“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.” — Ecclesiastes 3:1 (NIV)
Well…apparently, I’m a blogger again.
Which is a slightly ridiculous thing to say, considering I just wrote an entire first blog post announcing that apparently, I’m blogging again.
But here’s the thing.
This isn’t actually my first time.
Or even my second.
Apparently, every few years I decide the internet needs to hear what’s rattling around inside my head. Then life happens, I disappear for a while, and eventually I find myself sitting in front of a blank screen again wondering how I got here.
Except this time, something feels different.
I’ve been thinking about the other times I’ve written and why I started writing in the first place. And the more I think about it, the more I realize each blog belonged to a very different version of me—and a very different season of my life.
The first was called Journey to Ordinary.
Even the name makes me stop now.
Because back then, ordinary was something I thought I was trying to get to.
Today?
I’m beginning to wonder if ordinary was where God was trying to teach me to find Him all along.
If you asked my family and friends, they would tell you I prefer to be behind the scenes…unseen. It’s easier there. Comfortable. A whole lot less scary.
Somehow, being unseen translated to being ordinary in my mind. We don’t usually notice the “ordinary people” we pass every day. We notice the loud ones, the outgoing ones, the beautiful ones—the people who stand out in the crowd.
I didn’t want to stand out.
But looking back, I think I was longing for another kind of ordinary too.
I wanted life to feel normal again. Safe. Predictable. I wanted to know what came next. I wanted answers to questions I didn’t even know how to ask yet.
Ordinary sounded pretty good to me.
Instead, God gave me Himself.
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
— Matthew 7:7–8 (NIV)
And apparently, He also gave me a keyboard.
Writing became the place where I worked some of it out. I wrote about what I was learning, what I was questioning, what God was showing me, and sometimes probably just whatever happened to be rattling around in my head that day. I didn’t realize I was documenting the beginning of something.
Looking back now, that’s what gets me.
I can read those old posts and see a woman who was just beginning to understand who Jesus really was. I can see God teaching her things she had no idea she was going to need later.
She didn’t know what the next fourteen years would hold.
She didn’t know there would be more heartbreak. More hard seasons. More questions. She certainly didn’t know there would also be so much laughter, healing, growth, second chances, and joy.
She didn’t know that some of the truths she was learning about God would eventually become the very truths she would cling to when life got hard again.
At the time, I couldn’t see any of that.
I was just laying one brick at a time.
Fourteen years later, I can see the foundation…
If I could sit down with the me from fourteen years ago, I think I would tell her, “God’s got you. Trust Him completely. You’re going to be okay.” ❤️
And maybe that’s one of the things God is beginning to teach me about ordinary faithfulness:
We don’t always get to see what He’s building while we’re being faithful with the brick He’s placed in our hand.
Maybe Journey to Ordinary wasn’t really about getting to ordinary after all.
Maybe it was the beginning of learning that God had been there all along.
Apparently, that wasn’t the end of my blogging career either.
Several years later, another blog showed up. And this time, the reason I started writing was completely different.
And there she is:
Mable. 😂
If you know Mable, you probably understand how Autism Keeps Me Giggling got its name.
I had actually been using that phrase long before there was ever a blog attached to it. Life with Mable has a way of producing stories you simply couldn’t make up if you tried.
Over the years, I would share those stories with friends and family, and inevitably someone would say, “You really need to write this stuff down.”
If you have a relationship with Mable, then you have a funny story to tell!
One of my favorite things about Facebook is Memories. From time to time, a funny Mable story pops up, and I get to relive it all over again.
I can’t say I have a favorite because there are just too many, and each one holds a special memory for me. If I had to choose one of the most sentimental, it would probably be from her fifth- or sixth-grade years, when she had a paraprofessional named Jennifer.
Fun fact: Mable doesn’t call me Mom. She calls me Jennifer. Sigh. 😂
I have come to appreciate this because while her paraprofessional’s name was also Jennifer, Mable confidently and boldly informed her:
“You are NOT MY Jennifer!”
Some days, it would be nice to hear “Mom.” But knowing that I am HER Jennifer means the world to me.
And if I were ever given the choice, I would choose her all over again.
I could fill this entire post with Mable-isms, but I’ll save some of those for another day. 😉
The point is, people kept telling me I should write them down.
Eventually I listened.
So in 2020, Autism Keeps Me Giggling was born.
But unlike Journey to Ordinary, I didn’t start that blog because I felt this overwhelming need to get everything in my head out onto a page. I started it because other people saw something worth sharing in the stories I was already telling.
And looking back now, I realize the writing sounded different because I was different.
The woman who wrote Journey to Ordinary was searching. She was trying to understand a life she hadn’t planned and a God she was only beginning to truly know.
The woman who wrote Autism Keeps Me Giggling still didn’t have life figured out—not even close—but somewhere along the way, she had learned to laugh.
Not because autism had become easy.
Not because all the hard things had disappeared.
Not because life had suddenly started going according to plan.
But because somewhere between the hard and the holy, there was also a whole lot of funny.
And Mable has always been really good at reminding me of that.
That blog didn’t last very long either.
A handful of posts. A handful of Mable stories. And then, once again, life happened.
I stopped writing.
There wasn’t a dramatic goodbye post or some grand decision that I was finished being a blogger.
I just…stopped.
And for several years, that seemed to be the end of it.
Until apparently it wasn’t.
Because here I am again.
Only this time the blog is called Bloom Where You Are Planted.
And I’ve been asking myself the obvious question:
Why am I writing this time?
I knew why I wrote Journey to Ordinary. I needed somewhere to work through what God was doing in my life.
I know why I wrote Autism Keeps Me Giggling. People I loved kept telling me the stories were worth sharing.
But this time?
I’m not completely sure yet.
Maybe that’s okay.
What I do know is that something has been stirring in me lately.
I’ve been spending more time in my Bible. I’ve been looking back at old writing and seeing God’s fingerprints in places I didn’t recognize them before. I’ve been thinking about purpose and faithfulness and what it means to live the life God has actually given me instead of waiting for some other version of it.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about ordinary things.
Ordinary days.
Ordinary conversations.
Ordinary women.
Ordinary acts of obedience that nobody else may ever notice.
Maybe I’ve spent too much of my life believing that if God wanted to do something important with me, it would need to look important.
I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve misunderstood what “important” looks like to God.
Maybe the things we think are ordinary aren’t very ordinary at all when they’re surrendered to Him.
And maybe that’s why these three blogs don’t feel quite as separate to me anymore.
Journey to Ordinary.
Autism Keeps Me Giggling.
Bloom Where You Are Planted.
Three different seasons.
Three different versions of me.
But the same God.
The God who was laying a foundation when I didn’t know I would need one.
The God who taught me there could still be laughter in a life I never would have written for myself.
And the God who, fourteen years later, apparently has me sitting in front of a blank screen again.
I have no idea what He plans to do with it this time.
Maybe this little blog will live quietly in its corner of the internet.
Maybe a handful of women will read it.
Maybe someday I’ll look back at these words the way I’m looking back at Journey to Ordinary now and realize God was doing something I couldn’t see yet.
I don’t need to know.
And maybe that’s what’s different about this season.
Fourteen years ago, I wanted to know where I was going.
Today, I’m learning to trust the One who already knows.
So maybe this next season is simply about…
Learning to be faithful where we’re planted.
Trusting God with the growing.
And maybe—just maybe—blooming along the way.
I’m glad you’re here.
— Jenni 🌸
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