Click here to read my statement of faith
To contact me, you can email me: kimberly@joyfulmomma.org. I get around 500 emails a day (mostly spam), but I do try to answer those I can. I apologize in advance for those times when I miss the mark in answering email!
The origins of this site started back when I struggled with spiritual matters while an art and design student at Northern Michigan University in the late 1980s. I had many questions in my mind about eternal and spiritual matters but I bucked against all things Christian because of what I wrongly thought Christianity was all about. I became a Christian in 1990. After years of searching spiritually and trying to fill a "God-shaped vaccuum" in my life with just about everything this world has to offer, I took off on a journey backpacking through Eastern Europe. I travelled by hiking, and by train mostly, and on August 3rd, 1990, while in Prague, Czechoslovakia, I had an encounter that changed my life. I met a girl who did not speak much English, who began to tell me about my need for a Savior. What she said so burned in my heart and piqued my curiosity, I wanted to know more, but a language barrier prevented her from fully communicating the Gospel to me. God however is very faithful, and sent along two workers from Campus Crusade for Christ, who then explained to me how to be saved. I bowed my head in a cafe on John Huss Square in Prague that afternoon with Betty Morgan and Chris Mizuhara and asked Jesus into my life.
I lived in Krems Austria as an Au Pair, learning much but not really appreciating it at the time :) . I moved to Salzburg for several months and then returned home to the United States, where I met my husband. We got married in 1992 and in 1993 the doctors who had told me I would likely never have children were proven wrong. I gave birth to my first born daughter that year, and my life changed even more dramatically. Through the challenges of motherhood (especially being unprepared and at the time "bucking against the Lord" in this matter), God began to really work in my life as never before, and I grew in Him as He patiently taught me and led me along.
When I first discovered the internet in 1996 while pregnant with my third child, a whole new world opened to me (there were days my husband surely loathed the day he showed me how to use a modem). Being an information junkie who can never seem to have enough money for books (having exhausted the local libraries), I was tickled at such a large resource of free information where I found many resources which aided me in my growth as a wife and mother, as my family continued to grow, and challeneged me to search the Scriptures all the more diligently to see whether these things I was reading really were so.
The more I read from other authors, the more hungry I became for the Bible as I searched out what the Bible said on different topics. I actually wore out two Bibles during this time and filled 3 notebooks with personal Bible study notes. I read through the Bible completely once every month or two! As God taught me, I began to put much of what the Lord was teaching me into writing and eventually a few articles and books were born. In 2004, I finally put together this website, and it has gone through several up grades since then as I have learned XHTML and CSS, and grown in my web design skills.
God has allowed me to complete seven books, all of which are available from my bookstore, as well as to keep writing more and more articles. As my web design skills have grown (having majored in Art and Design in college), I have also branched out into website design services as well as graphic illustration services. You can find some of my illustrations in my book Momma's Guide to Growing Your Groceries, as well as illustrations by my daughter and I in The Bread by Hand Ebook. Further illustrations can be found in upcoming books, including some animated, interactive children's ebooks, and animations in my nearly completed Video Curriculum, "The Art and Tech of Web Design" (coming December 2009 at the lastest :-)).
