The Jones Family Chronicles

A moving truck turns up on the street on a Saturday in October, two doors down from the Thompsons, and nobody comes to help the family unload it. Mom notices that first. Addison notices the lamp with no shade. Sister Beverly is at the door inside the hour with a dish, because that is who she is, and gets no further than the step. Then all five Jones children walk over with a plate of cookies and m...

It is a short engagement and a small wedding, and there is a great deal to do. Allison has the binder open to somebody else's day, and this time she asks before she decides. Andy has been without a red ball since the afternoon he carried his across the street, and will not take a new one. The night before, Ava Grace asks the question nobody else thought to ask — what happens if Brother Thomps...

After a year of being told to wait, Brother Thompson asks Dad and Pastor Garrett one more time — and this time the answer is yes. Allison Jones, eleven years old and the finest organizer in the congregation, hears the news and does what Allison does: she gets a binder. Tabs. A timeline. A rain plan. It is genuinely beautiful work, and Brother Thompson, who is newer in the Lord and gentle to a faul...

Sister Johnson puts a bare paper tree on the classroom wall, and every verse a child learns by heart earns a leaf. Ana is fast — gloriously, effortlessly fast — and by the third week she has twenty-six leaves and a number she cannot stop saying out loud. Ava Grace picks one verse. A long one, with a word in it she does not understand, and she works on it for three weeks without earning a single le...

Addison Jones knows that the detail is where the meaning lives. On art day in Sister Suarez's classroom she builds a paper street so lovely the whole class gathers to look at it — gold-paper windows, a striped awning, a tiny dog on the corner. Three tables over, a boy named Dexter is working just as hard on a street of his own. Then a jar of muddy rinse water goes over, and in the space of on...

Every Sunday the Pastor's family sits in the pew right in front of the Joneses — Pastor Garrett, Sister Garrett, and their littlest, Houston, who is just about Andy's age and just about Andy's favorite person in the world. The two of them have struck up the wobbly, joyful friendship of two two-year-olds. Which is exactly why it is such a catastrophe when they get into it over Andy&a...

It is an ordinary week at the Jones house, which is to say it is a full one — and this time the story belongs to the one who holds it all together. The dishwasher quits on a Monday. The to-do list grows back overnight like grass. And Mom, moving through it the way she always does, catches herself living a little way out ahead of her own life: once this is finished, then I’ll rest; once things sett...

Summer is over, and the Jones children head into a new school year at Glendale Christian Academy — where, this year, the halls are full of family. Their aunts, aunt Jessica and aunt Tanya, are teachers; their grown cousins, the twins Alexis and Alyssa, are classroom aides for the very first time. So when the first-day jitters give way to a building stacked with people who love them, the Joneses ar...

Of all the Jones children, Ava Grace speaks the least — and somehow says the most. For six years her family has treasured the way she can put the truest thing into the fewest words, because those words always came wrapped in love. But this week the love slips off, and the true things start coming out sharp. When Addison steps out one Sunday morning in an outfit she took a brave chance on, Ava Grac...

Sister Beverly gives Ana a paper envelope of sunflower seeds, and Ana plants them along the fence with plans for blooms taller than Dad. Then she discovers there is nothing to do but wait — and waiting has never been Ana’s strong suit. That same week, Brother Thompson goes to Dad and to the Pastor with the biggest question of his life: he wants to ask Sister Beverly to marry him. The counsel he re...

Addison has to say her memory verse in front of the whole church on Sunday evening, and she has spent two weeks planning exactly what she will wear. The verse is not the problem. Being looked at is. Meanwhile, after Sunday school tells the story of David and the giant, two-year-old Andy falls asleep with his red ball in his fist — and dreams himself down into the valley of Elah, where the armor is...

The welcome the Jones girls gave a lonely camper up in the pines has borne fruit: Abigale comes to church. She keeps coming back, too, drawn by something she cannot yet name — and one Sunday she asks the question that changes everything: how does a person come to Jesus? Allison and Addison, who are only children themselves, discover that they know more than they thought. With Allison’s careful ord...

