Livin' What You're Given

As I end my podcast for the foreseeable future, I reflect with great gratitude upon what I have learned, the people I have met, the support I have enjoyed and the incredible opportunity to tell and share stories from people all over this world. I want to end this season, episode and podcast as I started it, by stepping out of the boat of sameness and into the sea of adventure. Although I would hav...

 I can not imagine a better guest to end this fourth season of Livin' What You're Given Podcast, than Robin Freed. Robin is also my last interview as I end the podcast for the foreseeable future. The reason Robin is such a great fit for this role is because she embodies all the values and encouraging messages I've tried to highlight in this show for four seasons. Ms. Freed is a musi...

My guest today holds a special place in my heart. Her name is Suzanne Chimera and she is Co-Founder of ​Hair We Share, an organization that takes hair donations and make wigs for people who are losing their hair due to a variety of reasons. I met Suzanne in January of 2024 when I contacted her to take a donation of my sister, Mary's, hair after she passed away from cancer. Mary had long brown...

My guest today, Beatrice Bruno, the Drill Sergeant of Life, joins me as we explore the idea of gratitude in all things. She talks about being thankful for each day and the opportunities she has been given by God, including her very life. As the author of books on various topics, including grief, Beatrice shares helpful hints on how to navigate life's ups and downs through being grateful at al...

This month, November, I am bringing on two guests who remind us of the power of gratitude even in these difficult, divided and tumultuous times. The gentleman who is my first guest in November, Stephen Ray Watts, shares with me and my audience today about how his life, ministry and music have been influenced by having a grateful heart. If you recognize the name, that is because this is one of the...

 My guest today is Michelle Rohlf, and she is granting me another interview to follow up her interview in May of 2023. In our last session, Michelle and I discussed the pain of having a child estrange themselves from us. She described her journey through her healing process and writing a book that chronicled that process. Today, Michelle describes how her work has helped her and others. She says t...

Karen DeArmond Gardner is a survivor of thirty years in a marriage where she was verbally, emotionally and at times physically abused. She talks about how her own work of writing a book, speaking to others and helping to educate communities around the issue of domestic abuse, has been helpful for her own growth and healing. She points out that churches are not always equipped to deal with this iss...

Today, my guest, author and speaker Lori Ann Wood, discusses where her story of a divine detour has taken her and how sharing her story has helped other people. After discovering she had end-stage heart failure, she began to ask the questions of God that we are trained not to ask. This is a follow up to our original interview that took place on March 8, 2023 called, "Involuntary Tide Turning....

In a rare presentation of a solo episode, I talk about my philosophy that we can indeed learn to love, speak and walk with dignity, even in a world where winning at all costs is everything. Pulling from real-life experience, I share a story from my 2018 publication "Jesus in Shorts: Twenty-five Short Stories of Life-Changing Jesus Moments." The lead story in that collection of short stor...

Please note:  This is a rebroadcast of an episode that I ran in 2023. Because we are still in the political chaos, or perhaps worse, I feel it is important for us to remember that we can have a voice, we can turn this tide and we can bring unity to our beautiful U.S.A. by turning from the chaos to the reasonable and unifying voices.   I was excited to sit down with former senator and house represe...

  Note:  This is a rebroadcast of the episode with Kevin Kuns in July of 2023. Because we seem to be in the same or worse political situation than when this was first recorded, I felt it worth a revisit of the wisdom, strength and hope in the words of people like Kevin Kuns. Drawing from personal experiences of living in different countries, having a diverse employment background, running successf...

In March in 2015, Maya Haynes' daughter Caitlyn completed suicide because of bullying. After her death, Cait's peers came forward and told Maya and her husband that they had witnessed the bullying and did not know what to do. Many had reported the bullying incidents, but there was no action taken. Instead of becoming angry, bitter, and vengeful, Maya turned grief, pain, and loss into a d...

In 1989, Jerry Schemmel survived the airplane crash of United Airlines Flight 232 that landed in a field in Sioux City, Iowa. In 1996, he wrote a book called "Chosen to Live" detailing not only the disastrous incident itself, but also his journey of healing afterward. Jerry does not allow this incident to define him, but he thinks about it as a way to share his personal testimony of find...

