I believe we are standing at the edge of an evolution in time.

Human history has experienced enormous shifts before. Water and electricity came into people's homes. Machines changed the way we worked. Women fought for rights and opportunities that previous generations could scarcely imagine. The internet connected the world in ways that once belonged only in science fiction.

Now artificial intelligence has entered our lives, and I believe it may change what it means to be human more profoundly than anything we have ever experienced before.

AI may help cure diseases, solve problems, and give ordinary people access to knowledge and opportunities they never had before. It may also eliminate jobs, spread deception, increase loneliness, and place extraordinary power into the hands of people who may not use it wisely. Will this evolution ultimately be good or bad?

I don't know.

I don't believe anyone truly knows.

Strangely, I feel peaceful about that uncertainty. It isn't because I don't value my life. My life has enormous meaning. I have Kevin, the love of my life. I have my children and grandchildren, my nieces and nephews. I get to write freely, which gives me tremendous purpose. I have people to love, work to create, and something meaningful to contribute.

I am not afraid of death. My faith in Jesus gives me peace about what comes afterward. If I am honest, I have sometimes been more afraid of life than death - not because I wanted life to end, but because living has required me to face uncertainty, loss, change, and parts of myself I spent years trying desperately not to feel.

THE YEARS I KEPT MYSELF NUMB

Looking back, I realize I wasn't hiding the alcohol from another person. I was hiding it from myself. I was hiding from the truth of what my life had become.

I would come home from work and take nine gulps of vodka. Not eight. Not ten. Nine.

I would become so intoxicated that I passed out. Then I would wake up and repeat the same nine gulps, only to pass out again.

It wasn't peaceful or restorative. My sleep was horrible, but horrible sleep had become familiar. It had been that way since I separated from my husband after twenty-seven years of marriage.

The end of that marriage wasn't simply the loss of a husband. It was the loss of the life I had known, the identity I had carried, and the future I thought was already written.

I will always love and feel connected to both of my former husbands. I was a teenager, trying to understand my first marriage before we had even figured out who we were. My second husband shared nearly three decades of my life. We raised children, built a home, created memories, and became part of each other's stories in ways that a divorce can never erase.

People who knew us also knew the difficult truth: I was the one who was no longer in love. Leaving did not mean that I stopped caring about him or that our years together had no value. It meant I finally admitted that I could no longer continue living a life that was safe and comfortable on the outside but no longer felt honest on the inside.

I left almost everything familiar to live my own life and speak my own truth. That may sound courageous now, but at the time, it was terrifying. I had spent most of my life living for other people - trying to be the wife, mother, daughter, businesswoman, and faithful church member everyone needed or expected me to be. When I finally chose a life of my own, I discovered that I didn't yet know how to live it.

Freedom did not immediately feel free.

I was trying to process the loss of my past life while learning how to live a new one. I didn't know how to do that, so I kept myself numb.

WHEN BELONGING DISAPPEARS

Years later, I began thinking about Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Maslow described human needs in levels. At the foundation are our physiological needs: food, water, sleep, and shelter. Next comes safety. Then love and belonging, followed by esteem. At the top is self-actualization - the desire to become who we are capable of becoming.

Life doesn't always move neatly from one level to the next. We can feel secure in one area and frightened in another. We may experience love while struggling financially or achieve professional success while feeling completely disconnected from ourselves and our loved ones.

For much of my life, I lived in the realm of love and belonging.

The LDS Church had provided community, structure, identity, and a place where I understood how I fit. When I left the religion in which I had been raised and eventually became a Christian, I didn't simply change where I attended church. I lost an entire sense of belonging.

Becoming a Christian was not a quick or easy transformation for me. It was arduous.

Religion had already created deep conflict within my family. My mother and father divorced over it, and the struggle continued until the day my father died. Eventually, nearly everyone in our family stepped away from the religion in which we were raised. Only one of my beautiful sons remained active.

I do not share this to criticize the people who remain active or to suggest that their faith is not sincere. I share it because leaving a religious community can involve real grief. You may gain anew understanding of God while simultaneously losing traditions, relationships, certainty, and the identity that once told you who you were and where you belonged.

Those losses are complicated. They can leave you wondering where you fit. I tried to quiet those questions with alcohol.

It worked - until it didn't.

Alcohol didn't heal my grief. It postponed it. It numbed the pain temporarily while quietly creating more pain for me to face later.

POOR, RICH, AND STILL BECOMING

I have been poor, and I have been rich.

I wasn't truly happy in either situation.

Money can provide security, comfort, choices, and wonderful experiences. I understand its importance. Kevin grew up in a family where worrying about money was passed from one generation to the next, and because I love him, his worry sometimes affects me.

But money does not drive my peace.

I have learned that a bank balance cannot tell me whether my life is meaningful. It cannot determine whether I am loved, whether I have loved others well, whether I have served anyone, or whether I am becoming the woman God created me to be.

Peace came when I stopped measuring my life primarily by what I owned and began measuring it by whom I loved, whom I served, what I created, and how closely I walked with God.

MY SELF-ACTUALIZATION ERA

For many years, I don't believe I reached the self-actualization level of Maslow's hierarchy. I was surviving. I was looking for safety, fighting to preserve relationships, rebuilding an identity, and trying to find somewhere to belong.

Now, in my sixties, I feel as though I am in the middle of the self-actualization era of my life. Self-actualization doesn't mean I have solved everything. It doesn't mean I never feel afraid, make mistakes, or become overwhelmed. It means I am finally becoming more fully myself.

I get to write.

I get to tell the truth.

I get to create something meaningful from experiences that once felt meaningless.

I can love my family without losing myself. I can serve other people without believing I must rescue everyone. I can speak about addiction, mental illness, divorce, faith, aging, sex abuse, and beginning again - not because I have mastered all of them, but because I have lived them. The world may be entering the age of artificial intelligence, but I am entering the age of becoming fully myself.

Perhaps those are both examples of evolution through time.

One is happening around me. The other is happening within me.

REDEMPTION IS NOT THE SAME AS NECESSITY

Sometimes I wonder whether my addiction was part of the road that led me to Jesus.

I don't believe God needed me to become addicted to alcohol so I could find Him. I don't believe the pain was required or that the addiction itself was a gift.

Addiction hurt me. It stole years of real sleep, clear thought, honest emotion, and genuine presence. It did not peacefully lead me to God.

It showed me how desperately I needed a peace that alcohol would never provide.

There is a difference between believing something terrible had to happen and believing God can redeem what happened. The addiction was not the gift.

What God helped me build from its ruins may be.

The suffering gave me compassion for people who are still hiding bottles, pills, secrets, shame, or pieces of themselves. It taught me that people are often trying to survive pain no one else can see. It gave me a desire to speak honestly so someone else might My story is not about being a victim. It is about becoming.

WHAT MAKES A LIFE MEANINGFUL?

We are living in uncertain times. Technology is advancing faster than our ability to understand its consequences. The future may bring extraordinary breakthroughs and profound disruptions. I cannot control all of that.

But I can decide how I will live during it.

I can love Kevin. I can love and be present with my children and grandchildren. I can try to stay close to my sister, nieces and nephews, who have always been a big part of my life. I can write books and tell the truth. I can serve people. I can keep learning. I can remain curious. I can choose faith over fear and honesty over numbness.

Most of all, I can trust that my value does not rise and fall with my income, accomplishments, age, appearance, or the approval of other people.

Maybe self-actualization is not finally arriving at the top of a pyramid.

Maybe it is reaching a point in life when you stop trying to become the person everyone expected you to be - and become the person God always wanted you to be.

I have lived through wildflowers.

I have lived through weeds.

I have lived with both, and grown during this last era of my life.

And perhaps self-actualization is finally understanding that every part of my story belongs - not because every part was good, but because God has helped me create something meaningful from all of it.



From my open diary.

Wildflowers and Weeds.

And Once Again, The Sun Rose

I believe there are some people you are meant to meet.

Yesterday, I had a hysterectomy. Eight months ago, precancerous cells were found in my cervix, but because I developed cervical stenosis—meaning the opening had narrowed—my doctor could no longer adequately examine the area. Now I wait for the pathology results.

Waiting is its own uncomfortable kind of helplessness.

While I was in the hospital, I was cared for by three lovely nurses. Both impressed me, but my night nurse—whom I will call Anna—was one of the most resilient women I have ever met.

We began with ordinary conversation, but we didn’t stay there long. There was something about her that made surface talk feel unnecessary. Maybe she sensed that I was genuinely interested. Maybe two strangers occasionally recognize something familiar in one another.

As I asked about her life, Anna trusted me with parts of her story that were anything but ordinary.

