Category Archives: To Inspire

10 Lessons I’ve Learned (the hard way) in 10 Years of Marriage

10 years. Rich and I have been married 10 years! That’s the same amount of time it took Einstein to come up with E=mc2. That’s how long it took Julia Child to write Mastering the Art of French Cooking. That’s how long it took to create the Brooklyn Bridge. And that’s how long psychology professor John Hayes says it takes to become an expert at something. How fantastic. On this momentous occasion (and since I am now a marriage expert!), I thought I would take it upon myself  to bestow upon you 10 years worth of my hard-earned marital wisdom. Or rather,… Read More

The Very Best Gift to Give and to Receive

A dear friend of mine’s husband was recently diagnosed with brain cancer. The terminal kind. The life-changing your-time-together-now-has-a-deadline kind. I found myself desperately racking my brain for how to best help her. Clean her house? Watch her kids? Pray? Yes, yes and yes, but would be the MOST meaningful gift to offer? Also, when I see my husband going through a rough patch, I’ve often asked myself, “How can I be of best service to him here? What can I say? What can I do?” As fellow humans, we all at some point come upon hard times. Eventually, we all… Read More

Saving a Marriage From Divorce

Can a marriage be saved from the brink of divorce? What would that even look like? I’ve collected stories and advice for couples hoping to save their marriage from divorce. When someone signs up for my email list, they get a little welcome email which asks them to respond back stating something they are currently struggling with in their marriage. I get quite a few of these emails each week. At first I was surprised to find how many of these emails expressed marriages in dire straights- on the brink of divorce, dealing with things like infidelity, addiction, abuse, etc.… Read More

Spiritual Sunday: Am I a Success?

Happy Sunday everyone! This month for my spiritual Sunday post, I’m going to re-post something I wrote for lds.org that got published a week or so ago. When I submitted the article I called it, “Am I a Success?” In publishing it was changed to “How I Learned My Worth Isn’t Measured By Checklists” which is totally fine since admittedly my title-writing skills are mediocre at best. I’ll just say that this article deals with measuring success. I discuss measuring worth in this article (note: our worth is innate and not dependent on our measurement of it). That said, here’s… Read More

Spiritual Sunday: Why Do I Need Jesus?

Happy Easter dear readers. My thoughts today have been on the question: why do I need Jesus?  Not, why do YOU need Jesus, but why do I need Jesus.  This isn’t an essay to convince you to accept Christ (that essay would look very different), but rather to boil down what purpose He serves to me that I can’t find elsewhere. Which is a little difficult to test since I don’t have a control group of me without ever knowing Christ. So our starting point is the FAITH I’ve already gained in Him, which is may be a bit of a… Read More