The story behind Old to New Creations — and why this brand exists
Some of my earliest memories live in the kitchen and at the craft table.
The smell of something baking. The feel of fabric or paper in my hands. The quiet satisfaction of taking something ordinary and turning it into something that hadn’t existed before. I didn’t have a name for it then — I just knew I loved it. The process of taking something old, something plain, something forgotten — and making it into something new. It was a joy that was shared with me by mom and my grandmother.
Some of my earliest memories live in the kitchen and at the craft table.
The smell of something baking. The feel of fabric or paper in my hands. The quiet satisfaction of taking something ordinary and turning it into something that hadn’t existed before. I didn’t have a name for it then — I just knew I loved it. The process of taking something old, something plain, something forgotten — and making it into something new.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized God had been doing the same thing in me all along.
I grew up knowing God was in the business of transformation. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” — 2 Corinthians 5:17. I knew that verse. I believed that verse. And for most of my life, I watched it come alive in the people around me — children and adults taking their first tender steps toward faith, lives turning slowly and then all at once toward something better and truer and more whole.
Old to new. I had seen it happen. I believed it was real.
And then I came face to face with loss — and I had to learn what it meant all over again.
The Collision of Two Opposite Thoughts
I want to be honest with you about something, because I think it matters.
When tragedy arrived in my life — and it arrived more than once — I didn’t immediately land in a place of peace and theological clarity. I landed in a place of collision. Two thoughts that seemed impossible to hold at the same time:
God is powerful enough to stop this.
And yet — He didn’t.
I have wrestled with that. I suspect you have too.
Here is where I landed, after a lot of sitting in the hard middle of it: I don’t believe God selfishly orchestrates suffering for His own purposes. I also don’t believe He is a passive bystander, wringing His hands at the brokenness of this world. What I believe — what I have had to learn to believe through lived experience rather than just theology — is that it is precisely through His deep love for us and His absolute faithfulness that He walks with us through the brokenness. He doesn’t stand outside of it. He enters it. And somehow, in His supernatural wisdom, He allows the broken places to shape us — not to harm us, but to form us into something more and deeper and truer than we could have become without them.
That is not a cliche. That is the hardest and most beautiful thing I know.
And it is the heartbeat of everything Old to New Creations is about.
The Moment Everything Changed
The moment this brand grew into something deeper — something I could no longer keep just for myself — was the moment my sister and brother-in-law received the news that no parent should ever have to hear.
My sweet niece, Madison Joy, had suffered a brain bleed. Emergency brain surgery followed. And then, thirty-five days after she came into this world full of life and promise and all the hope a new baby carries — the doctors told them she no longer had brain activity.
She was here.
And then she wasn’t.
I watched my sister walk into the darkest valley I had ever witnessed someone I loved enter. I watched her grieve with a rawness that only a mother who has lost a child can know. I watched my brother-in-law stand beside her. I listened as she told the story day after day of my two-year-old nephew pad down the hall, looking for his baby sister, asking the question that would eventually become a book —
“Mommy, is Madison sleeping?”
We all felt a longing for Heaven like never before. But… we watched God show up.
Not by fixing it. Not by reversing it. Not by answering our prayers the way we desperately wanted Him to.
But by being present in the most unshakeable, undeniable way — in the middle of something that could not be fixed or reversed or explained away.
That was the moment I understood — really understood — that Old to New is not just a craft philosophy or a brand aesthetic. It is a theology. It is a way of living. It is the defiant joy, hope-filled conviction that God is not finished with any story — no matter how broken the middle looks.
What This Space Is For
Old to New Creations exists for anyone who has ever sat in the hard middle of something and needed to be reminded that the story isn’t over.
It is for the grieving mother who doesn’t know how to explain death to her toddler. It is for the father who is grieving quietly and doesn’t know where to put it. It is for the woman who has lost someone and is trying to figure out how to keep believing in a God who could have stopped it. It is for anyone who has ever held something broken in their hands and wondered if it could ever be made new.
This is not a space where grief gets wrapped up neatly with a bow. This is a space where we sit in the hard questions together. Where we tell the truth. Where we hold onto the Biblical hope that has held us — even on the days we barely held onto it ourselves.
Because Old to New isn’t just something God does once.
It is something He does over and over and over again.
In crafting tables and kitchen counters. In hospital rooms in the middle of the night. In the lives of people who had every reason to walk away from faith and chose — slowly, painfully, stubbornly — to stay.
A Note Before We Go Further
In the weeks ahead I am going to share more of this story with you — the full story of Madison Joy, and the story of my own daughter Lucy Grace, who I delivered still three years later.
I am going to share the book that grew out of both of those losses — Mommy, Is Madison Sleeping? — a children’s book for families navigating grief with their little ones, rooted in Biblical truth and written from the inside of the hardest thing I have ever lived.
And I am going to share the tools, the journals, the Scripture, and the community that have helped me — and that I hope will help you — move from the old thing to the new thing.
However long that takes. However hard the middle gets.
God is still at work.
“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” — Isaiah 43:19
If this resonated with you — share it with someone who needs it today. And if you are in the middle of your own hard season, I would love to hear your story. Leave a comment below or reach out directly. You are not alone here.
If you are in a season of waiting or grief right now, the Old to New Journals were designed for exactly this.
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