Jan's Journey

Part One



From every wound there is a scar, and every scar tells a story.

A story that says, “I have survived.” Mhar

 I like to believe I have lived a fairly adventurous and fulfilling life. Growing up, I lived in Geneva, Switzerland and Cambridge, England while my father wrote books and taught classes. I traveled to dozens of other countries with my family and met people from many different cultures with many diverse backgrounds and life stories. And when we returned back to the States and dad worked for a seminary, he had such concern for the foreign students that during holidays he would drive around the college campus to find “strays” and bring them to our home for dinner. As a young adult, I moved from a quiet northwest suburb of Chicago to Humboldt Park, one of the most dangerous, drug and gang infested inner city neighborhoods in Chicago. During my thirteen years in the city, I ministered to hurting youth. I pulled some of them from drug houses and convinced others that life was worth living even when they thought it the best way out of their pain was suicide or to stay high 24/7. I endured interrogation from police officers suspecting that the reason for my presence in the ‘hood was to buy drugs. To be fair to the cops of course, there were times when I unknowingly transporting illegal drugs and concealed weapons in my car and offered my jumper cables to some of my youth who were actually attempting to steal a car, not start their own.

At age 44, I decided after gentle nudge from the Lord (actually it was a huge kick in the pants) to return to school and get a graduate degree in social work. I applied to school, was accepted the following week and the week after that, put my condo on the market, packed up my things and moved across the country to start another adventure.

I have, by no stretch of the imagination, lived an event-filled life. I have had some great experiences and made some great choices that have brought great rewards. But I have also made some pretty bad choices as well. One choice in particular was so profound that it altered the course of my entire life.

Perhaps I should back up a bit. My parents had two children. The first they named Paul Michael, until they realized they were having a girl. My sister Lynn was born February 6, 1967.  With much excitement, they named the second child James Harris until they   found out they were having me. And I was a “girly girl” to anyone who knew me well.

In spite of my father’s understandable disappointment in not having boys, my sister did a good job in my perspective of making up for it. She was very much like him in many ways.  They could sit for hours and discuss current events or political unrest in any part of the world at any given time. They could talk with great enthusiasm about family history and genealogy, a subject that would (and still does) put me to sleep. I mean, why talk about dead people when you can talk to people who are still living who can still respond? It makes no sense to me.

In junior high, I preferred to talk on the phone with my best friends about what boys we wanted to date, marry and have children with. I preferred to spend hours in the shopping mall buying clothes that I thought would make me look more like Cindy Lauper or Madonna or sit in the sun to get a suntan that I knew from experience would burn me to a crisp. You’d think I would have learned. In less than a week after dreaming of becoming the beautiful bronze goddess I desired to be, my bright red skin would blister and peel  and I would once again be right where I started – about as dead white as a person can be without being dead.

            But I had bigger goals too.  I was confident that either Scott Baio or Shaun Cassidy would become my future husband. I may or may not have sent a few letters to each of them hoping to determine our spiritual compatibility. To my disappointment, they never responded to my letters.

And then there was the issue of higher education. My father worked hard to get a Ph.D. and expected that both my sister and I would follow in his footsteps. My sister chose a “respectable” career path – college. In the early 90s she boarded a plane for Scotland to work towards a Master’s degree at the University of Aberdeen. I on the other hand, wanted to become a hairdresser. Much to my father’s despair, instead of working hard to become a well-known, well-educated and well respected individual like he had become, I was content with making people look good. Just as respectable of a life choice, of course. Just not what he had anticipated for son James Harris, uh, I mean his daughter Janice Carolyn.

It turned out that I wasn’t all that committed to cosmetology school. It didn’t take much to convince me to go to college. In fact, all it took was a simple bribe. If I went to the college out of state where dad was teaching at the time, he would purchase a condo where I could live and where he could stay each week when he came there to teach.  I quickly changed my life aspirations to anything that would allow me to live in a brand new condo out of state and away from the restrictions at home.  Unfortunately, as a young woman trying to find myself and determine my worth, I made some pretty bad choices in that condo – which brings me back to the real reason I am penning these words.

I have discovered over the years that God’s grace and mercy is unending and that he has never given up on me, even after years of choices that have left him heartbroken and left me hurting and deeply wounded.  Perhaps that’s when he does his best work. I would like to believe that sharing my story of hurt, my ongoing journey of healing and the life discoveries that I have experienced along the way will benefit you, but it is a real possibility that I am writing it for my own healing. Regardless of the reason, I hope that you will still go on this journey with me. I hope that God’s work in my life will encourage you to lean in towards him and allow him to heal any hurts you may have in your own life.


*Please look for my published book in 2014.