good, I think? I didn’t know what to expect as a new author, but I’ve gotten a lot of really wonderful feedback, and I have enough stories about the ways the Holy Spirit has brought this book to just the right people (it’s a grief novel) that I could write a book just about that!

Then, in a complete 180-degree turn, I wrote Radelzia, a sci-fi worldbuilding magical realism novel. Very different from Skunk Cabbage, but with my same writing style and a lot of spunk. Radelzia was released on July 15, 2026 (eBook still in the works…but coming, I promise!).

And I love it. I love, love, love it. I could sit and work on novels all day and I wouldn’t get bored and it wouldn’t feel like work. (So—I would be remiss to not say this—help me do that!! Go to jennaslot.com and purchase these wonderful novels!! And tell others how much you enjoy them!)

I’ve got more books coming and so many more novel ideas in my brain. So, onward, I write.

*

I started part one of my story talking about brokenness. Because it is something everyone can relate to. It is the defining factor of a world without Jesus, and even with Jesus, we stumble across brokenness because we are still human, we still fail at times, and we live in a broken world.

But I hope as you read my story, you could see the redemptive work of Jesus at play. And that’s just my one story! He’s doing redemptive work everywhere in people all over the world, all the time, every day. He’s in the business of redemption.

So, now what? Yeah, I’m fully surrendered to Jesus, I only want what He has for my life, I love Him with every fiber of my being…but He’s not a magic bean. That word none of us want to relate to? Brokenness? Like I said, it still impacts me. I still feel broken sometimes.

In full honesty: I struggle with parenting. A lot. I struggle in marriage. I struggle in the challenges that both of those life paths bring. I get too irritated and impatient with my kids and my husband and I behave in ways I later despise. I often question if I’m fit to be either of those roles. I struggle to know exactly the right path for my life and then, in taking on too much to figure it out, I spread myself too thin and then can’t give myself fully to the things that matter most. I struggle to prioritize.

So, you see—brokenness. This life on Earth will never be perfect; it’s been broken since Eve bit that fruit. BUT, and this is a big but, we have a hope of eternal perfection. There aren’t words in human language to adequately describe the greatness of the hope of Heaven through the redemptive saving power of Jesus.

In wrapping up this series of sharing my story, the most important thing I can leave you with is this: seek Jesus. Whether you already know Him and are continuing to seek Him, or you’ve never sought Him before, seek Him. Read the Bible and get to know Him, find someone who does know Him and ask them about what following Him looks like. Our time on Earth is extremely short compared to eternity (seriously, if you do the math, it’s such a small number, it’s basically 0% of your life), so know Jesus and spend eternity in Heaven with Him.

So much love to all of you, my friends. And if you read every word of every installment of my story, you are the brightest of the gems and I adore you.

Also, I’d love to hear from any of you! Comment! Like! Subscribe! Reach out via my contact form on jennaslot.com! Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok! I’ll respond!

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I don’t even know you guys, I don’t even know.

If you haven’t read parts 1-7, go back and do that…or just hop in here, you’ll probably still get something out of it.

As I said in part seven, in October of 2024, I gave of alcohol. When I told Travis, my husband, about this, he was extremely happy. Which solidified even more that it needed to happen. What’s wild, and amazing, y’all, is that after I made this decision, I didn’t even desire it anymore. I went from wanting a drink nearly every day, or at least thinking about having one nearly every day, and believing that every social gathering we hosted or went to needed to have alcohol involved or it wouldn’t be as fun, needing to have alcohol on vacation, etc…I went from that, to not even thinking about it anymore at all.

That was not of me, that was the work of the Holy Spirit in me. It was a drastic, noticeable change and I give Him all the credit and glory and praise for so graciously leading me out of that, but not only leading me out of it, He made it easy.

In fact, even the idea of having an alcoholic beverage is now abhorrent to me. It sounds awful. I understand, however, that drinking alcohol is not a sin for everyone. It can be a sin for one person and not for another—it all depends what the Holy Spirit has convicted you of.

That change in my life, giving up something I honestly thought I couldn’t—and really did not want to—give up, was the catalyst for enormous, exponential growth in God that I had never felt, known or experienced before in my life.

Then, came another massive catalyst for growth I couldn’t have predicted—a deep dive study of eschatology and prophecy. If you had told me two years ago that I would become enamored with eschatology (the study of the end times) and prophecy, I would have given you a very weird look.

But I have two wonderful friends from work who started talking to me about their views on the book of Revelation and end times. I will go much deeper into this in other posts, but for the sake of my story, I’m going to keep it short. I was hesitant at first, because you know, Revelation is scary, right?

Wrong! It’s not scary if you’re a believer in Jesus Christ!

As I engaged in discussion with my two friends about these things and dug into scripture for myself, and as I started listening to podcasts and reading books on these topics, I realized how life-giving and hopeful studying the end times and prophecy actually are! I couldn’t (and still can’t) get enough and devour(ed) every resource I could get my hands on. I am flabbergasted about how I knew nothing before in comparison to what I’ve learned and now understand.

Diving into end times and prophecy study drew my heart closer to God in a way I had no idea it could, the study of these topics made Jesus’ love even more real and the closeness I have with God in my day-to-day life, in every single thing I do, is unparalleled to what I had before. I am in awe of the way there is always more to learn about God because His vastness is far beyond what we can comprehend. It is such a blessing to learn from Him when you are walking with Him in full surrender each day.

He is so good and loving and will never fail His children.

Part of this growth was going from sometimes surrendering to that full surrender I mentioned. God led me through a lesson on full humility before Him and full surrender to Him. It is so hard to let go of control, eh? We still want some semblance of it. But He gently taught me and led me to scripture that revealed our need for complete humility before our good, loving, and holy God.

As I went, I learned to remain in an attitude of asking Him to show to me anything—even seemingly small things—that were not of Him and that He wanted me to get rid of. Let me tell you, this can be a painful process, but very humbling. It’s not always giant obvious sins that God wants out of our lives, sometimes it’s tiny day-to-day habits that He knows are hindering us. And it’s not because He’s mad at us for doing them, it’s that He loves us and knows we’ll do better, live better, and be closer to Him if we get that sin out of there!

Doing that is full surrender—acknowledging and living in the fact that God is far greater than we are. He knows far better than we could ever know and His ways are far above our ways. That means, even if you or I don’t like something we read in the Bible, too bad. He is greater, wiser and better and Biblical truth is the Truth. If you don’t like it, that doesn’t change it.

When I walk in full surrender and humility with the Holy Spirit as my guide, everything is massively better.

I implore you, if you don’t already, to do the same! I guarantee your life will be better if you are walking in relationship with Jesus. There is literally nothing else in this world I would guarantee, but this one thing I will. Because Jesus absolutely never fails. He never has and he never will.