  Gwendolyn Burton is an author, teacher, speaker, and certified grief educator. But mostly she is an authentic voice for those who are experiencing grief and loss, as she has suffered one of the toughest losses known to humans - the loss of a child.  Through her work and in this interview, she discusses how she began to heal and move forward from her loss. She speaks about finding help by hearing...

We are starting our fourth season of "Livin' What You're Given". The rest of 2024, I want to explore the effects of storytelling. In this episode I talk about why our stories matter.  They have been given to us so we can share them to encourage other as they walk their stories as well as help others along the way in their own journeys. I open this season by explaining why this...

  Today in this solo podcast episode, the last one of 2023 and the last one for a few months, I want to talk about letting go of idolizing the past. We cannot move forward, if we insist on focusing on the past. The tendency to retro reach (trying to recapture and relive the past at the expense of the now and the future) is a prescription for unhappiness.   Through a personal, and humorous story, I...

Today, I am joined by Ashley Pyles, a Christian Transformational Faith Coach who has spent decades helping women not only strengthen their faith, but also put it into action. There are many reasons why we can stunt our spiritual growth, and one of those is hanging onto the past. In our conversation on Livin' What You're Given, Ashley offers some tools to help us resist this retro-reach p...

  In this week's episode, which is a solo, I want to share the word "burdens" as an acronym. I think this is particularly important as the holidays are here and we can feel overwhelmed by the expectations we place on ourselves and the expectations we try to meet that are placed upon us by others. The point of this is to demonstrate that it is our choice to allow our own (sometimes u...

Whoa, the holidays are here already and the pressures can be real. In today's episode, my guest Sue Moore Donaldson, and I explore how to drop some of the baggage around what we expect of ourselves and others when it comes to holiday festivities. As an author, podcaster and public speaker, Sue uses her own experiences to help us relax around our imperfections. That can be, and often is, the f...

Please note:  This is a re-broadcast of an earlier episode that was taped and aired in 2021. The subject is domestic abuse, and because it is October (National Domestic Violence Awareness Month), I wanted to air this again. The topic follows my September episodes on bullying. Domestic abuse is in fact one of the most commonly seen areas of bullying because it relies upon the unequal power structur...

Please note:  This is a re-broadcast of an earlier episode that was taped and aired in 2021. The subject is domestic abuse, and because it is October (National Domestic Violence Awareness Month), I wanted to air this again. The topic follows my September episodes on bullying. Domestic abuse is in fact one of the most commonly seen areas of bullying because it relies upon the unequal power structur...

"Before you hate, think of Cait." This is the statement that began P.E.E.R. Kindness, an organization started by our guest, Maya Haynes, after her teenage daughter Cait completed suicide in 2015. In the second part of this two-part series on turning the tide on bullying, my guest Maya Haynes and I discuss some of the tools her organization PEER Kindness utilizes to help identify this beh...

"Before you hate, think of Cait." This is the statement that began P.E.E.R. Kindness, an organization started by our guest, Maya Haynes, after her teenage daughter Cait completed suicide in 2015. I am joined today by Maya Haynes, the mother of a young woman who in her teens completed suicide as a result of being bullied. Sharing from her own experiences during and since that time, she te...

Today, I’m joined by Annie Perdue-Olson, a certified coach with a Masters of Arts in Human Resources and Change Leadership.  Annie has fifteen years in her current coaching work of helping leaders and teams be healthier in their relationships and workplace processes. In this episode Annie stresses the impact of three particular issues in leadership roles. Those are feeling overwhelmed, dealing wit...

Do you ever feel you are in a rut? Today, my friend and fellow Christian podcaster, Jerry Dugan, joins me as we discuss the definition of being in a rut. As host of the podcast, "Beyond the Rut" Jerry helps us identify when we are in a rut and how to get out, and beyond it. He explains that being in a rut is doing the same activities day-after-day, week-after-week, and feeling unproducti...