Who am I?

I am blessed to be married to my best friend, Derrick, who gives me more time to create in my art studio because he likes to cook! He’s also selfless, loves the Lord, and is quite the looker. I’m mom to three kiddos with biblical names - two very active and charismatic sons, and a teenage daughter who is an incredibly talented artist. I spend a lot of time chasing down our rescue dog, Louis Armstrong, pulling chewed-up paper towels that he snuck out of the trash or baseball cards out of his mouth. We recently moved from the Atlanta area to North Carolina and expect to take full advantage of living between the coast and the mountains now.

I am a maker, a creative, a lover of beauty. I live to create and create to live. From a very young age, I created my own elaborate games for my friends, organized clubs for the neighborhood kids, all kinds of various art, commercials for my favorite products, and made up songs with my hairbrush microphones in my mirror. I wrote and mailed letters in cursive on floral stationery to my grandparents in another state. With a thread and a needle and my very rudimentary sewing skills, I’d repair the holes in his beloved Mr. Bear for my big brother because I could contribute to making something better and bringing happiness to another through my creativity. Creating helped me connect to the world, to others, myself, and later it would help me connect with God.

A little bit of my story

I’ve always had a very strong sense of self and identity and one of my favorite memories supporting this is when I was in an elementary school Christmas performance and all of the second grade was asked to dress in their Christmas finest - velvet reds and Christmas plaids, with shiny black patent mary janes and lacy socks. But I had convinced my mom to allow me to wear my favorite purple outfit and purple boots with fur. To this day, I’m not sure how she felt comfortable doing that, but as a mother, I can understand “picking and choosing your battles”. I had a solo that night and stood out like a sore thumb on the stage but I remember feeling pretty awesome in my power color, purple. I credit my mom for contributing to that. Examples like that continued throughout my whole life (like that blazing yellow jacket I had to wear for a high school yearbook picture).

For a few decades of my life, I stepped away from art and pursued business. The Lord brought me back to art during a season of long-suffering. He knew I would be able to meet him only through my creativity on some of my darkest nights. Now, I often use the pain and the purpose in my writing, visual art, and coaching sessions. Creativity allowed me to process a lot of the suffering, pain, and loss through poetry, psalms, and writing on my Substack Becoming. Immersing myself back into art brought a rich and magical awakening to all of the beauty the Lord surrounds us with. Beauty became a powerful tool for me to combat darkness and suffering and a very real ‘sustaining grace’ that continues to comfort me smack dab in the middle of my pain and trauma that our family has experienced over these last seven years. I have now learned to see suffering as a gift and most of my curriculum as a life coach has been developed from my own life experiences. God is in the business of making beauty from ashes and he wastes nothing. I want to waste nothing, also, and use what has helped and healed me to help others find healing.

“When people cease to be surrounded by beauty, they cease to hope.” N.T. Wright

I can’t mention beauty as a big part of my life without including nature. I am a master naturalist and conservationist/environmental educator and our family is always collecting nature treasures to add to our extensive, museum-level collection of nature objects, which I affectionately call our ‘cabinet of curiosities’. It is not unusual to find dead insects lying around in containers waiting to be pinned, including two brown boxes currently in our refrigerator with several dead butterfly specimens that I received from the natural history museum.

I love collecting books, and reading most of them. You can see a list of some of my favorites here. Give me a free day and I could spend the entire day in a library or bookstore, happily. I am almost always reading at least 5 books at a time, including the Bible, a collection of poetry, and a book on spiritual development. I don’t read a lot of fiction but I love reading and collecting good quotes! I have notebooks full of them. I am an avid journaler and write ‘morning pages’ every morning.

I’m also a baseball coach. I was an athlete through all of my school years and when my boys were old enough to play rec sports, I was quick to volunteer to help in the dugout. However, it became hard for me to just watch and help - I wanted to coach! It didn’t take long before I was out there on the field as Coach Kelly. I suppose I’ll keep coaching as long as I can keep lapping the boys around the bases. I was a fast one in my ‘glory days’.

Our family lived through an unimaginable experience and truly knows what it feels like to lose everything. We lost our family’s dream home, our health, our dogs’ lives, our jobs, my art studio, all of our belongings, and all of our money in a very short time frame when our family discovered hidden toxic mold in our home. It was kind of like having a house fire, except nobody acknowledges it and most people thought we were crazy. We also lost a lot of friends. I am more familiar with mystery chronic illness than I care to be, and have become a huge PANS/PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Strep Infections) advocate through our family’s tumultuous journey with it. I feel anytime God gives you an experience like that, He calls you to help and encourage others who are also walking through similar challenges. God’s in the business of making beauty from ashes.

I grew up in church. My grandparents were both pastors, but we didn’t have a super religious home. I did all the things good little girls who ‘believed in God’ did. I went to church, prayed, blessed my food and loved others. I knew the Sunday-school Jesus loved me, but it was an abstract love - not a personal “for me” love.

I was an adult when I accepted Jesus as my personal savior. It’s been over a decade and I’m STILL LEARNING how to fully receive his love and understand what that looks like. A huge part of that process has been learning how important our own healing is in order to give and to receive God’s love fully. My healing journey is another theme in my art, poetry and writing and one of the main reasons I am so passionate about coaching others to step into the fullness that God has to offer in their lives. I was sad, depressed, anxious, and traumatized and from God’s grace and mercy, he guided me through. It’s my calling to do that with others now as a life coach.

Moving from ‘believing in God’ to becoming a ‘disciple of Christ’ was one of my greatest joys in life. The more I know him, the more I trust him and the more I trust him, the more I love him and the more I love him, the more I feel seen/known/loved in return and want to keep knowing, trusting, and loving him. It’s exciting to know I have the opportunity to constantly grow here. It’s exciting to see the world with ‘new creation’ eyes, where beauty abounds and beauty heals and redeems, and sustains, and provides.

In all of this, in everything on this entire website, I pray that all I share with others, everything I have to offer, points to Jesus and who he is and how much he loves us. I’ll be real about it and it won’t always be pretty. And I’ll be vulnerable because I know that’s where true connection and healing happen. And I always give all the glory to God.

Thanks for being here.