Huh?  Here I am, launching a blog. Yes, it is I – A Colorado girl born and bred, steeped in the independent spirit of the Wild West, who vowed that she would never, ever blog.  What happened?

Mr. Turkey is an ungainly and seemingly a quite silly sort of creature.  Little head, big body, floppy red wattle.  However, in late August I have seen a flock of great, wild turkeys take to a fruit-laden tree, their great bodies bending the branches, frenzied in their passion to make provision against the coming winter, just as God created them to do.

For what am I created?  What is MY passion?

For many years the Lord has been speaking gently into my head, leading me through His Word, nudging me through His incredibly beautiful creation, through family and friends, through the chance encounter in a grocery store aisle, through the life cycles of my beloved gardens , through great authors and poetry – words and phrases and ideas rattle around in my head all the time, jostling for position and substance, begging to be realized upon the page.  My life is routinely derailed by the absolute need – not just the desire, but the NEED! – to sit down and write.  Often in the morning I retrieve and decipher with difficulty scribbled sticky notes pasted to my headboard, remnants of midnight epiphanies.  Church bulletins and scraps of paper from the wastebasket serve as receptacles for outlines and precious thoughts lest they slip away forever. I forget to eat when I am writing. And I have felt a little weird about this – rather like a closet writer addicted to the turn of a phrase.

With no prior warning, I routinely must abandon chores on the spot – dishes in the sink, vacuum standing in the middle of the living room – in order to write.  Donning my favorite old grey sweater and fuzzy slippers, I  head for the kitchen table, my wonderful little iPad in hand, settle before the big kitchen window as my world pours forth upon the worn oak tabletop – and I am lost in time. 

Over many years I have accumulated a dusty archive of my writings, many of which took shape during the last four years of retirement.  Infrequently, I have shared some of my work with family and close friends for critique or to encourage them, but the thought of exposing my work to public scrutiny was daunting – my work was not ready nor was my heart.  Upon retiring, my intent was to spend more time especially with my rapidly maturing grandchildren (indeed, time seems to run faster and faster), to delve deeper into ministry, to pursue more intensely studies in my chosen medium of watercolor – and to write.  Ah, now there was the rub.  In literary terms I was green, so very green. I needed tutorials and resources to bridge the gap between my private writing and the skill I hoped to achieve, but most of all I needed real people to guide me as I struggled with my motivations and goals in writing. 

Voila! The age of instant information prevails!  I “googled” for a Christian writers’ group in the Denver area, and Writers On the Rock popped up in premier position on my computer screen!  Four years ago, I attended my first WOTR conference and was completely blown away. There I was, in a large room filled with like-minded Christian writers, courageous people who shared my predilection for words, people who also experienced an undeniably God-driven need to write and write and write – people who roll words over their tongue, searching for just the right shape and sound to express a thought, people who think a thesaurus is dessert with whipped cream on top.

During the opening conference session, an arrow struck and quivered right between my eyes:  “If God has given you words to write, why aren’t you sharing them?”

Indeed – why?

Sadly, it took the death of a dear friend, a sister of the soul, for me to weigh anchor and start sailing.  An intensely honest and passionate woman, an artist, a retired nurse practitioner who used her knowledge and skills to further Christ’s kingdom, Helen graduated on December 30th into eternal life with a smile on her face.  During my last visit with her a few weeks earlier, her face shone with absolute radiance as she calmly spoke of meeting Jesus.  Her family reported that up until her death, though walking was nigh on impossible in her last weeks, daily she worked at at her sewing machine which faced out upon her beloved mountain meadow surrounded with aspen.  I knew how talented a seamstress Helen was and even own a couple of her creations, but only after her death did I discover her website – The Mountain Mitteneer – where she showcased her unique aprons and warm wool mittens. If she could do it, so could I!

And so my blog was born.

But – whence came GraceAjar? After diligently searching for a unique domain name, I had success with GraceAjar and was delighted with its succinct summary of my aim – to share the grace of God that pours through the cracks in my life.  But a funny thing happened on the way to my domain name. Into a Google search bar I typed “grace ajar,” just to make sure that I was not duplicating someone else’s business name. Up popped numerous websites referencing a tract written by John Bunyan and published in 1850 by the American Tract Society – “The Jerusalem Sinner Saved” – in which Bunyan writes that God “stands, at least, with the door of grace ajar in his hand.” I was humbled. The great writer had beaten me to the punch 169 years ago.  (See “The Delphi Complete Works of John Bunyan Illustrated,” by John Bunyan; tract titled The Jerusalem Sinner Saved, Application: Section 3; available online at https://books.google.com)

Nothing is new in this world, least of all the concept of the undeserved grace of God, whose Spirit – Ruach! Breath of God! – hovered over the face of the deep during creation and shaped man in His own image, giving us minds with which to think and eyes to see.  With great respect for my readers, I will endeavor to land on the fruit-laden branches of God’s grace and share the moments of my life where mundane collides with miraculous.  With ears to hear and eyes to see, who knows what wonders we will discover together? 

**Visit my other website – RuachArt.com – where I share my adventures in watercolor.

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,
the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world.”
– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity