Tag Archives: trials

An Irish Blessing

Sometimes the simplest thing can touch your heart. Today reading this Irish blessing someone shared touched mine: May God give you…☘️ For every storm, a rainbow, For every tear, a smile, For every care, a promise, And a blessing in each trial. For every problem life sends, A faithful friend to share, For every sigh, […]

If Our Future Selves Could Talk to Us

As those who follow my daily blogs know, I have done something really different this week in my blogs. I’ve been sharing excerpts each day this week out of my book I wrote, “What Awesome Looks Like: How To Excel In Business & Life”. Given this is the last blog for this week I thought […]

Why Me?

I started reading through things I’d written in past years Aprils to try and remind myself of what my Aprils used to be like before this pandemic. Ironically, the first thing I flipped to was an article I’d written back in April of 2013 that was published in Forbes, and when you read what I’d […]

Be The Light (guest post by Dalton Anderson)

To mix things up a little for y’all I asked my son Dalton to write today’s blog post: I was talking to a good friend of mine today – I’ll just call him “Kurt” (to respect his privacy). Kurt was sharing some of the trials that have been occurring in his life recently. Summed up, […]

Jesus Will Make It Grow Back

When my son Dalton was a little boy, for some reason he could not grow bangs.  His hair would grow on top and on the sides and in the back, but it just wouldn’t grow in the front.  So for the first few years of his life I kept him in baseball caps to disguise […]

Trials Are Empowering

“Have you ever gone through something difficult and that experience allowed you to empathize with friends or even strangers who were facing a similar challenge? Or have you seen others experience sorrow from difficult circumstances and turn their pain into a moving, empowering cause? The trials we face allow us to develop compassion for others […]

The Growing Definition of Love

Today’s blog is brought to you by Ashley Anderson Hill, recent newlywed, and Amy Rees Anderson’s amazing daughter 🙂 After recently getting married back in May, I’ve learned that my definition of love changes and develops every single day.  When we were dating, love was when Alex would surprise me with flowers, or take me […]

If You Want To Be Happy, You Have To Be Happy On Purpose

“If you want to be happy, you have to be happy on purpose. When you wake up, you can’t just wait to see what kind of day you’ll have. You have to decide what kind of day you will have.” –Joel Osteen I’ve learned a lot about this concept of being happy on purpose over […]

Things Will Straighten Out When You Stand Steady And Face Them

Sundays have always been a special day of the week for me. It’s the one day I set aside work and outside activities and as much technology as I can and I use it as a day to refill my spiritual tank. I always attend church for three hours each Sunday (…yes, you heard me […]

Turning Weakness Into Strength

We were all born with our own unique challenges. Some physical, some mental, some circumstantial. Some all of the above.  But those challenges we were born with were never meant to hold us back, in fact, they were meant to help us become strong in the areas we would most need to be in order […]

Come What May, And Love It

Years ago someone gave me a little plate that reads, “Come what may, and love it.” It is a quote that came from a fantastic story told by a man named Joseph B Wirthlin in a talk titled the same in which he shared: “When I was young I loved playing sports, and I have […]

If your future self could speak to you…

I have been out in Washington DC for the last few days and I was reminded of how beautiful Virginia is.  I lived in Vienna, Virginia when I was a teenager in High School and during this visit I was able to drive past the house I used to live in while I was there […]

Don’t stop dreaming just because you had a nightmare

“Don’t stop dreaming just because you had a nightmare.” Some days I come across a quote like that one and instantly know it’s what I need to write about in that day’s blog, and for whatever reason when I saw that one I knew it had to share it… We all go through our own […]

“We have not yet the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us…”

Do you ever have times where you feel you have already been through so many hard trials in your life, and you’ve already overcome so many hard things, and worked to improve yourself in so many ways that surely you deserve to have a reprieve from life’s difficulties because you feel you’ve fought through hard […]

Stay True To Yourself

As a young adult who was trying to take on responsibilities that I felt totally inadequate to take on, I came to learn that in order for me to be able to feel truly confident I needed to stay totally focused on living my life with integrity, as doing so provided me the confidence to […]

