During Jonna-Lynn's professional career in international health she resided for extended periods in Lisbon, Portugal, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Prague in the Czech Republic and Manila, The Philippines. Her writing focused exclusively on professional needs for overseas program development and the use of ethnographic methods to pursue missiology (the study of missionaries) in the analysis of missionary publications in Mozambique during the first half of the twentieth century.
Once she retired, she pursued new avenues to fulfill a childhood dream of writing. She lives with her husband and three miniature dachhunds in northern New Mexico.