Indice dei contenuti per April 2019 in Guideposts

Julee is always bugging me to make lists. I’m a little vain about my memory so I resist. I refuse to make a to-do list or a shopping list. It’s all in my head. Or so I tell myself. And maybe it was true once upon a time. Now, not so much. I forget stuff all the time…my glasses, the TV remote, Gracie’s leash. So maybe I should take Julee’s advice. I think I’ll start by practicing with you. Here a list of what’s in your issue this month. • Start with our cover. I was thrilled that Chrissy Metz, star of the critically acclaimed TV show This Is Us and of the upcoming movie Breakthrough, was eager to share her story with Guideposts readers. And what a story! Chrissy…

“Each person on this planet is here for a purpose.… That purpose is to care for other people and to help this world become a better place through service to others.”actor GARY SINISE, whose foundation serves military veterans, from his book, Grateful American: A Journey From Self to Service “If your life is off-key, maybe it’s because you’ve been deafened by the negative self-talk that doesn’t let God get a word in edgewise.”from Whisper: How to Hear the Voice of God, by MARK BATTERSON “Most people need love and acceptance more than they need advice.”BOB GOFF, inspirational speaker “Roots, home, neighborhood and community—these are the geographies of our lives, the places where God dwells.”from Grounded: Finding God in the World—A Spiritual Revolution, by DIANA BUTLER BASS “Worry does not take…

SOME PEOPLE CALL ME AN OVER-night sensation. I play Kate in the hit TV series This Is Us, and now I have my first feature film, Breakthrough, coming out this Easter. But I wouldn’t exactly call my success “overnight.” More like 365 nights and days—multiplied by a dozen years. In Breakthrough, I play the mom of a boy who drowned and was declared dead. She refused to believe it and kept praying, praying when no hope seemed possible, praying when all the evidence argued against her prayers, praying that the boy would come back to life. Miraculously he did. That kind of resilience is something I can relate to. In life and in prayer. A year and a half ago, I was gearing up for the Emmys. I’d been nominated…

THE GRAVEYARD. THIS WAS where drugs and alcohol had led me. I was 34 and had never had a job until now, working at the cemetery. I’d just gotten my first assignment to dig a grave. As if I hadn’t been digging my own grave for years. Smoking pot, drinking beer, dropping out of school. Getting hooked on opioids. Getting in trouble with the law, landing in jail. I was the poster boy for addiction. I’d fallen into the dead-end life I saw growing up, the only kind of life I knew. The steel and manufacturing industries here in West Virginia collapsed in the early 1980s, around the time I was born. There were mass layoffs, factory and mill shutdowns. My hometown of Huntington had been struggling to recover ever…

ONE GRANDPARENT WAS STILL ALIVE when I was born: my mother’s father, Poppop Rossiter, who lived with my aunt Cass. My memories of him are vague, though even at a young age I knew there was something wrong with the old man. He would forget my name and who I belonged to. One benefit: He always gave us grandkids a quarter when we came to visit, and toward the end I sometimes got two, even three quarters. It seemingly slipped his mind that he’d already bestowed his largesse. “Did I give you your quarter yet?” he’d say. I wasn’t about to remind him that he had. Poppop died when he fell one morning in the bathroom. There was no mention of Alzheimer’s in the autopsy. There should have been. Years…

“MOM, PLEASE GET IN THE CAR.” She ignored me and wandered through her small vacation home—a mobile home, actually, by a lake outside town—in search of her favorite night cream. “Mom, we have to get Dad to the hospital now.” I tried to steer her toward the front door. She shrugged me off. I fought the urge to yank her outside. I had learned it would just agitate her and slow things down. Five years earlier, Dad had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given six months to live. He’d beaten the odds so long, his oncologist called him Superman. Now the odds were catching up with him. He needed lots of care. Mom was making caring for him as hard as possible. She didn’t mean to. All my life…

PRAYING IT FORWARD Thirteen years had gone by since my job in the work order control room at a machine shop. Now I was back—same plant, different building. Filing some papers, I thought back on all the things that had happened during those years. My husband had spent four years in the Air Force. We’d moved around. I’d worked other jobs. I’d started at the machine shop barely out of high school, my first job, sending reports to payroll about each worker’s hours. I was eager to do it well. I even gave myself an extra task. Each time I recorded the hours from a worker’s time card, every day for a year and a half, I said a silent prayer, asking God to bless the worker by name. I…

LOVE KIT LEGACY I read a story in the March 1983 Guideposts titled Why Don’t We? The author, M. Linda Dunbar, wrote about the “love kit” a friend had sent her: a large envelope filled with little gifts, each with a Bible verse attached, explaining how the item rep-resented a blessing from God. I loved the idea and started making love kits for people struggling with depression, sickness or big changes. At first I made them exactly like the one in the story, but I’ve added treats over the years, including a loonie or toonie coin (Philippians 4:19), apple (Deuteronomy 32:10), key (John 14:2), small package of raisins (I’m “raisin” you up in prayer) and a bottle of water (John 4:13). These items and others don’t fit in an envelope,…

GREAT course on how to tell a story, no matter what genre—fiction or non-fiction. The printed material plus the videos solidify the information. The best investment you could make! —Dianne M. Join Guideposts Editor-in-Chief Ed Grinnan and other senior editors in an exclusive online class designed to teach you how to write your own story or memoir. These master storytellers will show you how to make your story compelling and entertaining as they share techniques that have worked at Guideposts for more than 70 years. With more than two hours of video lessons, this creative writing course delivers professional instruction designed to improve the quality of your writing. How To Tell A Great Story includes: • 12 video modules to guide you in your creative writing journey.• Digital workbook with…

