Welcome to my cyber hideout!
My name, Jona, is spoken with a soft Y sound, like the Ionian Sea, the waters that shaped my earliest memories.
I grew up in a small easy to miss country in Eastern Europe, called Albania, though the locals call it ‘Shqipëri’, which on local tongues sounds as rugged and untamed as it looks written down – one could argue that it is.
Some 25 years ago, my mother signed me up for free English lessons at a summer school run by Americans, so I could ‘practice my English’.
It turned out that this ‘school’ was not a school at all, but a gathering of believers trying to spread the gospel in our little Mediterranean city of Durres, Albania. It was actually a church.
We gathered in the basement of this concrete building, much like what one might picture the early believers doing. Full of people that had just discovered the treasure and sold everything to buy the field. Not churched people, but people sitting at the feet of Jesus, learning to be His church. People searching the scriptures to find the Word in awe and amazement of the new name they had been given. It was messy, authentic, and organic.
It was there that I met my now husband. Through a series of events only God can orchestrate, I moved to the States at 17, got married at 19, and became a parent at 20. We’ve been living out this covenant of marriage for over two decades now. That man and those five kids of ours are the greatest privilege of my life.
What to expect
A lot of what I write will be about what is currently going on in my life. Not a blog of current events, but an attempt to stay current with the One that works all events for our good.
I have a complicated relationship with words. Is that an oxymoron for someone who is trilingual? There is one language that I was born into. Another one that I used to speak fluently. And yet another one that I’m writing in now. They say that your true language is the one you ‘think’ in. Well, ha! What if you think in more than one? That explains a lot!
It’s. just. complicated.
Thing is, the more I wrestle with words, the more I seem to find the Way to the Word. Something about stringing words together that pulls strings through my own soul and connecting dots I didn’t even know needed to connect. Something about my mind opening up to truths that have to be spelled out in words to become true.
Truths that were true all along, but these words, these single units of language that we have been given have this power to them. Power to create reality as we know it. Is it any surprise though? Don’t we live in a reality created by the Word?
The Word himself used words to create the world as we know it. To rearrange matter with its laws of attraction and space and time and forces that keep us all grounded.
The Word himself uses words still, to keep these weary souls of ours grounded and to give us a new name. That’s what the Word does, He makes all things new.
This corner of the internet is a collection of my walk with words, to discover more of the Word himself.
This is my word-ful practice to look for Him in the mountain top moments and the valleys, in the mundane and the breathtaking, in the stories that we get to proclaim loud and clear as our testimony and the ones we keep intimate and hidden knowing that He is the God who knows.
It is my hope that there is encouragement, hope and truth here. Truth that sets us free.