Whitney Johnson's Blog

Last weekend, something wonderful happened: friends came to visit.

But not just any friends. These were a special kind of friends—people we met when our adult lives were just beginning. We were newly married, still figuring out who we were, and dreaming about what life would be like.

Roger and I met Jeff and Paula Chipman in New York City when Roger was getting his Ph.D. at Columbia, and Jeff was starting medical school there. We spent countless hours together in our tiny one-bedroom apar...

“Never suppress a generous thought.” – Camilla Kimball

It’s been a hard week. Painful, overwhelming, terrifying — hard.

After church on Sunday, I learned that someone had driven a truck into a chapel in Michigan, shot four people to death and wounded eight others, then burned the chapel down. People who knew the killer said he hated people of my faith — The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That was hard to sit with.

The night before, the president of our church, Russell M. Nel...

When’s the last time you felt jet lag – really felt it, your bones and your mind refusing to believe that it’s mid-morning and not the dead of night? Your muscles are screaming out – why are we not in bed? Or why are we in bed? 

Last month, I was in Australia for work, a whopping 14-hour time difference from my home in Virginia on the East Coast. And all that travel indeed affected my body’s natural clock. At 6pm in Australia, I was feeling the call of bedtime, then shooting wide awake at...

My husband and I just returned from a trip to Tahiti, an island about halfway between Australia and South America. It was a fundraising trip for Southern Virginia University, where my husband is a professor. We’re all in on supporting SVU – so we sailed out on a marvelous eight-day cruise, joined by the amazing President Bonnie Cordon and a truly splendid group of people.

Out on the water, I made a conscious choice to record all the good things about this trip. I wrote them down. It’s som...

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Last week, over the July 4th weekend, our family went to see the new movie “F1.” It was a delightful film, with all the feel-good elements of a redemption arc, and yes – lots of very, very fast cars.

But my husband and daughter almost went by themselves. It was my husband’s birthday on Tuesday, and he said, “Let’s go see this movie.” Yes, of course, let’s go… then Thursday morning comes and I find myself feeling anxious. I have a lot of work to do — writing and editing the book, and getti...

Two weeks ago, our son, David, began his six-week trip in Asia with several of his friends. He’d been working full time for over two years, and had been planning this for even longer. This was his vacation of a lifetime before medical school.

Two days into it, he and a buddy were in Vietnam riding motorcycles, and David was injured. A scraped knee and forearm, and an injured wrist; he was hoping it was only a sprain. However, after getting it x-rayed, it was clear that he needed surgery r...

April’s come and gone, we’re in the thick of May, and I’ll bet there are a lot of folks who don’t know we just missed National Poetry Month. It’s easy to get caught up in the change from chilly spring to the first tastes of summer, but doesn’t poetry have more in common with the changing of the seasons than we think? Doesn’t it provoke a change, a transformation inside of us?

I’m reminded of this Robert Louis Stevenson poem:

Here I wander in April
Cold, grey-headed; and still to my
Heart,...

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It’s tough to nail down a single origin story for April Fool’s Day – some point to a line in The Canterbury Tales, others pore through ancient manuscripts for references to a day of trickery. Either way, it’s fascinating how this holiday has lasted for hundreds of years. Somehow, somewhere, folks created a day dedicated to making ourselves and each other laugh, because exercising that part of our humanity was important to them.

We look for reasons to laugh all the time – we have an entire...