As a little girl, she was beaten by her father and sexually abused by her uncle. At fourteen, she gave birth to her first child after being raped. Even now, certain memories can return with such force that she can smell the person who violated her.

I listened to this woman as she cared for me with patience, competence and tenderness, and I wondered how someone who had been treated so cruelly could become a person who brought so much comfort to others.

Some people seem to “get” harder lives than others.

I use the word get deliberately, although I don’t believe trauma is a gift or that God deliberately hands a child abuse so she can become stronger. Some experiences are simply wrong. They should never happen, and we do not need to make them beautiful to acknowledge the strength of those who survive them.

But I have also seen how suffering—once faced and processed—can deepen a person. It can make us more compassionate, more understanding and less eager to judge lives we have never lived.

Trauma is especially devastating when it comes from the very people who were supposed to protect us. A child cannot understand why someone who claims to love her is also hurting her. She may blame herself, disconnect from what is happening or bury the memories deeply enough to keep functioning.

But what we push away does not always disappear.

It can show up later as anxiety, depression, addiction, anger, numbness, shame, difficulty trusting people or a desperate need to be loved. Sometimes a sound, smell, expression or touch can make the past feel as if it is happening all over again.

Most of Anna’s experiences were different from mine, but parts of her story touched places in me that I rarely expose outside my therapist’s office.

I have undergone EMDR therapy, which helped me work through some painful experiences. But much of my processing has happened while I was alone early in the morning, watching the sun rise over the mountains.

I would look at that mountain standing so firmly—so strong and unmoved—and watch the first gold light spread across an indigo sky. The sun kept rising, no matter what had happened the day before. In those moments, I felt the power and dependability of God.

I also began to understand that healing required more than admiring the sunrise. I had to become quiet enough to hear what I had spent years trying not to feel.

For a long time, I lived from my wounds. I interpreted the present through the pain of my past. I ruminated, reacted and sometimes expected the people around me to carry emotions they could not possibly resolve for me.

My pain was real, but so was the pain my behavior caused.

There were years when I pushed away my children, family and friends. Kevin—my boyfriend at the time—stayed beside me through seven years of severe alcohol addiction. He also experienced my depressive and manic episodes firsthand.

We broke up six times during our ten-year courtship. Our relationship was far from perfect, but somehow our love survived. I will always be grateful that he continued to see something in me when I had difficulty seeing it in myself.

Three weeks after Kevin and I married, my son decided to close our car dealership. I had worked six—and often seven—days a week helping him build it into a fifty-million-dollar enterprise. Within a year, it had crumbled.

At almost the same time, my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Eleven short weeks later, she died, surrounded by my sister, two of my nieces and me.

I had spent most of my adult life working. Suddenly, I was unemployed for the first time since I was nineteen. The business that had consumed me was gone. My mother was gone. The identity I had built around being productive and needed was gone.

And yet, strangely, my mother’s death became the beginning of my healing.

Not because losing her hurt any less, but because grief stripped away my ability to keep running. Marrying Kevin and no longer working gave me something I had never allowed myself before: time.

Time to sit with my pain.

Time to grieve my mother and the other losses I had never fully mourned.

Time to recognize what had happened to me—and also to take responsibility for what I did with it.

That distinction matters.

We are not responsible for the abuse, betrayal, illness or loss inflicted upon us. A child is never responsible for what an adult does to her. A rape survivor is never responsible for the violence committed against her. A grieving person does not choose the loss that breaks her heart.

But as adults, we eventually become responsible for seeking help and deciding whether our wounds will continue directing our lives.

That does not mean we can simply “get over it.” Processing trauma is rarely a straight path, and it does not happen through positive thinking alone. Sometimes it looks like sitting in a therapist’s office and finally saying the thing you have never spoken aloud. It may involve trauma-informed therapy, EMDR, a support group, addiction treatment, medication or spiritual guidance.

It can also look quieter than that.

It may mean noticing what triggers you instead of immediately reacting. Writing down what happened and what you needed but did not receive. Letting yourself cry without apologizing. Learning to set boundaries. Allowing safe people to love you. Caring for your body through sleep, movement and nourishing food. Praying honestly—even when the only prayer you can manage is, “God, please help me.”

Healing may require forgiving yourself long before you are ready to think about forgiving anyone else.

And if you are living with trauma, please do not believe you must excavate your deepest memories alone. For some people, forcing open the past without support can be overwhelming. A qualified, trauma-informed therapist can help you approach it at a pace your mind and body can tolerate.

