July 11, 2026
The Holy Undoing
The essay that opened this space, and the reason Jodi started writing on Saturday mornings at all.
Read itAbout Jodi
Her life looked whole from the outside. Underneath, she was coming undone.
Jodi Ashcraft is an author, speaker, and ministry leader from West Texas. Her story is for anyone who has been faithful to everything except the life God was actually offering.
Jodi Ashcraft
This Sacred
Unraveling
Unraveling
A Holy Undoing That Makes You Whole
Cover reveal coming soon
The book
Some things have to come apart before they can come alive.
This Sacred Unraveling is for the woman who has built a good life and lost herself inside it. Through ancient Hebrew words that open layers of meaning no English translation can carry, and through the stories of women who found God faithful in their most undone moments, this book walks you through the sacred process of loosening what fear, shame, and exhaustion have wound too tightly around your soul.
This is not a journey back to who you used to be. It is an introduction to someone truer. Someone freer. Someone who was always there underneath the knots, waiting.
Streamline Books · Fall 2026
More about the bookThe unraveling
From the outside, Jodi’s life looked whole. She was the one others counted on, the one who kept hard things running and never let it see her sweat. She also knew, in the quiet, that the passion underneath it all was dying. What she thought was faithfulness had slowly become performance, and the God she served felt further away than the work she did for Him.
The undoing that followed was not a crisis she survived. It was a mercy she received. Thread by thread, God loosened her grip on the person she had built and introduced her to the person He had made. This Sacred Unraveling is the story of that undoing, written for the woman who recognizes the ache before she can name it.
What binds us
Fear
It moves in quietly and starts giving directions. It rarely announces itself. It simply becomes the voice you obey, until you cannot remember agreeing to it.
Shame
Guilt says you did something wrong. Shame goes further and says something is wrong with you, then keeps you hidden so that nobody finds out.
Unbelief
You still hold the doctrine. What went quiet is the expectation that God is moving in the details of your actual life, this week, in this house.
“There is a version of you that nobody sees.”From Chapter 1: The Swirl
Twenty years of teaching
Somebody saw a teacher before she could see one.
Healing came first. Linda, Jodi’s mentor for more than thirty years, walked her through the long undoing one layer at a time, and what surfaced on the other side of it was hunger. Jodi joined a women’s Community Bible Study nervous and left it unable to get enough. She answered every question in the homework and filled her shelves with commentaries she had never owned before.
A year later she was leading a small group. Not long after that, the area director called and asked if she was sitting down. The leadership team had been praying for months, and Jodi’s name kept surfacing. They wanted her to become their teaching director.
She felt disqualified, which turned out to be part of the point. She said yes, served in that role for seven years, and has taught the Scriptures ever since. More than twenty years later, she still loves watching a person discover her own hunger for the Word of God.
The work
Jodi serves as chief of staff and women’s ministry director at Empower One, a Christian missions organization that walks alongside indigenous leaders in South Sudan, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her own unraveling led her into this work, and the leaders she serves alongside have taught her more about freedom than any book she has read. You can meet them here.
Home is a dirt road outside Lubbock.
Jodi lives in West Texas with her husband Jason, where the cotton fields run to the horizon and God keeps leaving feathers on the path. She walks that road before the sun is up with the Shema on her lips, speaking Psalm 23 aloud into the dark. Most of what she writes walks out of that hour.
She is a wife, a mother, and a JoJo.
The architecture of the book
Every chapter rests on a Hebrew word.
Jodi anchors every chapter in a word from the language underneath our English Bibles, where a single term can hold layer after layer that the translation flattens. The words are lenses. They give language to what has been happening in you that English alone is sometimes too flat to carry. Here are three of them. The rest wait inside the book.
tikvah
Hope, a cord
midbar
Wilderness, where God speaks
yatsar
The hands that formed you
This Sacred Unraveling on Substack
One essay, free, every Saturday morning.
The stories that did not fit in the book, the Hebrew words at greater depth, letters from the field, and the ordinary places where God keeps meeting Jodi, most of them within sight of a dirt road in West Texas.
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Coming Saturday, July 25
Faithful to the Wrong Thing
A kitchen-table reckoning with the kind of faithfulness that costs more than it gives back.
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Bios and press materials
Short bio
Jodi Ashcraft writes for women who love God and have lost themselves somewhere along the way. Her deepest passion is the Scriptures and the freedom that comes when people meet the love of God through His Word. She serves as chief of staff and women’s ministry director at Empower One, a Christian missions organization that walks alongside indigenous leaders in South Sudan, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Jodi lives in Lubbock, Texas, with her husband Jason. She is a wife, a mother, and a JoJo.
Long bio
Jodi Ashcraft is an author, speaker, and ministry leader whose work sits at the meeting point of spiritual formation and everyday faithfulness. Her debut book, This Sacred Unraveling: A Holy Undoing That Makes You Whole, traces her journey from capable, responsible exhaustion into a gentler, truer way of living faith, anchored by ancient Hebrew words and the witness of the global church.
As chief of staff and women’s ministry director at Empower One, Jodi partners with indigenous leaders in South Sudan, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She writes a free weekly essay at This Sacred Unraveling on Substack, published Saturday mornings. She and her husband Jason live in Lubbock, Texas. She is a wife, a mother, and a JoJo.
Press kit
Headshots, a speaking sheet, and cover files are available on request. Email Jodi and the materials will come straight to your inbox.