Susan Jenkins blogs, writes books, and shares podcasts from rural Mississippi, living back on the very soil where she had grown up enjoying her walks in the woods and savoring God’s glorious Creation. Many twists and turns in life filled the years she was away: paths that brought her heart into a faith she’d never imagined, before bringing her back to her childhood roots.
After a career in the human services field, early retirement opened the door for Susan to help establish the Christian school ministry of First Pentecostal Church in Bay Springs and enjoy a part-time second career in home health medical social work. It was during this phase she began to pursue her growing passion to turn life experiences into preserved observations through the written word. She works from the premise that writing what others see and feel — but are often unable to voice — serves a purpose in the lives of those who read.
Susan enjoys savoring the life God has entrusted to her in the beautiful corner of the South she is blessed to call home.
Up Is Just Backwards When You’re on the Way Down
You were made for more, but events and experiences you face can render your sense of direction out of sync with the emotional and spiritual growth, the freedom, that God wants to establish in your life. What you do in such a season can be a game-changer for you or leave you leaning into what draws you further downward.
Start to Finish: Starting a Walk with God That Can Finish Strong
If you had the opportunity to share a cup of coffee or a glass of iced tea with someone whose heart longs to invest in your walk with God, what questions might you hope to have answered? “How did you get your start in living for God?” “What pitfalls almost made you falter along the way?” “What advice would you give to one starting on the same journey?” Start to Finish shares one woman’s insights gleaned through thirty years of walking by faith. (You just provide the coffee or tea.)
Works in progress include:
Once I Heard the Sweet Song: A Child’s Faith Colored by the Cultural Divide For a little girl in the Mississippi of the sixties, the faith to love all the little children won’t come from where she has been told to find it.
Once I Had to Wander: A Young Girl’s Walk Through Places She Never Wanted to Be When a young life is transplanted from the soil that made it grow, a good girl learns the roots that kept her strong aren’t so easy to replant in a place she can’t call home.
A little more about me:
Here is a video comprising a short summary of my history, in particular how I became Pentecostal. The video was prepared for a presentation to Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), which meets on the campuses of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg and Long Beach: