I’ve been afraid of everything most of my life. I mean everything. I even know where it started.

I survived the April 10, 1979 Texas tornado outbreak as a child and my little heart struggled so much afterwards that fear and anxiety became a part of my personality and shaped my life no matter how hard I tried to recover from it. 

In 2016, my husband was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma cancer. Terminal cancer at that! The fear and anxiety I felt were incomprehensible. We were only 48! Our oldest daughter had just gotten married two weeks prior and was half-way through college. Our other daughter was 6 months away from graduating high school. Our lives were changing fast and we had amazing plans for our future! We had a lot of life to live!

Our family had been through some tough and scary times before, but cancer???? My biggest fears were coming true and I didn’t know how to deal. I was scared out of my mind.

 BUT GOD

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I don’t believe that life changes with the tick of the clock or the turn of the calendar, yet so many of us expect to wake up on January 1^st with the previous year (which was just yesterday) completely gone, only to find a whole new life just sitting there waiting on us.

Unfortunately, that just isn’t how life works.

I believe that if you want a different outcome, something must change; thus, my Live Out Loud 2022 Challenge.  

For someone who talks a lot, isn’t afraid to openly share my opinions, and is VERY LOUD, it would seem very curious that Live Out Loud would be my 2022 challenge.

If you had known me 20+ years ago, you would NOT have described me as “loud.”

I know that comes as a shock to those of you who live life with me on this side of those 20+ years, but it is true. I was quite, shy, and introverted.

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I feel like I’ve belly-crawled over broken glass for 100 years in just this one week; and I’ve lived through some very devastating weeks before.

The COVID-19 virus has turned the world upside down. It is wreaking havoc in the lives of millions globally. I know. I can’t turn on the TV or scroll through Facebook without seeing the devastation, and, I’ve scanned empty shelf after empty shelf in stores looking for food and essentials for family and friends.

Because of that and so much more, fear and faith are in the battle of a lifetime inside my heart.

I jump from one to the other much more quickly than a Christian should. I know that, yet, here I am, sitting on the sidelines watching heart wrenching, mind numbing, white knuckle fear duke it out with a God-fearing faith that can move mountains inside of me.

The battle rages. Sometimes fear wins. Sometimes faith wins.

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What if God saw me the way I see other people?

What if God treated me the way I treat other people?

What if God gave me only as much GRACE as I give other people?

She walks in the door of the church building every single time it’s open. She has been faithful to every church service, Sunday school class, Bible study, and anything else we have, to the best of her ability. I’m not sure she’s ever missed…as long as someone can pick her up and bring her. She doesn’t drive. She can’t.

When she walks in, most people scatter, and even though she’s been faithful, very few will stick around and welcome her with a smile and hug like we do every other person walking through the door.

But she’s not like every other person, you see, and that makes encounters with her difficult, at best.

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“But WHY do you love me?” I asked my husband of 27+ years this question for the thousandth time.

“Because I do!” His same lame answer frustrated me to no end!!!

My husband tells me he loves me repeatedly. And while I take great delight in this, from time to time I just absolutely cannot understand why, after all we’ve been through, with all my faults and failures, that this man would love me as much as he does.

One day during my Bible reading, I was thinking about how “…God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

God so loved…

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Today we wake up to a new day, a new year, a new decade.

2020 has begun.

Most often we see the New Year as a chance to put the past behind us and start over. This is the time that many of us make our New Year’s Resolutions to lose weight, stop smoking, save money, have less negativity, read the Bible, and pray more… or just try to be a much better person than we were last year.

You’ve heard it…you may have even said it, “New Year, New Me.”

Well, we can make all the resolutions, read all the self-help books, do all the diets, change the color of our hair, buy a new wardrobe, tweet all the positive quotes, remove all the negative people, and VOW to do the ”New Year, New Me” thing….But…

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“A Christmas Story” has become a favorite holiday movie for so many of us over the years. It may be because we all can identify with Ralphie and his obsession of convincing everyone that there is nothing more perfect for him for Christmas than a Red Ryder BB gun! (“You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!”)

We have spent countless hours as children, and maybe even as adults, dreaming of waking up on Christmas morning, snow falling from the sky, a warm fire in the fireplace, hot chocolate being poured into Christmas mugs, and that one perfect gift that Santa couldn’t resist bringing…even if you might shoot your eye out, kid.

I have had some of the most amazing Christmases a girl could ask for but nothing has compared to the gift I have been blessed with this year. This year, I received my proverbial “Red Ryder BB gun.”

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