Hello friend,

I’ve captured my “writing journey,” if you will, here not so much because you need to know why I started blogging, but because I needed to share it.

I want to say that journaling as a part of my time in the Bible and with the Lord probably started a good habit of getting words onto paper. That was my beginning.

Then in high school, my journaling began to give birth to Bible studies that I shared with my youth group. And, during that season I daresay my rhyming texts to friends must have contributed at least a small portion to my creative writing muscles.

I didn’t love writing papers in college, mostly because I have never, and indeed still do not, savor editing. But one of my supervisors did some writing on the side for Passion, and invited me to write a few devotions, with his promise to help edit. Edit he did, as did Passion (, and I’m proud to say that three of my devotionals are to be found in their book Simple Pursuit, " 365 daily devotionals written by a collective of 18-25 year-olds from the Passion Movement for their peers.”

A few years after college I was approached by a friend in women’s leadership at my church. She invited me to join a group of writers composing a weekly devotional for the women in our church. Long story short - I did! I enjoyed wrestling with passages to uncover new applications, and composing shareable content. What I didn’t enjoy was the deadline. The looming challenge of a first draft kept me procrastinating until the last minute, and I’m sure my readers suffered for it. I promised myself every time that I wouldn’t wait that late “ever again.” I’m not sure I ever did keep that promise, but it was definitely a good challenge, and I appreciated the unusual ministry opportunity.

After I got married and joined my husband’s church, I considered the idea of pioneering a similar ministry in my new congregation - but I thought I’d give myself time to adjust and get to know this new body before volunteering to fill a gap that may not be in God’s will or timing. In the meantime, I was learning to write content for a professional setting through my newsletter at work and I was beginning to embrace the value of storytelling to communicate mission.

Then, out of the blue, my husband Andrew invited me to join him in #1000wordsofsummer, “An email list for the writing community hosted by author Jami Attenberg.” The idea was to write 1000 words a day from May 29 - June 11, 2020. And we did it - mostly. It was a wild season to be writing - mid COVID-19 pandemic across the globe, and then racial injustice revolutions across America. But, writing definitely helped me process the hard things. I learned that I could write, and that writing contributed to my sanity, and gave me thoughtful opinions in shareable formats.

The last thing that perhaps brought all of this together was that I began to read other people’s writings, not their books, but their newsletters and articles - their opinions. I began discovering the magic of a blog and a regular publication of opinions and ideas. David Perrell, for example, shares lots of ideas in two weekly newsletters, and I was much encouraged by his journey to writing. Other bloggers, advocates and Christian thinkers like Sarah Billups and Amy Gannet began to fill my inbox. They impacted and encouraged me, and I hope to do the same for my readers.

Onward and upward,

Maria