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Your Authentic Life : Learning To Be Impeccable With My Word
Sometimes words spin around in my head and even spill out of my mouth before others have finished speaking. When I do that, I’m barely listening to them. It feels almost like I’m in a competition to get my thoughts out quickly...
Mindful Self-Care: When To Drop a Friendship
Award-winning journalist John Leland spent a year visiting with six culturally diverse seniors, all eighty-five and older. In his book Happiness Is A Choice You Make, he weaves together the stories and lessons he learned from them...
Personal Transformation: A Horrible Hidden Form of Racism…and I’m Guilty of It
The Caucasus Mountains in Georgia Racism, the belief that one race is superior to another, is a big and weighty topic. I don’t begin to think that I can do it justice in one short blog. But I want to address just one form of racism I...
Your Authentic Life: Finding the Truth can be a Slippery Slope…How To Write Truthfully About Those We Love
My parents in 1951 In 1951, my parents Dr. John and Clara Schmidt founded and ran a leprosy station in Paraguay, South America. After 20 years of devoted service to ease the suffering of cast out untouchables, they were asked...
Your Authentic Life: Knowing about Heaven and Hell?
As a Christian, I grew up with the certain knowledge that salvation from hell could only come through believing in Jesus Christ as my savior. This is nothing unusual. Most of the world’s religions have some concept of heaven...
Your Authentic Life: Supra: A Georgian Feast of Love
Our vehicle bounced over and around deep potholes in the rutted one-lane dirt road, deep into the countryside of the Republic of Georgia. There were 20 of us. Pilgrims, we called ourselves, traveling through Georgia for two...
Your Authentic Self: Leaving My Partner: Cowardice or Courage?
When I made the decision nearly 40 years ago to leave my first husband and father of my two children, many well meaning friends and family members lectured me, saying I needed to have the guts to stay in the relationship and...
Personal Transformation: I Was Pregnant… But It Was Not My Child
Mother’s Day always brings up complicated memories of my first taste of motherhood nearly 50 years ago, in November of 1969: Something seemed terribly wrong. My lower abdomen was swollen and sore. I could no longer keep food...
Personal Transformation: Caring about Another’s Pain without Condescension
Have you ever resented the way someone demonstrated their caring and love for you? Even though you knew they meant well? I have. And I’d like to learn how to not do this to people I care about. While researching my parents’ lives for a...
Personal Transformation: Caring About Another’s Pain Without Guilt
…and Without Needing to Fix It My last post ended with this: “In 1971, I was married and pregnant with my first child. I was preoccupied with the business of trying to be a good wife and mother. In the process, I was an inattentive...
