Things I’m Still Learning: Hope

This week at The Edwards Table, we continue the March mini-series “Things I’m Still Learning.”

Today’s conversation is about hope.

Hope is one of those words we use easily, but living with real hope can be much harder—especially when life has handed you disappointment, unanswered prayers, or seasons that didn’t turn out the way you expected.

In this episode, Amy talks honestly about how her understanding of hope has changed over time. Hope isn’t pretending everything is fine, and it isn’t blind optimism. It’s something quieter, deeper, and sometimes more stubborn than we realize.

This conversation is for anyone who:
 • feels worn down by hard seasons
 • struggles to keep believing things can get better
 • wonders where hope fits when life doesn’t go according to plan

Even when the path forward feels uncertain, hope reminds us that our story isn’t finished yet.

Pull up a chair and join us at The Edwards Table. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Amy Edwards and welcome to the Edwards Table. This podcast is all about real conversations, the kind that come from life, love, family, friendship, and all the messy, beautiful parts in between. I started this show because I believe in redemption stories and in sitting down together to talk about the things that shape us, heal us, and sometimes just make us laugh. So grab a seat, take a breath, and join me. Because there's always room for you here at the Edwards Table. Well, hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of the Edwards Table. My name is Amy Edwards and I am your host here at this podcast. Delighted to have each of you here. If you are brand new to this uh podcast, definitely welcome. We're all glad to have you here at the table with us. And if you've been with me from the start, thank you. Cannot thank you enough for being a part of this journey with me. Uh definitely have been loving the month of March. So if you've been joining, I've been doing this little mini-series situation called What I'm Still Learning. So this whole podcast kind of revolves around my story. And uh if you haven't had the opportunity in season one to listen to my story kind of start to now, definitely I would encourage you to go back and take a listen. I do reference it a good bit because obviously that's what we're talking about. But also I want to make sure that if you're not familiar, you have an idea of why there's so much healing in this journey that we keep talking about. So I would highly recommend you going back and listening to season one if you haven't already. Uh, but in any case, so mini-series for March. We've been talking about things I'm learning about. So if you started with me the first week of March, you heard me talking about how I'm still learning about love. Then last week, if you joined me, you tuned in and heard me talking about how I'm still learning about trust. So love, trust. Well, this week I'm going to talk more about how I am learning about hope. I don't know about you all, but like in the world we live in today, hope is a really overused word, in my opinion. I think that it's loosely used as well, right? Oh, I hope you get to feeling better. Oh, I hope that things work out. Oh, I hope, right? Which for some people that might be that might be a heartfelt thing, but I feel like that's one of those quick little phrases that we'll give to people in passing. Like if we stop on the street, let's say, and have a little quick little chat of catching up with um maybe an acquaintance and we'll throw that out there. Oh, I hope, I hope, I hope. Um, and it kind of leaves an open-ended, unfinished piece of business to me. Like, unless you're putting a date on the calendar to call the person back and check in or whatever, it's just kind of a pleasantry, if you will. But goodness, if there's one thing that I have been learning a whole lot along this journey of healing and just really and truly falling in love with this woman that I am, it's that hope is a very powerful part of who we can be. And so I just kind of wanted to talk more about that today. I know that if you're in a situation that is very difficult, and maybe you're right now you're in the middle of something really hard, maybe you're trying to heal from something that happened to you or happened around you or to someone you loved. Maybe you have a relationship that you are just trying to work your way into, out of, through, whatever. Um, maybe you come from a childhood that is riddled with messiness, abuse, or a myriad of other things, all of which I've described, right? Give us these scars and these wounds and these just broken places in our lives. And a big piece of this hope journey for me, right? Learning more about hoping and truly investing my hope in the right places comes from a place for me personally of learning not to numb. And what I mean by that is not leaning into alcohol, drugs, um, binge watching, binge scrolling or doom scrolling, right? Um over-socializing, like filling my life with things, some good, some not good, some terrible, right? Like trying to fill those gaping holes of sadness and not wanting to think about the hard things, right? Trying to fill those with stuff. And albeit I am not um, I've never been an alcoholic per se, but I definitely teetered on that line of finding myself in a place where I was, you know, having a couple glasses of wine, a couple of beers, that that kind of a thing. But I was drinking regularly throughout my work week, throughout my weekend, and whatever else. And it wasn't that I couldn't walk away from it. At the time, it was just it started filling my time more and more. And with that, then shifted how I was living my life, how I was treating people around me, yada yada, yada, yada, yada. So, all this to say, in this journey that I've been on and that I share with you all very transparently, I might add, uh, every Wednesday, is just being completely upfront and honest with you that I can can come to you and say, as we sit around my table or in my kitchen for today, uh, is that I get it. Like I totally understand. I've jokingly said this many times. I understand why women of my grandmother's generation drank martinis and gave their children paragoric. If you're not familiar, paragoric was given to children back in the day. Uh it's it's a sleeping drug. And it's not that every single parent did this, so please don't at me in the comments. But it wasn't an uncommon practice either that children were, you know, helped to sleep and whatever else. But I can totally understand why a woman who is a wife and a mom who feels overwhelmed, overstimulated, potentially is carrying a lot of extra baggage into the relationship that she's in, into the the situation and the in the place that she's in. I can totally understand and relate with a woman who would feel like that. I feel so hopeless, I feel so helpless, I feel like I have no other alternatives, and I am gonna find a way to numb that pain, numb the thinking of having to constantly think about so many things. It's heavy, it's hard, it's not fun, it's scary, it's so many things. And I personally have been in those situations just along the way. And one of the ones that I really wanted to talk more about today goes back to a time where John and I, we owned our own building company uh back in the early 2000s. We started a business on our own after he had like worked under someone and really under started understanding and learning the building industry. And uh, so we went out and he partnered with another fellow and we started this company together. Took on a a lot of death, a lot of debt and a lot of risks and all of the things. But at the time, the housing market, 2000 to 2007, was rocking and rolling. Uh, we jokingly say we were printing money, it was just that simple. Anyone that had a pulse and maybe even not could qualify for a home loan. And the the way that they moved that around to allow anyone to be able to do it, not to have to bring money to closing, you know, not to really be vested, right? Like you're you're not putting skin in the game, uh, if you're coming without any down payment, but you're able to assume a full loan with these astronomical interest rates. And so we started this company, we were rolling along, and in the midst of that, I've shared more than once here, um, we got to a place in our marriage that was on the edge of divorce. Um, and praise God, we did not get divorced. Um, that came full on just months before uh 2008, and that is, if you're not familiar, that is when our economy crashed. And where we were living at the time was in Memphis, Tennessee. And Memphis, unlike maybe Nashville, uh definitely did not have the structure to bounce back quickly from that. And so uh what we thought we were doing was John pouring money into our company trying to keep it afloat, which was valiant effort, doing everything and anything that he knew to do to try to keep us running. Uh, but what wound up happening was is we lost everything. So at the time we lived in a 5,400 square foot house. I drove a Mercedes S class. John drove a high-end, whatever, King Ranch, Ford pickup. Don't even get me there. I don't even know, 250 something or t'ether. Uh our children went to private school. Um, I mean, the list just goes on and on and on, right? So we went from having all of those things to finally a year later selling our home. Um, we were supposed to short sale it for 44,000, right? Bring 44 to closing. And somehow we were talking about that the other day. Somehow we finagled away out of that. I don't know how, don't ask me. It wasn't illegal, I promise. Uh, but it um I think we made it a deal with the bank. Like there was just we we we didn't have we didn't have two pennies to rub together, much less nickels. So um we we went through that. And uh I share a lot of times this this part of our story, mine and John's, and or just mine personally, right? So I'm a wife, I'm a mom, I'm a woman in this time. And just the overwhelming sense of hopelessness. Um, the number of times in one day, I would get phone calls from, you know, the sheriff's department to see if we're at home so they could come serve us papers. And they it got to a point literally where they would call because we were getting served so often just to make an appointment and they could drop a packet of papers off of everybody that was suing us for money. Uh that we had the utility companies uh that were constantly trying to shut our utilities off, phones getting cut off. Um it it it was it was a time where according to the world standard, right, it was very hopeless. There was not an end in sight. And we were in the hole for millions of dollars. Um I at the time was a stay-at-home mom, and at that same time John was trying to find people he could do renovation or remodel work for, just anything. I was cleaning houses, sewing, cooking for people, like anything I could do. Uh we pulled our children out of private school and we started homeschooling because we couldn't, I couldn't even afford the gas to drive them back and forth. So uh became a homeschool mom and worked and hustled however I could. We had for the first time in our whole marriage where we couldn't buy gifts for our kids for Christmas, and so this hopelessness, I mean, this just overwhelming sense of hopelessness, right? Um and what is so crazy is even through all of that, I did find hope then, and along the way past that, right? So that was 07, 08, 09, you know, as as time kept going, and now we're in 2026. So this is not the last time I've been in a place where hope felt far and it felt small and it felt thin and it felt almost unattainable. Um, but this definitely a pivotal moment in terms of me learning what hope should look like, feel like, should be, um, and how to deal with those times of like when you're in the mix of everything around you feels like it is crashing. Um, and throughout my story, I there are several times I felt this. I felt this as a little girl when I was being abused. I felt this as a young uh teenager when my stepfather at the time was giving me horrific advice for a young woman about what men need and what men want and what boys do and how you should present yourself. Um I felt this way in my young, young 20s when I found out I was pregnant outside of marriage and made the worst choice of my life to have an abortion. Um I felt this way years after that when I uh got served papers for visitation rights of my son from my family. I felt this way when I was um, let's see, next in that line of like hopeless feelings was in between my son and daughter. I had a baby that I was pregnant with and I lost a miscarriage. Had found out I was pregnant after a year after that, I got pregnant with three girls and uh gave birth to one, which is our daughter, Maddie, and lost the other two. I felt that again when I was about a year after I had MAD, I had to have a complete hysterectomy. And at that moment, at I think I was 29, I hadn't quite turned 30 yet, and it felt like my whole world as being a woman and as a family grower through being able to have babies, losing that that privilege and that ability. Again, what how in the world am I gonna do this? And where's my identity gonna fall? Is it gonna be in the fact that as a woman you're no longer able to do part of what you're created for, right? So when I say this feeling I of hopeless, like, y'all, I'm I'm not trying to put this laundry list of all the terrible things in my life. I don't want you to hear it like a woe is me. I just want you to understand where I come from. I get it. Like I truly, when I say I see you, I hear you, I understand you, I'm not joking. Legitimately, I feel like I probably have been relatively close to a place maybe where you are or you have been, albeit I may not have experienced an identical situation, right? And in these moments, not to say that I got destitute in my hopelessness every single time, but just like I've always said, right, this is a journey, it's not an event. So that means when we're learning things by going through hard stuff, and when it's unfair and it's unjust, and we just get the raw deal. It's the the short end of the stick, the raw deal, like it's not fair what is happening. Um, it is so easy, I think, for us to fall into that feeling of hopeless. Like, what am I gonna do? Where am I gonna go? How am I gonna handle this? How am I gonna get myself back up off the ground and stand back up and be able to breathe again and move my feet forward and actually start taking steps to living life again? I think about, you know, other women that I know that have been through some horribly difficult times in their lives, like the death of a spouse young. Um, there's a couple that always comes to my heart when I think about this, and they just, if you ever met them together, they were just two peas in a pot. They just complimented each other beautifully. Um, they adored one another and they loved each other deeply and they did life together beautifully. And out of nowhere, uh, he he died. And the absolute ripping of the rug, if you will, like it just felt like it got yanked out of this beautiful woman's life. And watching her from a distance, uh getting to see her grieve this loss, but then also see her blossom out of this loss has been so bittersweet. It it's bitter because obviously I I would have loved them to grow old, old, old, old together. And that didn't happen. But the beautiful part in it is being able to see her learn to stand in that grief and still be able to breathe and still be able to move on into life. Not to say that the memory of her first husband isn't always going to be a part of her story and always going to be a part of her life, because it absolutely will. But the beautiful part in it is that she has also been granted opportunity to learn how to do this living forward, if you will. And I just count it a privilege to be able to say that I have been able to witness that and have learned so much from her, just in the bits and pieces that she shares. I follow her on social media, and so the bits and pieces that she shares are just it's it's raw and it's transparent, and I just I so appreciate that. Um, but in terms of of the hopelessness, I mean I could go on and on with stories of of other friends, uh close loved ones and things of loss of you know, a father, loss of a child, uh, loss of wealth, a job, wealth, when I say wealth, but like livelihood, being able to provide for a family, um, the loss of health, you know, getting a diagnosis that you're just baffled by, like it comes out of nowhere. And um, it's not necessarily that you're dying of of a disease, but it's a