Go back and read parts 1-6 if you haven’t already and then join in here!

In part 6, I whipped through many years, giving you a very basic overview. So, now, before I move on to the aftermath of my mom’s earthly death, let me make a few connections for you.

I had discussed my “half-Christian” life during college, and I briefly touched on “getting better” in that regard. However, alcohol continued to be a low-grade, just-below-the-surface struggle for me, even years after returning from my study abroad in Australia. It wasn’t problematic enough that others would notice; no one would look at me or my life and say, “wow, she has a problem with alcohol”. I suppose Travis did start to notice as our marriage went on, but for the most part I could keep it under wraps and even convince myself there was no problem there.

Let me interject this, because I think someone reading this needs to hear: alcohol is one of the sneakiest ways the devil gets ahold of people. It’s legal, so people automatically think it’s “more” acceptable than drugs that aren’t, it’s normalized, and it’s sometimes even expected. However, it’s addictive, very unhealthy, and can pull you away from your purpose in God without you even knowing. Sneaky. (Yet another topic that could fill an entire book on its own).

Okay, back to 2023. My mom passed away and in the immediate aftermath of this, my devastation was such that I was certain I would never be able to function normally again. I didn’t think I’d be able to get out of my bed without falling on the floor in a pile of tears. My mom was my best friend and one of the very best people I ever knew. This loss changed me as a person.

I didn’t necessarily start drinking more at this point, but I noticed more why I would choose to have a drink—to feel better. I searched for joy in the next alcohol-infused high, relishing the temporary freedom I gained in the loss of inhibition and self-consciousness, and in the soothing of my devastation. But again, this was not so frequent that it seemed to be a “problem”, it was not my main source of handling my grief. It was low-level enough that I could ignore the times that it reared its ugly head.

I knew true joy only came from God because I’d been told that. And I saw it in others. But at this point, that was a pipe dream, I didn’t think I would ever feel joy again.

In the summer of 2023, I leaned on my husband, my dad and my sister, and my amazing friends to just get through, to survive. To smile at all. I started grief counseling, I wrote a lot, and I cried a lot. I also trained for a half marathon, so I was running a lot, too. These things helped. I would say I grieved in a healthy manner, for the most part.

In October of 2023 a lot changed. The grief turned a corner, in a good way. It felt like I came out of a murky darkness and could see a little light again. While I still thought about my mom every day, things felt a little lighter, I reached a new normal, I was functioning well and the grief didn’t feel as oppressive.

Several things happened that October that most likely played a role: I had started taking an SSRI antidepressant, my training culminated in the running of my half marathon, I began writing my first novel (Skunk Cabbage) and I began getting up at 6:00 a.m. every morning to have alone time before the kids got up, a habit that changed my life in the best way.

Shortly after this, I read the book Imagine Heaven by John Burke. Another life-changing event. This book discusses near-death experiences (NDEs). I cannot possibly summarize the entire book here, but I’ll say this: the reality and proof of NDEs happening for decades, across all cultures, to people of all ages, ethnicities, religions and happening in similar fashion, is enough to prove an eternal existence in either Heaven or Hell. I highly recommend reading John Burke’s books, listening to his podcast, and doing your own research on NDEs, especially if you’re skeptical. After researching them properly, they are undeniable.

For me, learning about NDEs was incredibly life-giving. Being in a place of missing my mom and wanting to be with her again, I thought about the reality of Heaven, and seeing her when I arrive there, and it gave me a new hope. Not that I didn’t have the hope of Heaven before, but my perspective on it shifted.

Prior to reading Imagine Heaven, the idea of eternity terrified me. It terrified me so much so that I could not think about it for too long without feeling the heebie-jeebies. Anything lasting forever was just…too much. We’re humans whose minds can’t handle the idea of forever; everything has to have an end, right?

But reading the accounts of those who saw Heaven, saw their loved ones, and saw Jesus, hearing people share the overwhelming love and joy and peace they felt in their brief journey to Heaven and how they did not want to return, they wanted to stay there forever, these accounts slowly took me from a place of terrified to extremely excited.

Yes, from terrified to extremely excited. I’m telling you: read the books.

Reading Imagine Heaven began something new in me, something hopeful.

Then, in October of 2024, I attended MomCon for the first time. Yes, Mom Con, Mom Convention. A convention for moms. One that praises Jesus. A convention for moms who love Jesus—it’s the best.

During the final evening’s main stage event, the speaker spoke about her past struggle with alcoholism, and how the Lord convicted her of it and set her free. And it absolutely broke me.

Now, let me put on display how good and merciful our God is. No one would call me an alcoholic at that time. I was living a good, productive life. Alcohol had not ruined me. Yet.

But before it became a full-blown problem, in that moment, in his perfect timing and grace, God revealed to me that if I didn’t change now, with the trajectory I was moving, alcohol would become a very big problem. It would affect me, my marriage, my kids, my testimony, my health, everything!

He put before me two paths, He showed me where I was headed and where I could be headed if I gave it up right then. Much like the Bible says in Deuteronomy, “I have put before you death and life, blessings and curses, choose life!”

In that moment as I was sobbing on my chair, I felt such an overwhelming love as God revealed this to me. It wasn’t shame (although it could have been, should have been, it’s what I deserved to feel), it was his love, his mercy, and his grace. He wanted me to choose a different path because he loves me so much, not because he was mad at me.

And I chose life.

I decided to give up alcohol and wow, what an amazing choice that was.

Perfect for ages 14+, Radelzia draws you in from the very first page, a quick, fun read. It has adventure, humor, a little action, world-to-world travel, and even an adorable new neon blue species.

Get into it now!
Order at jennaslot.com!

(eBook is not quite ready yet but IS coming very soon!)

PROMO VIDEO done by my amazingly talented niece Alena. If you need a video done, reach out to me and I’ll get you in touch!

I’ve given you a quick, very basic, overview of my childhood, teenage years and the beginnings of young adulthood, and yet it’s taken five posts just to get to this point! Bah! I’m going to condense several years in order to get to the main points that God is leading me to focus on.

I left you on a cliffhanger again. (Sorry, but…it’s fun).

I met Travis at a dance party and a year and four months later, we were married in a beautiful ceremony on Gun Lake! God truly blessed that day and has been very present in our marriage ever since.

We started by living in a small rental house in Grand Rapids, we were still attending the same church I had done the internship at, Travis was working in construction and I was working at the Omelette Shoppe as a server while taking prerequisite courses to go back to school for nursing.

Personally, I had come a long way from my past “half-Christian” lifestyle issues. God was near, of course, and I was growing in my relationship with Him, and in my desire to tell others about Him. The Lord was working in me and in Travis and I together.

