Livin' What You're Given Laura Padgett

Gwendolyn Burton is an author, teacher, speaker, and certified grief educator. But mostly she is an authentic voice for those who are experiencing grief and loss, as she has suffered one of the toughest losses known to humans - the loss of a child. Through her work and in this interview, she discusses how she began to heal and move forward from her loss. She speaks about finding help by hearing the stories of others which helped her to see she was not alone. By encouraging herself ...

We are starting our fourth season of "Livin' What You're Given". The rest of 2024, I want to explore the effects of storytelling. In this episode I talk about why our stories matter. They have been given to us so we can share them to encourage other as they walk their stories as well as help others along the way in their own journeys.I open this season by explaining why this podcast has not been offered for the past several months. In telling the reason for my absence, I have told a sto...

Today in this solo podcast episode, the last one of 2023 and the last one for a few months, I want to talk about letting go of idolizing the past. We cannot move forward, if we insist on focusing on the past. The tendency to retro reach (trying to recapture and relive the past at the expense of the now and the future) is a prescription for unhappiness. Through a personal, and humorous story, I share how we can get the wrong idea of who God is and proceed with that idea until we fin...

Today, I am joined by Ashley Pyles, a Christian Transformational Faith Coach who has spent decades helping women not only strengthen their faith, but also put it into action. There are many reasons why we can stunt our spiritual growth, and one of those is hanging onto the past. In our conversation on Livin' What You're Given, Ashley offers some tools to help us resist this retro-reach posture. She shares from her own experiences how she has learned to release the past and receive the blessin...

In this week's episode, which is a solo, I want to share the word "burdens" as an acronym. I think this is particularly important as the holidays are here and we can feel overwhelmed by the expectations we place on ourselves and the expectations we try to meet that are placed upon us by others. The point of this is to demonstrate that it is our choice to allow our own (sometimes unreasonable) expectations and those of others to weigh us down or not. Drawing from seven decades of I want ...

Whoa, the holidays are here already and the pressures can be real. In today's episode, my guest Sue Moore Donaldson, and I explore how to drop some of the baggage around what we expect of ourselves and others when it comes to holiday festivities.As an author, podcaster and public speaker, Sue uses her own experiences to help us relax around our imperfections. That can be, and often is, the first step in moving through the holidays with less stress and more joy. Through her faith base as a fol...