Inhoudsopgave van February 2020 - Guideposts

Last month, I told you that 2020 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Guideposts, founded by Norman Vincent Peale and his wife, Ruth Stafford Peale, who hoped the magazine would become part of the national conversation that Americans were having as the country went through momentous changes and challenges. With this issue, we start a feature called A Moment America Came Together, unforgettable stories from our archives about how ordinary Americans have rallied in times of triumph and tragedy, from the moon landing to the Challenger disaster, from the end of segregation to the September 11 attacks, from Jackie Robinson’s breaking of baseball’s color barrier to the release of the hostages in Iran. We may seem divided as a nation today, but these stories show how our country comes together in…

HAPPY JAR I was an emotional wreck during my pregnancy after two previous miscarriages. By February, I was around six months along. I developed sciatica pains, and everything I did hurt. I missed the stress relief I got from working out. My mood plummeted. My husband, Javier, and I don’t usually celebrate Valentine’s Day. So it was a big—but welcome—surprise when he presented me with a jar filled with pink slips of paper. “This is your happy jar,” he said. He had written a compliment or hopeful message on each piece of paper: “You will be an amazing mother,” “You make me a better person,” “You are absolutely gorgeous.” Javier instructed me to dip into the jar and read a note whenever I felt down. Those pink notes helped me…

Daily Inspiration In our exclusive video, TV journalist and talk show host Tamron Hall shares who has influenced her day-to-day faith life. guideposts.org/tamron Moving Madness Military spouse Elizabeth Gray talks about the chaos—and the joys—of her family’s many moves. guideposts.org/elizabethg Celebrate Black History Month Let our collection of quotes from influential black Americans inspire you. guideposts.org/blackhistoryquotes In the Name of Love This biblical prayer can work wonders on Valentine’s Day. Try it! guideposts.org/prayvalentine Keep Your GUIDEPOSTS Coming We make it easy to renew your magazine, check on the length of your subscription or manage book series shipments. guideposts.org/ecares…

who she is Maria Rose Belding, 24, co-launched and runs MEANS, an online platform connecting businesses that have surplus food with pantries and soup kitchens that need it. MEANS stands for Matching Excess and Need for Stability, a name Maria Rose came up with as a teenager while volunteering in her Pella, Iowa, church’s food pantry. She graduated from American University in May 2019 and plans to go to med school. what she does Maria Rose had seen firsthand the difficulties that pantries have connecting with food donors. Many pantries lack landlines or listed phone numbers. If only there was a way to make the connection online, she thought. As a freshman in college, she met a student who knew computer coding. The two of them designed the MEANS online…

My husband’s death left a void in my life. Tom was only 64 when he passed. It was cancer. I was blindsided. All of my plans for the future had been made for two, not one. Most days, it felt as if I were drowning in a sea of grief. My family became my lifeline. I put all of my energy into caring for them. My parents were getting along in years and needed more and more help around the house, so I ended up moving in with them. After the birth of my youngest son’s twins, I found myself busy helping care for my grandbabies too. But at every milestone—the twins’ first words and their first steps—I wished that Tom could somehow be there with me. He would have…

New York, New York IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT THIS past year, my beautiful daughter, Natalia, and I are again dealing with life-threatening challenges to her health. It doesn’t seem so long ago that our hopes and faith were tested the first time. In 2007, Natalia walked her first runway at my sister’s college fashion show, not far from where we live in Harlem, New York. At 12 years old, my green-eyed girl was already five foot nine; she got her height from her father, from whom I was divorced. As I watched her sashay down the runway, I was stunned by how poised and confident she looked—she was a natural! “I’m going to be a model,” she announced after the show. “We’ll see about that,” I told her. It’s…

BY THE BOOK “Your boots will be ready in two weeks,” the saleswoman said, practically brushing me off. “Pick them up then.” “Thank you,” I muttered, a little resentfully. I’d always had friendly service at this shoe shop, so the saleswoman’s behavior came as a surprise. “She was perky and friendly at first,” I said to my husband, Kevin, after we walked out. “Then her friends showed up and she couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.” “Maybe she’s new at this,” Kevin said. “She’ll learn.” “She should have learned already,” I said. “Maybe I’ll say something when I go back.” I didn’t plan to give that rude salesperson another thought until then. But the very next morning, when I made out my daily list of people to pray for,…