10 Tips To Help Get You Through The Hard Times

None of us are immune from having hard times in our lives. We all struggle with one thing or another. Whether its illness, or loss of a loved one, or financial difficulty, or heartbreak, or job loss, or feelings of inadequacy…everyone struggles…  Over the past few weeks I have had several close friends dealing with […]

Between who you are and who you want to be

“Between who you are and who you want to be, is what you do.” I was in the kitchen peeling an Orange when I squeezed it a little too hard and juice ran down my hand onto the counter. And of course it did because it’s an Orange, so when we squeeze it, orange juice […]

LIKE A BOSS

“After a while I looked in the mirror and realized…wow after all those hurts, scars, and bruises, after all of those trials, I really made it through. I did it. I survived that which was supposed to kill me. So I straightened my crown…and walked away like a boss.” I don’t even have words that […]

What Makes A Winner?

“Years back when we lived in Boise, Idaho, a man … Bill Bowman, who was the wrestling coach at Boise State College, did his doctorate work, his dissertation, on what makes a winner. After interviewing over a thousand athletes and feeding all the information into the computer, he got his answer. Do you know what […]

We can feel JOY regardless of what is happening, or not happening, in our lives

“We can feel joy even while having a bad day, a bad week, or even a bad year!   …We can feel joy regardless of what is happening—or not happening—in our lives.” – Russell M. Nelson I love that quote because it reminds me that it is absolutely possible to feel joy whenever we choose to, […]

We are responsible for what is inside of us

The Analogy of the Orange If you squeeze an orange you will get orange juice. It doesn’t matter who squeezes it, where or when this is done, or what kind of implement is used. If you squeeze an orange, what comes out is orange juice. The same holds true for each of us. When the […]

You’re Better Than You Think You Are (Forbes Article)

We’ve all experienced times where we’ve had a false sense of security, but we’ve also experienced times were we’ve had a false sense of insecurity…in ourselves. Too often we are our own worst critics. When circumstances of life don’t go the way we hoped for, we often allow them to make us think less of […]

Things happen around us, but it’s what happens within us that matters most

My daughter-in-law came across a story I hadn’t heard before. When I first saw the title of the story I almost didn’t read it because I couldn’t imagine how a story with that title would be interesting, but I am really glad I decided to keep reading because the message it conveys is just plain […]

To Succeed in Life, You Need Two Things: Ignorance and Confidence

“To succeed in life, you need two things:  Ignorance and Confidence.” – Mark Twain When I read this quote I couldn’t help but laugh because so much of my life I lived by those two things – ignorance in that I always underestimated just how hard I would have to work to pull off the […]

Express and Live A Life of Gratitude

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” – William Arthur Ward Tonight I have been thinking a lot about Gratitude. My life has been a huge whirlwind the last several months. Some things I have experienced have been amazing and some things I have experienced have been […]

Life’s Tug of War

Life’s Tug Of War  Life can seem ungrateful and not always kind. Life can pull at your heartstrings and play with your mind. Life can be blissful and happy and free. Life can put beauty in the things that you see. Life can place challenges right at your feet. Life can make good of the […]

Maybe the Angels Will Quote From It for Eternity

As we go through life we have experiences that teach us, hurt us, bring us joy, help us grow, and shape us into the person we are. But if we don’t take the time to stop and write down those experiences and what we learned from them we are limiting their impact to only impact […]

Anything can happen in just one day

“We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.”   – Gayle Forman You know what I love about this quote? I love that it is the very basis for HOPE! When […]

Don’t Look Back, You’re Not Going That Way

I shared this poem once before but I had forgotten all about it until I came across it today and it just seemed to reflect what I was feeling today so I wanted to share it again: As you travel through life there are always those times when decisions just have to be made when […]

Does Life Ever Get Easier?

I remember as a kid thinking how I couldn’t wait to become and adult because life seemed so much easier for adults. Being a kid felt hard….I mean after all, Adults got to go out whenever they wanted to, they had money to buy whatever they wanted (at least that’s what you thought as a […]