Facing the past does not mean living there. It means turning toward it long enough to understand how it has shaped you—then choosing, little by little, what you want to carry forward.

There is a difference between acknowledging that you were victimized and building your identity around permanent powerlessness. One tells the truth about what happened. The other allows the person or circumstance that hurt you to keep determining who you become.

I do not want the worst things that happened to me to have the final word.

I do not believe Anna does either.

There she was, gently caring for a frightened woman waiting for biopsy results. Anna could not change what had been done to her. But the little girl who had once been denied safety had grown into a woman who offered safety to others.

That is not a neat ending to her story. Healing is rarely neat.

But it is evidence that our wounds can become part of us without becoming all of us.

We cannot always choose the circumstances life places before us. We can choose to ask for help. We can learn to recognize our patterns. We can make amends when our pain spills onto other people. We can stop confusing survival habits with our permanent identity. We can refuse to surrender the rest of our lives to the worst days of our past.

Yesterday, I met a remarkable nurse.

Today, I am resting, healing and waiting for answers.

And once again, the sun rose.

Serenity: From Fear to Grace

There is a mountain just beyond the patio door of my bedroom.

Every morning, before the rest of the world begins asking something of me, I quietly reach to light my 3-wick mahogany fragrance candle and wait patiently for the sun to rise.

At first, the mountain is almost invisible. Just a dark silhouette against the early morning sky. Then, almost imperceptibly, a thin ribbon of light begins tracing its edges. The darkness slowly gives way to shades of lavender, deep blue, and soft gold until, before I even realize it's happening, the mountain lights up.

I've come to call that moment "Lights Up."

It has become one of the most sacred parts of my day.

Not because the mountain changes. Because I do.

There was a time when mornings looked very different.

For years, I dreaded nighttime because I already knew what was waiting for me.

Sleep wouldn't come.

If it did, it never stayed for long.

Instead, my mind became a movie theater playing the same painful scenes over and over again.

Dreams that had quietly slipped away.

Mistakes I couldn't seem to forgive.

Questions that never seemed to have answers.

What could I have done differently?

Why wasn't I enough?

Would I ever feel like myself again? Night after night, those thoughts circled through my mind until I finally believed they were telling me the truth.

I wasn't simply tired.

I was exhausted from carrying the weight of my own thoughts.

I tried everything I knew.

Prescription sleep aids.

Over-the-counter remedies.

Meditation.

Books.

Hot baths.

Hypnosis.

Vodka.

I probably listened to enough Wayne Dyer podcasts to earn an honorary degree in positive thinking. I kept hoping that if I could just fill my mind with enough good thoughts, I could finally quiet the bad ones.

Sometimes it helped.

Sometimes it didn't.

Looking back now, I don't think insomnia was ever my greatest problem.

I think grief was.

Not just grief over the end of my marriage.

Grief over dreams that didn't unfold the way I imagined.

Grief over losing pieces of the life I thought I would always have.

Grief has a way of asking to be heard. When we don't make space for it during the day, it often introduces itself in the middle of the night.

For a long time, I tried to outrun it.

Sometimes I stayed busy.

Sometimes I distracted myself.

Sometimes I tried to numb it.

None of those things ever brought me serenity.

They only postponed the conversation my heart desperately needed to have.

Healing didn't begin because life suddenly became easier.

It began when I slowly stopped running.

A wonderful counselor helped me begin untangling years of hurt.

EMDR helped me process memories that had quietly held me captive.

Long conversations with Kevin reminded me I wasn't walking through life alone.

Music gave words to emotions I couldn't yet describe.

Travel opened my eyes to beauty I had forgotten how to notice.

And my faith became quieter, deeper, and far less concerned with having all the answers.

Through it all...there was that mountain.

Every morning.

Waiting.

Unchanged.

Patient.

Reminding me that light doesn't rush.

It arrives exactly when it's supposed to. Staring out that patio door has taught me something I don't want to forget.

Serenity isn't the absence of pain.

It isn't a life without disappointment, loss, or unanswered questions.

Serenity begins to grow when we stop fighting every feeling that asks to be acknowledged.

The mountain has never spoken a single word to me.

It hasn't needed to.

Its quiet rhythm has reminded me that healing doesn't usually happen all at once.

It comes the same way dawn comes.

Slowly.

Softly.

