Jeanette Hardage, perhaps like most people, seems to have felt God’s presence most deeply in the quiet places of life. In Faith and Other Matters, she juxtaposes the poem below with the Psalm 37:7 admonishment to “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for …
Read MoreLove Just Gives
One of Jeanette Hardage’s earliest published poems, dating back to at least 1967, seems appropriate for the season of Lent. During a time when Christians contemplate the awesome love of God, and many emphasize selfless charity towards others, consider her very brief and simple, yet …
Read MoreChoose Joy
One of Jeanette Hardage’s daughters recently came across an unpublished poem in Jeanette’s handwriting tucked away inside a piece of old furniture. She had probably not intended it for publication, as it contained none of her usual word choice edits. With candor she shares how …
Read MoreDialogue with the Holy
Jeanette Hardage greatly admired Kathleen Norris, author of Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, a book which Jeanette reviewed for two magazines in 1999. In her meditation on Truth, Norris says that “poetry, like prayer, tends to be a dialogue with the holy.” Jeanette seemed …
Read MoreSoli Deo Gloria
In an undated journal entry, Jeanette Hardage expressed the hope that her Christian identity would show through in all of her writing somehow, even when a book or article was not obviously sacred in nature. In the early 2000s, she began to foster this by …
Read MoreThe Eyes of a Child
In the early 1960s, a serious play accident meant that Jeanette Hardage’s eldest daughter was in danger of losing her right eye. After significant medical attention and time to heal, in December of 1961 the family Christmas letter reported that, despite pessimistic prognoses from the …
Read MoreEncounter with an Angel
Jeanette Hardage could sometimes be shy about sharing intimate details about herself. For instance, a couple of her most poignant poems disguise her involvement by describing an experience in the third person, using made-up people. Around 1998, she had an experience that she wanted to …
Read MoreA Reluctant Saint
Jeanette Hardage always wanted to be thought of as a regular gal, definitely not as a “saint.” Perhaps she feared that if others thought of her as living on some higher plane of existence, they would not be receptive to her ideas and would impede …
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