Travis and I traveled to New Zealand (ah-mazing!) in 2014. Then in 2015, I graduated from nursing school and became an RN. I became pregnant with our first son, James, during the summer of 2015, and he was born on March 24, 2016. I worked as a cardiothoracic RN for just under a year before making the move to my nursing career home, Labor & Delivery in December of 2016.

It was around this time that Travis started to express more and more discontent with the church we were attending. I had a solid group of friends there and had no interest in leaving. I was stubborn and closed off to listening to what Travis had to say about the church if it wasn’t positive. Even if he was right, which he turned out to be about most things.

Okay, now, entering the phase of life called…dun, dun, dun…PARENTHOOD. Perhaps some of you have been there? Haha! Obviously, I could write a book solely on my parenting journey (as many people have), but for this, as I said before, I’m going to majorly condense.

James came in March 2016, as I said before. I became pregnant with Liam in 2017, while I was working part time in L&D and he was born in January of 2018. In August of 2018, I went back to school to become a Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner. I was doing this slowly and on-line while working and raising my babies. I unexpectedly became pregnant again at the end of 2018 and we welcomed Theo to the family in August of 2019. We then had three kids 3 and under, I was working part-time and in part-time graduate school, all while Travis worked full-time. In December of 2019, I left the church we had been part of (Travis had stopped coming a few years prior). Then, in 2020 a big ol’ thing hit our world, making it impossible to find a new church. And, I also started my clinical training in OB offices that fall.

Um. Complete craziness. That’s a time I look back on and think, how on earth did I survive? How did I ever clean or do laundry or make dinner or get groceries or play with my kids? How did I breastfeed and sleep train and potty train? How did I shower? (Did I shower?)

The grace of God. And obviously, the support of Travis, and the help of our parents and other amazing people who watched our kids.

In 2021, with one year left of my master’s degree education, I became pregnant again. This was also the year that many employers, including mine, were mandating a certain vaccine. Personally, I did not feel peace about taking this vaccine, especially while pregnant and filed an exemption. It was approved and I kept my job.

This event planted the seeds of a whole host of growth in my life. My eyes and mind were opened to a world of information and truths about which I previously had no clue concerning health and the American healthcare system, my curiosity was piqued and I dove in. Many problems in our system became glaringly obvious to me and my views on a lot of things changed. However, the most important takeaway was learning to trust the Holy Spirit’s voice to me more than ever before.

Despite differing opinions on covid and the vaccine, I think most people would agree, that our world was completely changed afterwards, never to be the same again. And we've seen a lot of absolute craziness in the world since then. (Like parenthood, this is a topic that could be an entire book—probably many books—in and of itself, and is not the focus of this post, so I’ll just get to my point).

In March of 2022, our fourth son, Lewis, joined the family. My amazing mom was at the delivery, and it was a wonderful and joyful experience. About ten days later, she called me with the news that she had been diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer and my entire world crumbled in a moment.

Those seeds of learning about our healthcare system and what health actually is began to sprout as I stood by my mom’s side while she chose alternative therapies instead of traditional chemo to fight her monster diagnosis.

(I am not going to go into her full story here, but if you want to read about it, go here and here.)

In May of 2022, I graduated from NP school, then in August of 2022, at the invitation of my aunt and uncle, we started attending Journey Church, something my mom was so happy about. I passed my NP boards that September, another thing my mom was super happy about (she was the best cheerleader!) In January of 2023, I decreased the number of hours I was working in order to be home with our kids. Then, in March of 2023, my beloved mom left the Earth and went home to Jesus.

And (I felt like) my life shattered to pieces.

(And, yes, I did shower.)

In part 1, I started by talking about brokenness. Because it’s relatable and it’s something we all have to grapple with, especially when coming to the feet of Jesus, knowing what He has done for you, but also knowing how incredibly broken you are without Him.

This point in my story is the part I look back on and view as the most broken. And it still hurt my heart sometimes, even though I know I’m redeemed by the blood of Jesus.

When I returned from Australia, I wish my attitude about drinking and guys changed immediately, but unfortunately, it didn’t. Not right away.

Recall from an early part of my story that all I wanted, really, was to meet my guy, get married and have babies. But I was disillusioned at this point in my life and not looking in the right places. The year after being in Australia continued much the same. While I wasn’t going out to clubs and bars nearly as frequently as I did in Australia, the internal problems were still there.

I wanted alcohol involved in every social gathering. I wanted to hang out with guys would be attracted to me and show it. I was back in Michigan with many of my really wonderful friends, but my internal motives were sorely wrong and selfish.

However, amidst this, I started attending a church that had a gift of magnetism for young people. Young people would attend on a given Sunday and be drawn in by the catchy, emotional worship, the prosperity gospel teaching, and the fact that they actively sought young people to join. I attended with my brother and sister-in-law and immediately felt wanted, included, needed. I felt part of something, and I loved that. I joined very quickly and in the “Christian-half” of my life, I was all in.

But then, I would also be going out with the neighbor and all his friends and making out with him afterwards, under the influence of the alcohol in my system. I would hide the latter life from the former, all of my new church friends not having a clue about the other half of my life.

Talk about internal dissonance. And sin. And brokenness.

And guess what, I never felt quite right. (Duh!) I was anxious, on and off depressed, and while I knew Jesus and what He did for me, my actions were holding me back from living in the fullness of his grace and plans for my life.

It’s hard to know exactly where to go from here with my story because I could dive into the nitty gritty of things during this time in my life, but that would take an entire book, and I think you get the overall point.

I’ll summarize a few major things and then I’m going to jump forward a little bit:

- I volunteered taking care of abandoned babies in Uganda for the summer of 2009.
- I did a year-long internship/discipleship program at the church I had joined from 2009-2010.
- I then graduated from Grand Valley (round one—I’ll get into that later) in May of 2010 with a BA in communications, minor in writing.
- I didn’t know what to do but was a big girl now and needed a job, so I found one. I worked as the administrative assistant to a small engineering firm in Holland, Michigan. Not a dream job, but it paid the bills.
- I rented a house with a few wonderful friends from 2010-2012, something that was an impactful and lifegiving situation that changed me for the better.

In April of 2011, my friend Carolynn invited me to a dance party with some friends. Think: innocent fun in someone’s living room, not big club with a bunch of drunk idiots. It was really fun. I decided that my roommates and I should host the next one. (There was something of a group that rotated houses, one of the guys being a DJ, holding dance parties for this group of young adults).

I planned it and put it on the calendar and told the people I met at the first party to invite all their people. The day of the party came and I was at work, excited to get home. As I was walking to get lunch, a text came through on my phone (a flip phone; this was 2011 and I was behind the times even then!) I didn’t know the number, but it said, “hey, let’s dance like crazy fools tonight.”

And that is the first sentence my husband ever said to me.

More to come!!!

As I mentioned, I attended Grand Valley State University.

