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Leaving Home—Finding Home: My Journey from Shame to Sonship through Journaling is the first book of its kind, showing how God Himself brought inner healing by speaking into one woman’s life. In it, author Jessie Mejias shares how God counsels and heals her through journaling. The central theme of Leaving Home—Finding Home is healing through intimacy with God—an intimacy that develops as she writes out her conversations with Him. The author devotes several chapters to her background and childhood, but the heart of the book is Jessie’s actual journal. About her decision to share her journal verbatim, she says: "When the Lord first instructed me to write this book, my natural instinct was to transform the ramblings of my mind and heart into a nice, neat package that the reader could easily follow. However, as I prayed about His instructions, I felt very strongly that He wanted me to demonstrate how I received my healing through journaling itself." Jessie Mejias grew up in what she would have described as an “Ozzie and Harriet” kind of home—loving parents, close siblings, good schools, and a religion that dictated solid values. What she did not know was that beneath the surface lay a shaky foundation of dysfunctional family rules and generational patterns. As a young adult, Jessie watched her neat world crumble when two of her siblings succumbed to mental illness while the family stood by helplessly. Subsequently, her family scattered and she unwittingly married an abusive, alcoholic man. Her disastrous marriage precipitated her decision to give her life to Christ. But despite her newfound faith, at age 27 she found herself a single mother of two young sons. In the ensuing years, Jessie sought and found healing and growth through studying the Bible and receiving Christian counseling. Miraculously, she and her husband were remarried after seven years of separation and divorce. She became involved in teaching and leading Bible studies within her local church and was confident that she was already experiencing the abundant life that God promised to His children. However, when she decided to return to school to earn a degree in Christian counseling, God began to show her that she was still suffering from the traumas of her childhood, and that shame was an integral part of her life that He wanted to remove. This revelation launched her into an unprecedented time of accelerated healing that was to be the inspiration for this book. Leaving Home—Finding Home chronicles that journey from shame to sonship through one-on-one dialogue with God. Shame is a universal problem that is sometimes hard to pinpoint. We describe ourselves as embarrassed, shy, fearful, or hesitant, but we never actually understand that the source of these emotions is shame. Shame is a terrible feeling that we are a mistake; that somehow we were never supposed to exist. The author found that this feeling of shame was so deeply hidden in her heart that it was not until God began to unwrap her from her emotional chains that she could see that this was the true source of her poor self image. Jessie vividly describes her feelings of shame: "It was as if all my life I had been living in a slum that I would leave from time to time to go the nice clean neighborhood down the block—at first for short times, then for longer and longer periods of time—but inevitably I would end up at some point back in this dump. The sight of it would make me sick, but I did not know how to leave it completely behind." God Himself initiated this unique approach to inner healing as He took Jessie back to her childhood home and school and walked with her through each traumatic event of her young life, reaching deep into her heart to show her what was hidden there.