School is out, and Dad, Allison, and Ana head up into the pines for Junior Camp — a week of cabins and campfires, of cold mornings and the smell of pancakes on the wind. Allison arrives with a binder and a plan, ready to run the tidiest cabin at camp. But when a quiet new girl named Abigale appears in the doorway of Cabin Seven — knowing no one, unsure of every song and every routine — Allison dis...

It is summer, and Ana — the fastest, loudest, most perpetually-in-motion of the Jones children — cannot imagine a day worth slowing down for. But one ordinary evening, worn out at last, she falls asleep and opens her eyes somewhere she has never been: a small wooden boat on a wide sea, with weather-beaten fishermen at the oars and a Man asleep in the stern. When a sudden storm turns the water to m...

For the first time, the story turns to Dad. As the church prepares for a Homecoming Sunday—a visiting preacher, a packed service, and dinner on the grounds—it is Dad, the Pastor’s Assistant, who quietly makes every piece of it happen: the squared chairs, the filled water glass, the corner fan he stayed late to fix. When the day arrives and the thanks land everywhere except on him, it is Addison—th...

On a long summer evening, the Jones family welcomes Brother Thompson and Sister Beverly into their home for the first time as a courting couple. For Ana—who lives at full speed and loves nothing more than the good part—the slow, steady pace of their courtship feels like a wedding that simply will not hurry up. As the evening settles onto the front porch, with lemonade and lightning bugs and Pickle...

On Monday morning, Papa had emergency eye surgery. By Thursday, the doctors say he is doing well — but the word emergency has been sitting in the Jones household all week like a guest nobody invited. The older children are quiet in their own ways, careful with their words and their footsteps, carrying a worry they don’t quite have language for yet. And then Papa comes to stay for a few days while...

School is out, the days are long, and Mom has enrolled all four sisters in a summer art workshop at the community center — three mornings a week, brushes and color and something to do with the hours. It is a good plan right up until the Wednesday the instructor holds up Ava Grace’s painting as the example for the whole class. Not Allison’s careful, methodical piece. Not Addison’s composed and inte...

Allison Jones is eleven years old, which means she is old enough to know exactly where she doesn’t belong and not quite old enough to know where she does. When the church Ladies’ Tea puts her squarely between the children’s craft table and the women’s conversation circle with nowhere comfortable in the middle, she carries that quiet ache home without quite having words for it. What the Jones famil...

Addison Jones has an eye for beauty, a mind for detail, and a heart that takes things seriously — which may be exactly why, on the night after Sunday school taught the story of Queen Esther, she dreams herself right into the palace. In the dream, the whole family is there: a Mordecai who sounds remarkably like Dad, a handmaiden who moves exactly like Ana, and a small child who wanders through the...

The Jones household runs because Rebecca runs it — quietly, faithfully, with warm meals and folded laundry and a steady hand on everything that needs one. But this week, Rebecca is carrying something she hasn’t told anyone about, and the children who miss nothing begin to notice that Mom isn’t quite herself. What unfolds is something the Jones family hasn’t fully seen before — the woman at the cen...

Ava Grace Jones has been waiting all week for one thing — the butterfly painting at school. She has the colors already picked out in her mind. But when Tuesday arrives and the plan falls apart, Ava Grace carries something home that she doesn’t quite have words for yet. It isn’t loud, the way Ana’s feelings are loud. It’s quiet and heavy, the way Ava Grace’s feelings tend to be. When the family gat...

Ana Jones has a gift for motion — she thinks fast, talks fast, and moves faster than almost any instruction can keep up with. So when Mom gives her one simple direction on a Saturday morning and Ana finds a reason to bend it, what follows isn’t a disaster. It’s something smaller and truer: a little brother left crying, a conscience that won’t quiet down, and a lesson from 1 Samuel that reframes ev...

A repeat of one of the most popular episodes. New episodes beginning again next week as we are in Kenya this week. Announcing the JFC picture book series

Addison has always had an eye for detail — the way a bow sits, the way a collar folds, the way a uniform is pressed or isn’t. But when she begins noticing that a classmate arrives every day with deep wrinkles in his shirt and leaves lunch without eating, something stirs in her that goes beyond fashion.  It’s the kind of noticing that asks something of you. In this episode, the Jones family explore...