A Life of faith strength and the Search for Hidden Treasure
A Life Shaped by Faith
Janice Perrin Johnson was born in 1937 in Osage, Iowa, and was raised in Albert Lea. Minnesota. Nearly eighty-nine years of life have given her many reasons to understand both hardship and hope. Through it all, one of the strongest threads in her life has been faith: faith learned in childhood, tested by loss and difficulty, deepened through years of serious study of the Bible.
As a young woman, Janice attended a Missouri Synod Lutheran church and was confirmed there. She married in 1957 and became the mother of six children. Family life brought both joy and deep sorrow. One child died before birth and another died suddenly at only eleven months of age. Janice went on to raise her four surviving children to adulthood.
Her marriage also carried a difficult burden. She recognized early that her husband was an alcoholic. Her life was not easy but her faith did not waver. Rather than allowing hardship to separate her from God, she continued to turn toward Scripture, prayer and a life in the church. In time she attended and joined an ALC Lutheran congregation and eventually went to a Covenant Church after moving to Winnebago, Minnesota continuing a lifelong Christian journey that had begun in her youth.
Learning to Search the Scriptures
Janice was taught to study the Bible inductively. For her reading Scripture was not simply a matter of moving through the words on a page. She learned to ask questions: What? Who? When? Where? How? And most importantly, Why? Those questions encouraged her to look closely at the setting, people, events and meaning of a passage rather than settling for surface reading.
Her study extended beyond the biblical text itself. She used tools such as Bible dictionaries, concordances, maps, timelines and books about Jewish history, culture and customs. These resources helped her place Scripture in its historical and cultural setting and allowed her to uncover what she came to think of as the many treasures contained in God’s Word.
That careful method of study became more than an intellectual exercise. Janice connected Scripture with ordinary life, personal struggle, relationships, grief, forgiveness, prayer and hope. Many of the messages she later wrote drew directly from her own experiences and from the ways she had seen biblical truth speak into real circumstances.
From Bible Study To Radio Ministry
In 2000, Janice began a radio ministry for her church. The ministry continued for roughly ten years. Each message required preparation, study, reflection and writing and those written messages preserved a decade of her teaching and spiritual insight.
The radio ministry gave Janice a way to share her Bible study with people beyond a single conversation or Bible class. Her messages combined Scripture with questions she had learned to ask and with the practical wisdom of a woman whose faith had been tested over many years. The result was a body of devotional teaching rooted both in the Bible and lived experiences.
The Hidden Treasure Collection
Years later, Janice’s daughter, Robin began transcribing those handwritten radio messages so they could be preserved in a series of books. What had first been prepared for radio listeners could now be gathered, organized and shared with family members and future readers in a lasting form.
The collection covers a wide range of subjects that touch daily Christian life including faith, prayer, forgiveness, grace and hope. Together, the writings reflect Janice’s lifelong habit of looking beneath the surface of Scripture and asking what God's Word means for the way people actually live.
These readings are therefore more than a record of an old radio ministry. They are a record of Janice’s faith journey: the questions she asked, the truths she discovered, the hardships through which she continued to believe and the lessons she wanted to pass on.
"These books are a true blessing. They have helped me grow in my faith and understand God's word in a whole new light."
A thankful reader from Minneapolis, Minnesota