Hello Letter: July 2026... Beginning Again

Hello Dear Ones,

Twenty-eight years ago this week, a dear friend and I made a decision to create a magazine that would change the entire course of my life. If you had told 24-year-old Janel everything that happened since and because, I can only imagine what her reaction might have been. I have no doubt that disbelief and horror would have been among them. As I watch a gentle summer rain fall outside my office window in the Pacific Northwest, I’m a long, long way from where I started in Boston.

Hello! I'm Janel Guevara, the editor-in-chief and publisher. It has been my custom to write you each time we publish a new issue, dear reader, about the things on my heart. This month, it’s fresh starts.

I co-founded The Christian Woman's Page with my dear friend, Elizabeth, in 1998. From the beginning, all we wanted to do was encourage women when life was heavy and God felt very far away. We decided to publish some articles and see what He did with it.

Both Liz and I were incredibly discouraged during that season of our lives. I was four years into a difficult marriage with two young sons. Liz was single with a string of less than acceptable suitors. Pieces of our lives felt like insanity and impossibility, and on some days, both. Faith was our comfort and constant irritation, because waiting on God is hard.

Still, we needed more of God in our life. We wanted to grow our faith and follow the path He had for us. We encouraged each other to love Him more and be the best versions of ourselves. Almost three decades later, I know those desires were easier to talk about and pray for than actually acquire.

We knew one thing: if we were struggling, other women were too. We decided to channel our frustrations into the encouragement we desperately needed for ourselves. It worked.

All these years later, I’m still not sure where everyone came from! We were seeing a quarter-million visitors each year, published around a hundred authors, and met the most surprising people at the perfect time.

I’ll never forget the day we had lunch with Roger Palms. He was the editor of Billy Graham’s Decision magazine for over twenty years. He sat down with Liz and I during the Philadelphia Christian Writer’s Conference in the early 2000s.

Mr. Palms wanted to know about our mission and vision. Publishing online was still brand new. We offered a few ideas. I also shared my frustration about not being a “real” magazine. He politely stopped me to say we are a real magazine. He encouraged us to keep going because what we were doing was the wave of the future. I listened. He was right. The rest is history.

For almost eleven years we encouraged women to live with passion and love for Jesus Christ. Then a series of events in my life imploded my friendship with Liz. Shortly after, I sustained a brain injury that left me unable to edit or write for almost a decade. The combination of the two benched publication but I never gave up on the dream. I knew in my heart that God hadn’t either. I just needed to wait for Him, probably to do a miracle, or twenty.

“Life is messy, God is bigger” isn’t just a cliché marketing slogan. We know it intimately, because we’ve lived it. We believe… I believe it. I hope you can believe it.

The messiness of life is why we need hope. We need to take God out of the box we stuffed Him in and let Him pour out His love and grace on us. Receive and be blessed. Because He can do so much with so little.

Welcome back. Here’s to twenty-eight more years of inspiring, renewing, and nurturing hope in women who have lost it! Because hope deferred genuinely makes a heart sick. (Proverbs 13:12)

Let’s Begin Again.

With love,
Janel Guevara
editor-in-chief