So, yeah, I attended GVSU. And I’m struggling with what else to say about that time in my life. A big part of me wants to say, “let’s just skip college and move right on to getting married, shall we?” Alas, it’s part of my story and skipping it would be dishonest.

While good, my college years were also a very confusing time. I was young, immature and relatively on my own for the first time. Sound familiar? Those years are the time period I’ve dubbed my “half-Christian” period of life, unfortunately. You know the verse in Revelation warning the church against being lukewarm in their faith? During that time, I was the definition of a lukewarm Christian.

My faith was there. Somewhere. I never, not once, stopped believing in God; I always loved Jesus. My faith has been the common thread connecting my entire life, but sometimes the thread was buried and at other times it was right there at the surface. During college, it was mostly buried. I had the push and pull between being a Christian and knowing right from wrong, and the draw of the wild college life. Studying abroad in Sydney, Australia in 2008 didn’t help with the latter.

I wasn’t quite twenty-one and had always been the good girl, ergo, I hadn’t been one to drink underage or go to parties. Then, I headed over to the land down under where suddenly it was legal for me to drink alcohol. And, to me, that was all that mattered. It was legal, so if I drank, I wasn’t doing anything wrong, right? I think I’d need a few chapters in a book to do a solid unpacking of my six months in Australia. For the sake of this post, I’ll shorten it.

Basically, to an acquaintance I’d say: “Australia is so cool! It was amazing to travel, sail the Whitsundays, skydive over the Great Barrier Reef, drive around Fraser Island, explore every crack and crevice of Sydney, go to a show at the Opera House, try all sorts of foods and restaurants and attend the original Hillsong Church. And I made friends from all over the world who were also studying abroad!” And that acquaintance would say, “Wow! What a great time!” And I would say, “Yeah, it was!”

And all of those things are true.

But what that acquaintance wouldn’t know is that the international friend group in which I became quickly integrated was far more acquainted with alcohol than I. Nor were they followers of Jesus. Their norm was to go out to the bars and clubs and drink. Or to stay home and drink. And to many of them, especially my European friends, drinking wine with meals was something they were accustomed to. I, however, showed up in Australia having had no experience with drinking regularly and no idea how to pace or control myself. I was a newbie.

And it showed.

My time in Australia exemplifies the terms I used before—half-Christian and confused.

For example, I spent one night out in Sydney with my friends at multiple bars and then at a new friend’s apartment. A lot of alcohol was involved. A lot of dancing, kissing boys, and more alcohol. It was a Saturday night, and not just any Saturday night, the Saturday before Easter Sunday. Before I knew it, it was the wee hours of the morning, and I had planned to go to church with my mom who was visiting me. Around 6:00 a.m., I figured out where I was in the city (without a smart phone, mind you), found my way to the nearest bus stop and made the long journey back to my own apartment in the outskirts of the city. I showered, spiffed myself up and at 9:30 a.m. went to church to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord while wildly hungover.

Writing that out is cringe-y, extremely shameful, and very embarrassing. But I tell you that story because vulnerability has power, bringing the darkness to light has power, and without knowledge of the valleys, the mountains don’t look as powerful.

I spent that entire church service in tears. Because I knew my behavior didn’t honor God. I was doing it because it was new and fun and, apparently, I had some wild oats, but because I was a born-again Christian with the Holy Spirit in me, I knew what was sinful and my conscience (the Holy Spirit) could not ignore those actions.

My friends could do what we were doing every single night and feel absolutely no guilt. In fact, when I expressed my guilt in knowing what I was doing was wrong, they were baffled. Which, in turn, baffled me. I would make out with three different guys in one night and my closest friend, Kati, would congratulate me. When I told her, “No, no I shouldn’t be doing that!”, she could not understand why.

But now, I know that those who do not have the Spirit of God do not have the same guidance system as those of us who do. In fact, the way of Christ looks like foolishness to those who are perishing.

But boy oh boy, while I was there, I did not have any of this figured out.

So, you might be thinking, “these friends obviously knew you were a Christian, if you expressed your guilt to them.” Yeah, they did. And to this day I pray that somehow, despite my horrible example and my sinful actions, Jesus was able to speak into their hearts, even if

only by the fact that I felt guilt after my many drunken mistakes. Because I did not have much else going for me in terms of being a light for God while I was there.

And to this day, I hate this and struggle with the guilt associated with my time in Australia. (More on that later…because, I know, I know, Jesus died for that. Yup, he did.)

Alright, more to come, keep tuning in as I tell my story! It gets better and better, I promise!

Seriously, thank you for reading along. As I mentioned in the first post, I know God is asking me to tell my story, but I’m not exactly sure why—who He wants to speak to through it or what other ways He might use it. I’m simply trying to be obedient, and I appreciate you coming along for the ride!

But I’m back!

Senior year. I was playing tennis and struggling to keep my emotions under control when I played poorly. Which, naturally, led to playing even worse. Other parts of my life played into my emotions, of course, but this was the situation that made it clear to my parents.

One evening after a tennis match, my dad, sat me down by our fireplace on one of the two blue loveseats placed there for fire-enjoyment. He looked me in the eyes and said, “Jenna, are you depressed?”

No one had asked me that before, so point blank, so shamelessly. No skirting around the word, no small talk to maybe kind of get to that eventually. He just asked. And I broke down in tears and simply replied, “yes”.

And it’s like a white-water river that had been slamming into a dam for years trying to get through finally broke the thing down and torrents of water rushed through.

Relief.

Luke 8:17: “For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.”

Typically, I was closer to my mom than my dad. And I would talk to her about things…you know, my friends, my classes, what I was interested in, things I was involved in, boys. But the deep-seated lies about who I was never felt like something I needed to talk about, which I see now was a tactic of the enemy to keep me entrenched in them.

At the time, as a teenage girl, I couldn’t name them, these lies. I couldn’t pin-point them, call them out, expose them. In actuality, I probably didn’t even know they were there. I would’ve just called them my thoughts and feelings, not lies.

My parents found me a counselor to see, who I really loved. And I did take an antidepressant for a while, which I also believe really helped.

(*A note on counseling: I believe we have to be really careful in today’s culture with using counseling. Finding one who is solidly scriptural and will guide you by the standards of Jesus, making it about Him and not just about you, is very important. And hard these days. That’s all I’ll say on that.)

The rest of my senior year went as well and normal as one would expect. And I really do look back on high school with fond memories.

On to Grand Valley State University, fall 2006.

My time at GVSU was…hard to describe. It was marked by confusion, difficulty finding my identity, morals defined by my peers rather than God, lukewarm faith, joining a new church that deeply influenced me for many years to come, and intermittent periods of poor decisions.

