Hi. I’m Jean Marie Bauhaus. Jeanie to my friends.
I’m a blogger and freelance writer, and I write spooky and suspenseful fiction under my real name and Christian romance and all-ages fiction under the pen name Jeanie Nicholson.
I’m a life-long Christian who grew up exposed to an eclectic mix of denominational traditions that included Methodist, Southern Baptist and Full Gospel/Pentacostal, but ended up at a Word of Faith hyper-charismatic church in my early teens, where I remained through my late twenties.
Around 2004 I met my eventual husband, who introduced me to exegetical, verse-by-verse teaching, and inspired me to finally stop being spoon-fed my beliefs and start studying the Bible for myself. This changed my life and began a spiritual awakening that was almost like getting saved all over again. Since then, it has been QUITE the journey — some of which I chronicled on this here blog, which I started in the mid-2010s under the name Daydream Believer.
That journey saw me through a really dark and difficult season of my life, during which I turned to online women’s ministries for encouragement and support. I made the mistake of replacing my daily Bible study time with devotionals written by women with good intentions but not so great theology, and unfortunately, I wasn’t yet grounded enough in scripture to know the difference. I’m ashamed to say that, even after having been led by the grace of God out of the Word of Faith heresy, I let myself be led into subtler forms of error that included other forms of New Age beliefs and practices mixed with Christianity. These ministries also led me deeply down the rabbit trail of self-help and self-improvement, pulling me farther and farther away from the Word and setting me to chasing worldly means of self-healing.
But God is so gracious.
In early 2020, even before all the collective craziness started, the Lord providentially began to wake me up to the occult and New Age origins and the spiritual dangers of all that I’d been involved in. As the world went into lockdown and I suddenly had a lot of extra time on my hands — including all the time I saved no longer obsessively “doing the work,” reading self-help books, listening to Enneagram podcasts, doing yoga and breath work and mindfulness meditation, etc. — I felt a powerful pull to spend all that time going deep into the study of scripture. I stopped being satisfied with the milk being served up by these online ministries and I hungered for the meat of sound doctrine and theology — and the Lord fed my hungry spirit with the enthusiasm of a momma who gets her baby back from college and realizes they haven’t had a proper meal since leaving home.
And it was there — in the pages of scripture, in daily communion with God through prayer and study and Biblical meditation on His word — that I found true and lasting healing and deliverance. And I found so much rest and peace when I realized that healing isn’t found in “doing the work,” but is found in submitting completely to the will of our Heavenly Father and to the sanctifying work that his Holy Spirit wants to do in us.
Here on the cusp of 2023, I’m feeling led to revive this blog with an altered course, which is reflected in its new name. I’m no longer all about chasing down daydreams. I’m about seeking first the Kingdom and doing the will of my Father, of searching his word to test everything like a good Berean. Studying to show myself approved, growing in all spiritual wisdom and knowledge, searching for it as for hidden treasure, and doing my best to rightly divide the word of truth.
These are things I want to model here on the pages of this blog. I want to help fill the void of sound Biblical teaching that’s so prevalent in women’s ministries and so-called Christian books targeting women, examining issues affecting women from a solidly Biblical perspective. I also want to fill another void that I’ve noticed in so many women’s ministries, which have a frustrating tendency to leave childless and single women out in the cold.
Above all, dear sister, I want to encourage YOU to put down the devotional, close out of the women’s ministry app, tune out the Christian social media influencers, and open up your Bible. These are perilous times we’re living in, rife with deception, and it’s only getting worse. Only a firm grounding in the word of God will guard us from deception and provide a proper context for understanding all this craziness that’s taken hold of the world.
Normal isn’t coming back. But Jesus is. Let’s get in the word, and let’s allow God to straighten out our priorities for us as we wait for the blessed hope of his appearing.