A CONTINUING MISSION As part of the Our Returning Troops series, I wrote about how ballet training helped me get through my Marine service, including the Iraq war, and how starting a dance company, Exit 12, eased my transition back into the civilian world (Fearless, March 2014). That story brought a lot of good to my life. Guideposts readers supported the company; as a result, we’ve been able to engage veterans in workshops and performances in the United States and abroad. A documentary about us, Exit 12, won awards at five film festivals and made even more people aware of our work. In 2017 I received a Fulbright Award to explore the impact of war on soldiers through choreography, which I did at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance…

“Don’t just aspire to make a living. Aspire to make a difference.”DENZEL WASHINGTON, actor “I love when the house is hushed and reverent, and on the days I’m fortunate enough to catch the first glow of orange on the eastern horizon, I smile. I believe God grins back.”REBEKAH LYONS, author of Rhythms of Renewal: Trading Stress and Anxiety for a Life of Peace and Purpose “Choose to be optimistic—it feels better.”via actress KRISTEN BELL’s Instagram “Try to have good days and bad moments. Life is too short to have a bad day.”advice from a friend of authors STEPHEN KLEMICH and MARA KLEMICH, Ph.D., shared in their book Above the Line: Living and Leading With Heart “Wake Up. Be Amazing. Be Kind. Be Brave. Be You. Rinse and Repeat.”sign on an…

I LOOKED OVER MY GLASSES FROM the bench and asked, “Is there anything else?” I was confident in the details of the case and ready to deliver a standard hearing closing. “No, Your Hon—” the attorney began, but his client interrupted. “Your Honor, I have one more thing,” the man said. I looked to the attorney. I’d been a judge for 23 years—a female judge from a time when that was neither expected nor particularly respected. I ran a tight ship. It was always “Yes, Your Honor” or “No, Your Honor.” I made a face that said, Get your client under control. That should have been enough. But today the attorney threw his hands in the air, exasperated. I knew we were in trouble. I turned to the client. “Yes,…

YOU’D THINK AS THE HOST OF A daytime talk show, encouraging people to tell their stories, that I would have no hesitation about telling my own. True, there’s a lot I’m willing to talk about. But one of the biggest, saddest, toughest and most important stories I didn’t share for years. I opened up only when I saw that others needed to understand, that they needed to know what I wish I had known back then, that lives could be saved. That my heart need not have been broken. Renate was technically my stepsister, but that’s not how I would have ever described her. She was my sister, plain and simple. I was eight when my mom remarried. Dad—as I learned to call him—and his daughter came into my life.…

I WAS LISTENING TO MY FAVORITE Bible podcast when one of the guests—a guy, mind you—pointed out, “You know, it’s the women in the Gospels who get it about Jesus. They’re often the first to really understand who he is.” Wow, I thought, that’s something I’d never noticed before. I took down my Bible and turned to Luke’s Gospel. Mary is there in the first chapter, of course, startled to learn from the angel Gabriel how she’s been called by God. She then goes to visit her relative Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, to share the good news. These two women are major figures in the age-old story, but as I kept turning the pages, it was the lesser-known women whose stories jumped out at me. Like Anna the…

“Coming back to Virginia was like coming home,” says Elizabeth Gray (Redeployed, page 48). Her family completed its sixth move last summer when her husband, Cody, got a new Army assignment. Per tradition, the trip had a few stops. First up was an elephant park in Oklahoma. “I promised the girls something big, but they didn’t guess it would be as big as an elephant!” Then an old diamond mine in Arkansas, where they found neat rocks (but no diamonds). They also stopped at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, before reaching their new home. Getting settled was easy—they moved back into a house they’d rented before, the girls reunited with friends, and even the boxes got unpacked in a timely manner. Better yet, Elizabeth says, some friends…