Except that all sounds very negative. My college experience had some bright spots and I don’t want to negate those. I met some wonderful friends, I studied abroad in Australia, I remained very close with my family, I volunteered in Uganda at a home for abandoned and orphaned children, I went through a hard, but necessary season in my relationship with God, and I grew in my love of writing through several writing classes I took.

But the mental health struggles didn’t fully leave me alone and, unfortunately, had too large a hand in how I experienced my GVSU years.

We’ll dive in more in part 4…

…

Before I tell you any part of my “story” (still trying to figure out exactly what that is…lol), I must say this:

All glory belongs to God for any and all good that has occurred in my life. I tell my story to honor Him and to, hopefully, bring hope and a life-giving message to others who need it. God has been with me my entire life, that is very obvious as I look back and contemplate. I clearly see that His hand has been on me, no matter if I was aware of it or not at certain times of my life. But I pray that my words point to Him and His goodness, perfection, beauty, justice and love!

Now. It feels so cliche to start this way, but it’s just true…

I experienced a very good, positive, conservative Christian, midwestern upbringing. I have no complaints about my childhood. I have no trauma from it, I always felt deeply loved and supported, and my family was a safe place. Most importantly, my parents were strong believers and followers of Jesus and they imparted this faith to their three kids, of whom I am the youngest.

I am aware this is not everyone’s experience in childhood, and I am deeply grateful to God that it was mine. I’m humbled that He saw fit to bless me and my siblings in this way.

While my hindsight of childhood is very bright and rosy, I know now that things weren’t easy for my parents. However, my parents were faithful believers in Jesus and God’s hand was firmly on our family through many difficulties. Finances were tight, but I never wanted for anything. My parents worked incredibly hard and God provided. My parents’ marriage was rough, but they never divorced or even separated—God was faithful.

I’ll briefly stop at middle and high school because there are some trends that began during those years that I can’t skip over. I don’t need to discuss these times in great detail, however, because for the most part they were good and normal.

Middle school is when the emotional rollercoasters started offering rides around the clock. Shocker, right? As we all know, in general, puberty for girls is not easy and the same was true for me. I can’t speak to how my mom felt about me during this time because, unfortunately, I never actually asked her.

Like I mentioned before, my family life was great, and nothing changed in that regard as I grew older. However, as I entered my teens, comparison became a thief of my childhood joy. I was very, very shy and I looked to my older siblings who both had many friends, were very involved in a plethora of different activities, were honored as good students, respected by teachers, talented in multiple ways and were both very outgoing. Also, they dated people.

This was the picture I saw and the one I felt like I absolutely had to live up to. Like, obsessively so. Sometime around eighth grade, I remember telling a friend of mine that if I couldn’t somehow become friends with the “popular” kids in our eighth-grade class, I was ruined for high school and would probably never find anyone to marry. Yes, this actually was a real statement out of my mouth at age 13.

I was not dramatic at all. Okay?!?

I laugh now, but these feelings were very real and very much fed into a teenage life marked by comparison, worry, anxiety, depression, and fear of what others thought of me. Especially worry about dating and finding someone to marry.

Again, I know, it sounds ridiculous. I was so young, but it’s how I felt. From a very young age, I wanted nothing more than to find a boy who liked me, date, marry and have kids. I was enmeshed in a culture in which most people dated in high school and married very young (conservative Christian West Michigan). It’s what I saw; it’s what I desired.

I should say, though, even amongst my incessant worries about my future and obsessive striving to be exactly like my siblings, I was very successful throughout high school. I didn’t always see it at the time and I never felt like I lived up to a standard I set for myself, but I had a solid group of wonderful friends, I achieved excellent grades, I earned a spot in our school’s version of a chamber choir, I played tennis and ran track, I led chapels (Christian high school), I was the chairperson for planning both homecoming and Junior/Senior banquet (our school’s version of prom), and ultimately I loved high school and had a lot of fun. Any outsider would objectively say I was a very high-achieving, successful highschooler.

So, you are probably scoffing at the fact that I still worried about my future or about the fact that boys never asked me out or that I still didn’t believe I lived up to the perfect ideal. Or maybe you get it…high schoolers’ brains are not fully developed, after all! Ha.

I constantly dealt with the nagging pull of you’re not enough, you didn’t do it like your sister, you don’t have a boyfriend, you’re not desirable, you’re so shy …which led into you’ll never be enough, you won’t turn out like your sister, you’ll never have a boyfriend, you’ll never be desirable, you’ll always be shy.

Ouch.

Can I stop for a second and say: those are such nasty lies. As I type those words here, I feel pained for that version of me. Pained that I listened to those words, that I took them to heart, that they had any place in my teenage experience. They are deeply untrue lies from the devil.

Today, I can say that every single one those statements were objectively untrue about me in high school and yet…they influenced me daily.

So, where was God in all of this? I believed in Him, loved Him, thought I trusted Him, but was I fully surrendered to Him? Probably not. I was in a very elementary state of my relationship with God, but He was there and He certainly never left my side.

And my family? My parents? They were also there and never left my side. The thing is I did not share these thoughts or feelings. Ever. I put on a happy face, other than the typical occasional teenage outbursts of rage and hormones, and I hid the lies that were eating me up inside.

Until my senior year.

It’s something we all experience and we all try to run from.

Or heal from.

I am very familiar with my own brokenness, and not just in a general sense, but in small details. The details of my past that are broken, that were never right…the things I wish I hadn’t done or had done very differently.

I’m thirty-eight years old, but some decisions from almost two decades ago and onward still sit heavily in my gut.

They aren’t even big things. In fact, the majority are small. Tiny things that I did or said that hurt others or hurt myself. Things that later required forgiveness and healing.

Thankfully, I’m also familiar with redemption, and how God’s redemption story is intricately woven into the lives of those who surrender to Him.

I love to write. And I’m a tad (or maybe more than a tad) scatterbrained. So much so that often when I sit down to write, I click from tab to tab, working on little bits of multiple books in one session. With some blog writing sprinkled in. Admittedly, it’s not the most efficient way to write. I’m working on it, okay?

But, in prayer, asking God to guide my writing, one thing has become clear, He wants me to share my story.

But that requires me to know my story, or more specifically, to be able to articulate my story. And for some reason, that feels hard. I’ve asked God, “what is my story?” or “what part of my story do you want me to tell?”

Because I don’t have any huge event that would be the pinnacle of my story as some people do. You know, like a near-death experience or life-altering injury, being on a TV show or living amongst a jungle tribe for a year, saving someone’s life or something “big” like that.

I have a smattering of experiences, including the brokenness we all can relate to, that have shaped who I am in big and small ways

, and I suppose those are what make up my story.

So, without any “obvious” climax to my story, what I’m going for is “extremely relatable” in hopes that someone sees themselves in what I have to say and is drawn closer to Jesus because of it.