Discover Mysterious Ways—an inspiring magazine from Guideposts that will move you with true stories of how God reaches out to us in surprising ways. Have you ever had an experience so unexpected, so remarkable, that only a greater hand than ours could account for it? A stranger’s all-too-perfectly timed random act of kindness. A deceased loved one who appears to you in a dream just when you need her most. A delayed flight that leads to an unexpected family reunion. Fascinating stories like these will entertain you and remind you that there is something more, something greater in our lives. Mysterious Ways will inspire you and bring you joy and wonder. You are cordially invited to accept a free issue and sample these everyday miracles for yourself. guideposts.org/mw Return the…

Many people with substance use disorders fear they will never lead fulfilling lives. Perhaps they have struggled with addiction for decades. Perhaps they’ve tried treatment and it failed. Perhaps they’ve relapsed one too many times. In fact, treatment for addiction is always possible. No one with a substance use disorder should live under the illusion that there is no hope. A major challenge to treating substance abuse is the mistaken belief that recovery is simply a matter of willpower and can be achieved quickly. Substance use disorders are a form of chronic brain disease. Once addiction takes hold, the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which governs decision-making, becomes chemically subordinate to the need to keep using. In other words, addiction damages the brain’s ability to make rational decisions. Like other chronic diseases,…

SOUL FOOD My son, Tim, raises chickens, ducks, guinea hens and quail. He’s the fifth generation in our family to sell his wares at Detroit’s Eastern Market, which has served the city since the nineteenth century. Tim sees quite a few homeless people between his house and the market, and he has often told me how sorry he is that he can’t share his eggs with them, because they would have no way to cook them. Last year, a week before Easter, he hatched an idea. Tim brought over several extra dozen eggs as I was getting ready to dye eggs for the family. “Mom, would you write something uplifting on these and dye them for me?” he asked. On Easter weekend, Tim was able to hand out hard-boiled eggs…

Wednesday night, 11 p.m. Before I went to bed, I took one last look out my back door toward the woods at the edge of my yard and called, “Jax, where are you?” I have four cats. One was a housecat, but the other three, including Jax, had been born feral. They weren’t happy staying inside all of the time, so I would let them wander freely during the day, then call them into the house at night to give them a warm and safe place to rest. Jax was my biggest wanderer and tended to return later than the others did. A few days earlier, when he’d come home with a scratched face, I started to worry about him. Now there was no sign of him, and this was…

Sun City Center Emergency Squad members find that helping their neighbors is tremendously fulfilling. Susan Spady, volunteer coordinator at Good Samaritan Society–Hastings Village in Nebraska, isn’t surprised by that. We talked to her about the joys and benefits of volunteering: A sense of purpose “My senior volunteers wake up with a sense of purpose,” Spady says. “They take ownership of a particular project, such as tending our flower gardens. That sense of purpose is healthy; it’s what keeps us living longer. There’s a lot of loss as you get older, but serving others can be your saving grace. It gets you out of yourself.” Social interaction and friendship The Hastings Village knitting group was started by Helen Wigert, whose husband had passed away. “Helen loves to knit and wanted to…

Tuesday, June 19, 2018 Amelia Milling, a twenty-one-year-old college student from Tennessee, was on Day Two of a three-day solo hike of the Crow Pass Trail, in Alaska’s Chugach Mountains. Following part of the historic Iditarod route, it runs 23 miles from the town of Girdwood to the Eagle River Nature Center. To finish the trail, she would have to negotiate snowy slopes, scree and mine ruins, as well as ford the Eagle River. Amelia is deaf, and her mother worried about her hiking alone in such rugged terrain. To appease her, Amelia had stuffed a SPOT, an emergency satellite location and communication device, into her backpack. Trekking poles had helped her make the uphill climb to Crow Pass on Day One of her hike. Surprised by the amount of…

Alzheimer’s is a disease that impacts the entire family. In fact, more than 16 million friends and family members provide unpaid care to someone living with Alzheimer’s disease today. The burden on caregivers can be devastating: Twice as many dementia caregivers report substantial emotional, financial and physical difficulties as caregivers of people without dementia. “Caring for someone with Alzheimer’s becomes an around-the-clock job—it can be all-encompassing and allconsuming,” says Ruth Drew, director of information and support services for the Alzheimer’s Association. Drew oversees the Alzheimer’s Association Helpline, a call center available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, which provides free support and guidance to individuals and families facing Alzheimer’s and other dementias. The call center answers nearly 300,000 calls annually. “We receive calls on…

THE DOCTOR’S TONE WAS GENtle, but his expression was serious. “If you keep going at this rate, you’ll have only another two years left,” he said. “You have to slow down.” It was a few days into 2018. I had just awoken from a coma in the ICU. My third in two years. I was strapped to the bed with a ventilator tube down my throat. I couldn’t move my arms. Couldn’t speak. His words sank in. I had done everything the doctors asked. As hard as it was to give up a 40-year, pack-a-day habit, I had quit smoking. I had worked on pulmonary rehabilitation techniques and mindfulness. But it wasn’t enough. I thought of my daughter, Kathleen, pregnant with her first child. I’d been praying for a grandchild…

As busy as she is now, Asya Branch (“Tell Us About Your Dad,” page 20) has a lot of opportunities waiting for her after she hands off her Miss Mississippi crown later this year. In between winning the state title and competing in the Miss America pageant in 2018, Asya changed her University of Mississippi major from broadcast journalism to integrated marketing communications and chose to minor in business administration. Now the world is her oyster. “A lot of doors opened for me during my year as Miss Mississippi,” Asya, a vocalist, says. “Hopefully by the time I graduate, I’ll have narrowed down what I want to do.” As part of her duties, Asya is still writing to the children and loved ones of inmates in her state through her…