Almost unnoticed.

Until one morning you realize...

your life has begun to light up again.

Tomorrow morning, before the demands of the day find you, step outside if you can.

Notice the sky.

Listen to the birds.

Feel the morning air.

Don't go looking for answers.

Simply notice what has been there all along.

Sometimes serenity doesn't arrive because life changes.

Sometimes it arrives because we finally become still enough to hear the quiet voice that has been patiently waiting for us all along.


From my open diary to yours...if something here speaks to your own journey, you're always welcome to share.

Hope After Midnight

I started having severe insomnia and disturbing dreams during my divorce several years ago. It was also around the same time I started drinking... heavily.

It began innocently enough. An old friend from high school came back into my life. We connected on so many levels. He had bipolar disorder, was going through a divorce of his own, and understood much of what I was feeling. Looking back, we were a recipe for disaster.

The nights were the hardest.

I'd wake up in the middle of the night and spend hours replaying the past or worrying about what lay ahead. My mind refused to rest. Every mistake, every regret, every uncertainty seemed to demand my attention in the quiet hours.

At first, I tried to drown out the noise by listening to Wayne Dyer and other inspirational teachers. Their words gave me moments of peace, but eventually the thoughts would come rushing back.

Then I found something that worked even faster.

I started drinking in the middle of the night.

At first, it was the relief I craved. Then it became the buzz. More than anything, alcohol numbed the pain. Living in my own skin, with all the sadness from my past and the fear of what my future might hold--felt overwhelming.

Drinking became my escape.

Two years later, I met Kevin. For the first time in a long time, I could afford to return to therapy. We eventually married after ten years together, and just three weeks after our wedding, my son told me we were shutting down the dealership.

Ironically, after decades of carrying the constant weight of owning businesses, I suddenly found myself without that burden. Since I was twenty-three years old, I'd always been responsible for solving the next problem. When that responsibility disappeared, I was left alone with something I had spent years trying to avoid.

My own thoughts.

I've often joked that I was born with busy-mind syndrome. Imagine a room full of gymnasts, twisting, flipping, spinning, stumbling, and never stopping. That's what my mind felt like most days.

Over time, I realized something uncomfortable.

Many of the greatest struggles in my life didn't begin with my circumstances. They began with my thinking.

Our thoughts shape our choices.

Our choices shape our lives.

When I finally took an honest inventory of my life, I wasn't always proud of what I found. There were moments that filled me with regret. But there were also relationships I had repaired, lessons I had learned, and evidence that I had grown. Those discoveries mattered just as much.

Life's lessons never really end. The question is whether we're willing to see ourselves honestly enough to learn from them.

Serenity didn't arrive all at once.

It came slowly.

Piece by piece.

It came through accepting my past instead of trying to outrun it. Through extending grace to the younger version of myself who was simply doing the best she knew how to do. Through realizing that peace isn't the absence of painful memories...it's learning they no longer have to control you.

Aristotle once said,

Hope is a waking dream.

I believe peace begins the moment we stop trying to escape ourselves and start becoming friends with the person we've been all along.


From my open diary to yours...if something here speaks to your own journey, you're always welcome to share.

My Open Diary

It has often been said that before someone can overcome addiction, they have to hit rock bottom.

Maybe that's true.

I certainly did.

Rock bottom isn't just where everything falls apart. It's the place where you finally stop pretending. It's where the excuses lose their power, the masks come off, and you're left with a single question:

"What kind of life do I want from here?"

Recovery doesn't begin because the pain disappears. It begins when the desire for peace becomes greater than the desire to escape.

If you've found yourself at rock bottom, I want you to know something.. it doesn't have to be the end of your story. It can become the foundation for a new one. Healing is possible, but it rarely happens all at once. It happens one honest decision, one courageous conversation, one difficult day, and one small step at a time.

I've also learned that grief isn't something you ever truly finish. It simply changes shape over time. What once felt impossible to carry gradually becomes part of who you are. The weight doesn't always disappear, but somehow you grow stronger beneath it.

Today, much of my pain has softened. I live with more peace, greater awareness, and deeper contentment than I ever imagined possible. For that, I am profoundly grateful.

Gratitude has become one of the surest paths to peace that I've ever known.

I'm deeply thankful for my husband, who loved and supported me while I found my way back to myself. His patience and steadfastness gave me the space to heal when I often couldn't see the way forward.

But this isn't a story with a perfect ending.

