Jen Sloniger writes from Phoenix, where her multi-ethnic family, built through birth and international adoption, resides. Often, she can be found typing one-handed with a baby on her lap, while her hero husband ensures the safety of their five other children.
She got her start some years ago God issued a command: be BOLD, Jen.
A fear-consumed life became no longer acceptable. Jen needed to “do” her faith like someone who meant what she believed.
So, as an ordinary young Jen, a wife, and mom to three young daughters, she began praying dangerous prayers; heartfelt ones pleading for God to shift focus away from herself, toward His kingdom instead.
Those kinds of prayers are drenched in risk because you can’t predict how the Lord will answer, only that He will. What you can be sure of is that gritty BOLDness comes the hard way. So Jen’s heart waited in silence, half trembling, half daring God to make real change. She wondered, and partially dreaded, where holding hands with Jesus would lead.
She began blogging about the time some of God’s first answers to her prayers began rolling out, writing not as a fearless warrior undaunted by the challenges of life, but as the same ordinary Jen she’d always been. Only now she placed her confidence in Christ and clung on for dear life when two failed pregnancies happened. Then, she and Dustin made the decision to forgo birthing more children in order to pursue adoption. They embarked on two faith-building adventures to bring home sons from Ethiopia; an infant in 2008, then a toddler with HIV in 2010. Later God unveiled yet another wonderful addition to the family — a surprise baby girl born in the summer of 2012. (If you’re keeping count that’s a total of six kids!)
In 2010, God led Jen to begin working for Project HOPEFUL where she served as Communications Director, creating and promoting educational resources for orphan advocacy. A year later God invited her to step away from the work she loved to begin focusing on writing. Today she writes fiction featuring authentic characters hard at work taking risks; some in search of God, some trying to escape Him. Her themes tend to revolve around weakness and insecurity, because, well, that’s what she knows best. Jen also writes inspirational non fiction on faith, family, and women’s issues. (You can learn more about her writing.)
Jen knows there is sometimes difficulty involved with living out the consequences of prayers for BOLDness. Doing faith is generally much more difficult than simply talking about it. Living this way almost always includes God exploiting your weaknesses to showcase His perfect power and sufficient grace. But, Jen wouldn’t change a thing.
Right out front, in the middle of the action — that’s the place to be. Soaking up every wonderful drop of Jesus you can, and reflecting Him back to the world. Not hiding in the back of some tent while the glory of the Lord passes by.
2 Corinthians 3:12-18 (New International Version) emphasis Jen’s
Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away. But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
God issued me a command: be BOLD, Jen. Easy for Him to say. Being BOLD is the opposite of what I do when I’m living life without depending on Jesus.