If God is telling me to write this, I know He will guide me as I do so.

So, stay tuned, I’m going to share my story as a series here on my Substack.

I often hear the verse, “love your neighbor as yourself” in defense of the rhetoric I described in part I. This is a wonderful, true, trustworthy verse. But again, the word love. In considering loving our neighbor as ourselves, we still must consider what it means to love, even to love ourselves.

Say, for example, alcohol is your sin. You drink too much, it leads to bad behavior, you can’t stop yourself, you’re addicted. What is the most loving thing you can do for yourself in this situation? Buy more alcohol and hide from those who might call you out on it? Go drinking every night with some friends? Hide bottles of wine throughout your house?

We can all agree the answer is no.

The most loving thing you can do for yourself is come to God, know Jesus, repent and be forgiven, seek help from others, and maybe, if the problem is advanced, go to a rehab facility.

Remember God is love, so if I’m loving myself, I’m drawing close to Him as He is the source of love. And the closer you are to Jesus, the further you want to be from any sin.

Therefore, supporting and affirming sinful behavior is not loving. So, if I’m going to love others like I love myself, I’m going to point them to Jesus, the beautiful, perfect, life-giving love of Jesus. And then I’m going to call them out of their sin. I’m going to teach, like Jesus did, that their sin is a wedge in their relationship with God. That sin keeps them unwell.

But hear me right, I do understand that more goes into love than just calling out sin. Of course. Meeting others’ needs as we would meet our own, being present with a listening ear, showing compassion, etc. are also all parts of being loving. I am not denying that.

But I also strongly believe that affirming sin is actually the opposite of loving. That’s the message I think many in the church are missing. Jesus didn’t ignore the problem of sin and neither can we.

As I said in Part II, sin is a sinking anchor that is only going to cause people to drown and if we are to love one another, we surely don’t want to let them drown. Cut the anchor loose and point them to JESUS, the one who is perfect love.

If you’ve read my three-part series on love and don’t quite know where to go from here or what your next step is, read the Bible, and also here is a prayer that might help you:

“Lord Jesus, I trust you. I want to know Your Word and Your Truth. Guide me as I seek both. Help me to more fully understand what love is and how I can better love others how you would want me to love them. Lord, help me to humble myself before you and if there are any sins, big or small, that I am holding onto, please reveal them to me so I can get rid of them. Please grant me strength and humility throughout this process. I love you. Amen.”

If you haven’t yet, please read Part I of my “Love” series here!

If Jesus told people to turn from their sin, to go and sin no more so that it may go well with them, does that mean Christians ought to say that to one another as well?

Yes, but not until something else comes first.

Ever hear the parable about the speck and the plank?

Jesus tells his followers to find the plank in their own eye before worrying about the speck in their brother’s eye, the plank and the speck representing sin.

As followers of Christ, we all must do this first: find the plank in your eye. And this takes massive humility. Humble yourself and even go so far as to look for the plank. Ask God to show you the plank. Any sin in our lives, even small, hidden things one might not even view as sin, we must ask God to reveal it to us so we can get as far away from it as possible. It’s a humbling, but vital part of walking with Jesus.

The Bible actually tells us to be holy as Jesus is holy. But how can we, sinful humans, be holy? Only through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in us, only through the wiping away of sins by the finished work of Jesus on the cross.

But that comes with humbling, confession, repentance and turning from sin. We must be in continual communication with God, with humility, asking Him to reveal anything displeasing within us so we can get it out.

It’s those who are humble, always working to keep the planks—sin—out of their own lives who I think have the right to approach brothers and sisters in Christ about their specks—sin. (Read this if you’re not sure what I mean by the plank and the speck).

Matthew 18:15-17 and Galatians 6:1 both support this.

I heard something said recently that the church in America is severely lacking in fear of the Lord because for the most part, people are too comfortable.

I agree with this.

Fear of the Lord is not being afraid of God. It’s reverence, an acknowledgement of His absolute holiness and perfection, His perfect might in light of our weakness. The knowing that without Him we are nothing and we are only anything because He made us so. It’s an awe that brings you to your knees. It’s a deep understanding that what He says is far superior to what our emotions want and a giving up of our desires, no matter what, to follow His Word. That is the fear of God.

To put one’s sin above that kind of fear of the Lord is an absolute tragedy.

It is a total delusion, a deception straight from the devil, to think one

can hang on to their sin even while claiming they want to follow Jesus.

Sin is a weight, an anchor to your soul.

Imagine trying to swim with an anchor hanging from your abdomen. You’d drown really quickly. And your sin will drown you in the same way.

I know, I keep mentioning sin, and some of you may be saying, well, what is sin? Valid point. However, for the purpose of this newsletter, I’m not going to list everything that is a sin. I will say, anything the Bible says is sin, is sin. I’ll list a few here:

• Slander

• Sexual immorality of any kind

• Jealousy

• Witchcraft, divination and the like

• False testimony (lying)

• Cheating

• Malice

• Anything God convicts you of as sin.

I’m not here preaching to you as one who doesn’t do this herself, I promise. In fact, God has been taking me on this journey (the humbling, the asking him to show me any sin in my life, the bowing down before Him in fear of the Lord) and it’s been amazing and transformative.

He loves us. So, this process is not to condemn…it’s to save! Jesus wants the absolute best for you and I and He knows, in His infinite wisdom, that repentance and humility are a huge part of that!

It is a fool’s prayer to pray, “Lord Jesus, I love you and want to follow you, but I’m taking this sin with me.”

Don’t be a fool.

Try this instead.

Bow down before Jesus (whether literally or figuratively) with the attitude of, “Lord Jesus, you are just that, you are LORD of my life and I come before you, asking humbly that you would reveal any, and I mean any, impurity within me because I desire to be pure and blameless before you, with your guidance and help.”

That is the humility of following Jesus. That is fear of the Lord. A holy reverence.

My words may sound controversial to some, but ultimately everything I’m going to say is straight from scripture.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, I hope we can all agree that we cannot define love outside of God. Because God is love. You cannot simply say love is love, because that circular reasoning brings us right back to the initial question.

Okay, but what is love?

God. God is love.

God came before all things, God created all things. Without Him nothing was made that has been made (this is written in the book of John, chapter 1). This includes love.

It’s a popular rhetoric in some Christian circles these days to discuss “other” Christians as being hateful because they “don’t accept” certain things.

I’ve felt a strong pull to address this.

This rhetoric posits that these “unaccepting” Christians are hateful because even Jesus accepted everyone. So, if they don’t, they must be hateful. Jesus ate with sinners, they argue. Jesus went into places like Samaria where Jews were not welcomed, and He loved the people there, they say.

Yes, absolutely He did. I agree. Jesus was the king of radical love! And radical acceptance! As Christians should be!