I still carry regrets.

I still wrestle with parenting guilt.

There are decisions I wish I could make differently.

Those feelings may always be part of me, but they no longer define me.

Instead, I'm learning to hold my regrets with compassion instead of shame, to accept life exactly as it is instead of wishing it had been different, and to trust that growth is still possible no matter my age.

It's an open diary of an imperfect woman learning that beauty and brokenness often grow side by side.

That's really what Wildflowers and Weeds has always been about.

And if I've learned anything over these last eighteen years, it's this:

Life will always have its weeds.

But with enough grace, patience and hope...

wildflowers bloom there too.


From my Open Diary.
Wildflowers and Weeds.
Enjoy the Journey.

Signs From Heaven

Some moments feel ordinary while they are happening, only later revealing how sacred they truly were. I thought my baptism would simply be an outward expression of my faith. I did not expect it to be another sign from my mother.

My baptism was not an impulsive decision. It was something my heart had been moving toward for nearly two years.

My faith and beliefs are deeply personal, and the path that led me here has been anything but straightforward. It has been tumultuous at times, peculiar at others, but through it all I have finally found peace. Simply put, I have found peace in Jesus.

I have found peace in His resurrection and in the deep certainty that there is life beyond this one.

I do not consider myself religious in the traditional sense. I do not believe a relationship with God is confined to one church, denomination, or prescribed path. I struggle with dogma, self-righteousness, and the idea that any one person holds all the answers.

What I do believe is that every individual can develop a relationship with the divine if they sincerely seek it. And I believe THAT relationship can and will transform a life.

For nearly two years I wrestled with whether I should be baptized in Utah or Phoenix, simply because of all the religious tension that has been in our extended family for over 30 years. I worried about how it might affect my children, daughters-in-law, and grandsons. In the end, Phoenix felt peaceful and uncomplicated, simply an experience I wanted to keep between myself and the inward relationship I had gained with Christ.

The morning of my baptism felt like any other rushed Sunday morning. At the last minute, I asked my husband to grab my mother’s Bible from the nightstand and put it in my backpack.

I have several of my mother’s Bibles. For some reason, I wanted one with me during this trip to Phoenix while helping care for my husband's 94-year-old mother. I chose a small mahogany Bible with gold-embossed leaves on the cover. I had never read this particular Bible, but without question my mother had read it cover to cover, just as she did all of her Bibles.

My mother had a relationship with scripture that I deeply admired. The Bible grounded her. It guided her decisions and seemed to make her softer, humbler, and more peaceful with each passing year.

Because the Bible had become so important to her, the one thing I wanted after she died was the Bible she had been reading. One day, she opened it and wrote my name on the bookmark.

On January 31, 2024, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She calmly decided against treatment and passed away on April 3, only a little over two months later.

The final months we shared became priceless. We talked for hours and came to know each other more deeply. We tried to be honest about almost everything, though some painful truths remained untouched because certain wounds felt too deep and too late to fully reopen.

The final days of my mother’s life felt surreal, as though the veil between heaven and earth had grown thin. Days before she died, she called out for her sister Barbara, who had passed years earlier. As Mom drifted in and out of consciousness, I read Psalms aloud to her from her Bible. I opened to Psalm 100 and, after reading it, tucked the Bible beneath her arm where it remained until she passed away.

Later, when designing her headstone, a line from Psalm 100 felt perfect:

“His steadfast love endures forever.”

I believe that is the message my mother would want us to remember.

Before she died, I asked her several times to send me a sign from heaven if she could. I never remember her answering me directly, but I knew she heard me.

Because the Bible had become so important to her, the one thing I wanted after she died was the Bible she died with under her arm and I read Psalms 100. Before she died, she opened it and wrote my name on the bookmark that had all the books of the Old and New Testament on it. I used that bookmark for months and then lost it. I have been so sick about losing it and hoping one day I would find it.

The third sign came the day of my baptism.

That morning, Kevin grabbed Mom’s Bible and tossed it into my backpack before we left for church. Somehow we mixed up the baptism time and arrived thirty minutes early. Sitting quietly in the back seat, I pulled out Mom’s Bible to read and settle my mind before the service.

When I opened it, I saw the same type of bookmark she had written my name on years earlier.

And it was resting at Psalm 100.

I wept.

That bookmark resting at Psalm 100 felt like another whisper from my mother reminding me:

His Steadfast Love Endures Forever.