But Jesus’ acceptance and love was not the same type of acceptance that is preached (by some) now.

Jesus invited everyone into the kingdom of God without qualifier of political or economic or ethnic background, without regard for race or religion or gender or past sin. All were welcome.

But. BUT.

NO ONE LEFT JESUS AND STAYED THE SAME. BEING AROUND JESUS CHANGES PEOPLE.

Jesus ate with sinners, yes, but when the Pharisees called Him out on it, He said, “it’s not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick.” He ate with them, but He still referred to them as sick.

Jesus himself called the sinners “sick”.

Jesus welcomed all to come see Him no matter their background or crime record or social status, but when He sent them away, He would say something along the lines of “go, and sin no more.”

And sin no more.

He said this to the Samaritan woman at the well.

He said this to the lame man in John 5. Jesus healed him and then told him to be sure not to sin so he may remain well.

Nobody came to Jesus in their sin and remained in their sin.

As some preach it, today’s message of Jesus’ radical love and acceptance wants to forget the problem of sin. Sin is washed away on the cross through the death and resurrection of Jesus, yes, I get that. But Jesus didn’t do that so we could continue on sinning. The book of Romans asks the rhetorical question: should we continue sinning so grace may abound? By no means!

There is a movement, led and taught by (probably) well-meaning people, saying one must accept all people no matter what they’ve done or do and (And this is a huge AND), and must accept their actions, sinful or not, otherwise you are a hateful Christian.

Yikes.

If my two-year-old wants to play with the kitchen knives because he says, “I like playing with knives, Mommy,” do I allow him to do so? Because he says he wants to? No, of course not. We all understand that he would hurt himself and to allow him to do so would be unloving.

Yet, if I don’t affirm the sin of a fellow Christian I’m unloving? I’m even called hateful?

Actually, the MOST loving thing I can do for others is point them to Jesus. And Jesus Himself is the one who told people to be changed and sin no more.

Look out for Part II!

She invites you, of course, you’re best friends after all. You even put it in your calendar because this party is going to be huge! Catered barbeque, freshly made desserts, a pool, live music, tons of friends, the works. And you’re stoked to go because, well, who wouldn’t be?

Fast forward and you’re both 39. The party is only a few days away. It’s been on your calendar for years, but in the meantime, you haven’t talked to this friend in four years. You forgot to call her back, her texts got buried and you grew apart.

You show up at her front door the day of the party, not wanting to miss out on the fun. She answers the door and says, “Oh, sorry, I don’t even know you anymore. Please go.”

Your heart plummets. You run to other guests you see approaching and ask if they have an extra invitation. No one does. They each have one, for themselves only. You leave, in deep regret about how you’ve acted towards her the past few years. You wish you had maintained that relationship.

Some of you see where I’m going with this.

For a really long time, Matthew 7:21-23 had me freaked out.

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’”

I thought, surely if someone can do all those miraculous things in His name, they must know Him. They must have a relationship with Him. How else could they cast out demons and perform other wonders?

I obsessed, too much probably, over if this verse would apply to me. Would Jesus tell me, “I never knew you”? The thought made my heart plummet…still does.

So, I did what any woman would do in this situation: I brought the question up to my two friends with whom I discuss all things eschatology (end times study) and Bible prophecy. Of course.

They had many good reassurances for me, but the one that I’ve ruminated on the most is the parable of the ten virgins (You can read it here). I’d heard this parable before, but never really dove into what it meant for my day-to-day living. Like, yeah, sure no one knows the day or the hour of Jesus’ return, so be ready. Okay. But, what does that look like, and how does that apply to the scary verse in Matthew 7?

Oh, friends, here we go.

When contemplating the parable of the ten virgins, we need to think about much more than just “being ready”. We need to ask ourselves what does “being ready” mean? What did the one group run out of? Oil. What does the oil symbolize? For most of my life, I did not know. This was a recent revelation to me and a life-changing one.

Their lamps went out because they ran out of oil. They had to go buy some, in the marketplace, in the world, when they should have been ready and awaiting the bridegroom. (If you’re confused about why ten virgins are awaiting a bridegroom in the first place, read this).

So, think about it like this: the lamp is our life with Christ. How well are we following Him and doing what He did, doing what He said in the Bible? What does our life look like? Are our lamps, our lives, ready for Christ’s return?

Well, what was the indicator in this parable of readiness? The oil. The oil. It’s the oil that kept the lamps burning and it’s the oil that keeps our lives on track with Jesus. So, what is this oil?

The oil is intimacy with Jesus.

INTIMACY WITH JESUS.

The oil is not “I come from a Christian family”. It is not “I go to church on Sunday”. It is not “I’ve read the Bible”. It is not “I’m part of a Bible study”. It is intimacy with Jesus himself. Don’t get me wrong, all of the things I quoted above are really good things and can feed and support a relationship with God, but they are not the oil.

The oil to keep your lamp burning, the thing that keeps your life in line with Jesus, is intimacy with Jesus Himself. He wants to know you. Just like the extra oil kept the virgins ready for the bridegroom’s return, intimacy with Jesus, keeps our lives ready for Jesus’ return. The virgins who ran out had to go back to buy more. Similarly, those who don’t have intimacy with Jesus, get sucked back into worldly worries and desires, sins and distractions.

What a beautiful thing. Jesus just wants us to be close to Him. He’s not asking us to perform for Him, just know Him. Intimately. And this intimacy changes our lives.

So that brings us back to the Matthew 7 verse.

If you have the oil, the intimacy, He will not be saying, “depart from me, I never knew you.” That will be for those who lived their own way with a heart far from God, never taking time to know Jesus.

Take heart and be encouraged! And if you don’t know Jesus, now’s the time! Ask Him to change your life and I promise you He will. He is so good and so faithful. TODAY is the day of salvation. Don’t wait!

I am SUPER EXCITED that my second novel, Radelzia, book one in a three-book series, is only a month away from release and is available for pre-order! Head over to jennaslot.com now and reserve your copy!

Radelzia is a world-building, sci-fi novel about an entire world that exists on the inside of a sphere rather than the outside of one, as on Earth. In many ways, life in Radelzia operates similarly to life on Earth, but in some very important ways—most notably, their energy source—life operates drastically different.

PJ Phillips, our protagonist, wakes up confused in a brightly-colored room after having been brought into Radelzia, a world she didn’t even know existed. With the help of Ilse Loo, a Radelzian “rehab”, PJ must learn why she is in Radelzia and how to return home. She uncovers far more than she bargained for, however, including the fact that she is connected to Radelzia. And not only connected, but important to the functioning of this other world.

Don’t miss out on this fun, exciting adventure of a novel!

Friends:

This is the GOSPEL—The Good News. And not just good news, but absolutely life-altering, unfathomably miraculously amazing news.

God created you and I. He created humans to be in relationship with Him, to be friends with God (yes, the Bible says we can be Friends with Him!) He didn’t create us because He’s prideful and wants people to worship Him, He created us because He is a relational being and wanted us to love and be with Him.

But sin entered the world through the temptation brought to Adam and Eve. Why, you ask? Well, God had to create people with choice. If He created them only to love Him by force, given no choice in the matter, then that would not be true love. Real love involves choice. He therefore created the choice to be with Him in perfect paradise or be tempted into disobedience. We know which direction that went.

Because of the introduction of sin into God’s beautiful, perfect world, a separation was created between God and mankind and Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden. Because of the choice aspect I mentioned, God created a place where beings (fallen angels, such as satan, and humans) could go if they chose to be separate from God. That place is Hell.

Because God is Holy and humans fall drastically short of His holiness, we would have to be condemned to Hell if we didn’t have some sort of atonement for our sins.

But God so loved us humans and He knew we’d never measure up to the level of holiness required to be eternally with Him, so He decided to pay the price of all sin for us through the person of Jesus Christ, God made human. God, the most holy being, so vast and almighty that we cannot even fathom, limited Himself to a human body so He could live a perfect life for us and then take the consequences of all humanity’s sins on Himself, for us. He died a gruesome death through crucifixion and bore the wait of all sin for all time. FOR YOU. FOR ME. FOR ALL HUMANS IN ALL OF HISTORY.

Jesus then rose from the dead, as only God could, and ascended into Heaven to welcome His children when each one’s time on Earth is complete!

The price for sin has been paid! You do not have to pay it again.

Those who receive the gift of salvation that Jesus gave, repent of their past behavior and sin, and follow Him will inherit eternal life with God! Forever in paradise with a close loving Father who absolutely adores you and wants you to choose Him! I cannot imagine better news!

He pursues you. If you are reading this right now and thinking this isn’t for me, I’m going to challenge you in that. This is for you! You reading this is God pursuing you.

Choose Him and choose LIFE!

The alternative? Hell.

Now, before you come at me about that, let me expand on the idea of Hell.

Hell is not a place simply to punish you for eternity. (Remember, God LOVES you, no matter what you do or have done). Hell is a complete absence of God, and by choosing to reject Him or refuse to believe in Him, you are therefore choosing Hell. You make the choice of Hell, by choosing against the one true God.

Because absolutely anything that is good, right, pure, beautiful, holy, perfect, lovely, nice, kind, joyful, praiseworthy, and any other good adjective you can think of . . . all of it is from God and because of God. God is love. God is goodness. God is anything that is good and right and pure. And none of it, none of the beauty of this world exists without Him.

No love exists without Him. No friendship. No purity. No beauty. No kindness. No mercy. No grace. None of it would exist without Him.

So, if you reject God. You reject all of those things. You choose to not believe in God, you choose an existence separate from Him for all eternity, then you are choosing a place void of goodness, righteousness, purity, beauty, grace, mercy, kindness, holiness, light, love . . . you get it.

Hell is that place. It’s the opposite of God’s presence. It is darkness and pain and weeping. Gnashing of teeth, torture, guilt, shame, spite, insults, jealousy, gossip, hatred, anxiety, depression, torment. Forever.

Friends. I say this not to condemn or scare, I tell you this because I care!

Choose God today! Choose the giver of life! Choose the one who literally gave His life for you. There is no greater gift!

Jesus tells us He will return and He will take His people to be with Him forever. We don’t know exactly when this will be, but the Bible is clear that we are to be ready at all times for His return. Choose Him. He loves you.

Nope . . .

Good morning, all! I genuinely hope you’ve had a relaxing, hot-drink infused start to your day.

Nope . . .

I’m sitting here, not sure how to start a blog post or if I even have anything to write about on yet another cold, blustery Michigan morning.

Nope . . .

You guys. This is how writing goes . . . and when working on a novel it feels like this, but times a million. And it is super frustrating!

I know, I know. You’re all like, “aw Jenna, that’s so hard! How can we help?”

(Ha.)

Well, let me tell you how you can help . . . RATE AND REVIEW SKUNK CABBAGE!

Oh, but first read Skunk Cabbage. Then rate and review Skunk Cabbage!!!

Seriously, this helps the growth of a book (and therefore, the author) more than you would think. Those smart techy people have built the algorithms so that the more ratings and reviews a book has, the more the search will show that book to people who might like it. It makes it really hard, and really annoying, to try to get ahead as a brand-new newbie author like yours truly!

So, please go to Amazon/Goodreads/BarnesandNoble/Walmart.com and rate and review Skunk Cabbage! Amazon and Goodreads are the ones I’m really focusing on, but if you’re feeling motivated, go for all of ‘em!

Amazon: https://a.co/d/0e

WkZKa8

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/244960112-skunk-cabbage

Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/.../skunk.../1148911047...

Walmart: https://www.walmart.com/.../Skunk-Cabbage.../18848119540...

Thank you, thank you thank you!

You are the BEST.

Jenna

P.S. As always, if you haven’t yet, get your copy at jennaslot.com!

Good morning, folks!

I’m pretty excited about my first ever author event coming up at Schuler Books in Grand Rapids on Wednesday, February 18 at 6:30 p.m. Mark your calendars. We’re going to have fun!

I’ll be there sharing all things Skunk Cabbage. My story, my inspiration, my “why”, and all things down to nitty gritty details about parts of the book that you might never have guessed.

Bring your curiosity and your questions and I can’t wait to hang out with you all. I’ll also be bringing along freshly made Doreen’s Doughs cookies which is reason enough to come, let’s be real.

To help Schuler’s prepare for the event please use the QR code above to RSVP.

See you there!

You can read it at the beach,
or with your cat or with a bird,
You can read it in the bath,
Or while you sit to leave a turd.

You can read it by a fire,
You can read it in the spa.
Read to your heart’s desire
with a newborn baby—“Awww!”

You can read it in your house,
at your own kitchen counter.
You can read it in the summer,
You can read it in the winter.

Read it when it’s Christmas,
or read it when it’s not.
Read it if you’re famous,
or a criminal who’s caught.

You can read it in your head,
or out loud to those around you.
You can read it in your bed,
many people often do.

Read it in the sunshine,
or read it in the rain.
Read it through a phone line,
to a friend who’s on a train.

You can read it when you’re healthy,
Read it when you’re sick.
Read it if you’re wealthy,
or couldn’t give a lick.

Read it with your red light,
or if you’re risky, blue.
Read it in with some bites,
or a cup of tea for you.

Read it all you doctors,
nurses, lawyers, artists,
Read it chiropractors,
mechanics, teachers, dentists.

Read it at the gym,
Read it on your lunch break,
Read it on a tree limb,
anywhere, for goodness’ sake!