disease that's gonna rob you of a lot of what you really enjoy doing. You know, you're not gonna be active anymore, and it's gonna be harder for you to speak and move, and it's gonna be painful, but it's not gonna shorten your life, you know. Like I have friends who are going through that. Um, I have friends who go through chronic pain, like for 20 some odd years have gone through chronic pain, and there's not been a way to cure it or fix it yet. And yet, when you listen to them and you see how they live their life, it is such, such a beautiful thing. So, like as I started thinking through, you know, chatting with you guys today and just sitting down and having a good, a good combo about this whole situation of like what I'm learning about hope. I was thinking about this. So, overall in my life, I've typically I was taught to be a very optimistic person. My mom was very much a driver of that. She drove that home regularly because even as a kid, I remember being kind of a negative Nelly, if you will, you know, just or an Eeyore, excuse me. So she would help change my thought pattern there into being optimistic, looking forward to the positive, figuring out a way forward. And I like that wiring. Like I appreciate that because it does help me in situations not stay in that negative mindset, right? But how I describe myself is an optimistic realist. I'm I am very much a realist. I understand we are human beings, we make mistakes, people are gonna let us down, the world is not gonna be fair, and it will still continue rotating, right? Like it's gonna continue rotating around on its little axis as it hums around the sun. We can't stop that. And when I say hope for today, I am not talking about this like Pollyanna, everything is roses and sunshine and rainbows and candy and all the things kind of a perspective. I'm talking about being a realistic optimist in terms of hoping. But a big part of that we'll talk about here in just a little bit. And you know, if you know me, if you've been here, you know we're gonna talk about my faith. But before we dive into that piece, I think, you know, what I was chatting through earlier, you know, hope itself can be really hard to find in situations. And I think that in our own mind, it is so easy to get into a place where we are constantly hashing out the negative, the hard, that hopeless, helpless feeling. And when the situation is Dire, and there doesn't feel like there is an opportunity to be able to maybe move ahead or move past or get away from where breathing is hard, thinking anything else is hard, moving forward is hard, just getting up and moving around your house is hard, right? I think that it is very easy to fall into a hopeless pattern. I think that it's very easy because we go one of two ways. Like, let's say, for instance, if we're grieving the loss of something. And a something does not have to be a person, y'all. It can totally be a loss of a job, um, uh loss of a relationship, loss of what we thought was going to be. And let me tell you, the what we thought was going to be is a biggie in my life because when we set forward goals and ideas of what we think the future holds or what we're aiming toward, and then that completely changes, you have to grieve that loss. You have to grieve that loss. And so I think it is imperative to remember that getting into those hopeless really spirals. I mean, that's really what it is, right? When you start feeling hopeless, helpless, I can't, it's never gonna work out. I I don't know a way forward, there's there's no way, and it turns into this really a chicken little moment. The sky is falling, the sky is falling. Um it's not for me to say this to diminish what you're going through or what you've gone through if you're trying to work through hard things from your past, right? What it is is to say yes, comma, and yes, a hundred and ten percent. What you're enduring, what you did endure, what you're trying to move past and move on from, valid, fair, valid points, 110%, not diminishing that at all. And there is a way forward. The catch is is just like I was talking about before, this whole concept of numbing. So typically when we think about it, people jump into addiction. So, like, you know, food, alcohol, drugs, sex, porn, psh, addiction. Yes, it can be that, but it also can be addiction in your work, right? Where you just throw yourself headfirst into your work and you shut everything else out of your life. Um, or it could be you throw yourself headfirst into your work, and then when you come home, you throw yourself headfirst into your kids. So your marriage suffers, right? Or vice versa, totally into your marriage, nothing about your kids, kids are all wild and crazy. Like whatever it is that we're choosing to go after instead of sitting in the hard times of being in a really difficult spot, um, doesn't ever allow us that the opportunity to really and truly start healing. And so I think when we don't have hope and we don't invest our hope in the right place, we start hoping in places of staying numb, not thinking about it, changing the subject when it comes up, denying that it even exists, I'll I'll put it off till tomorrow, you know, little scarlet O'Hare, why do it today when we can do it tomorrow, kind of a situation. And I think that the bottom line of what hope is, is hope is this beautiful opportunity to truly, truly practice our faith. So when I was preparing for today and thinking about all of the times in my life when the world has told me, girl, ain't no way, ain't no way you are going to make something of yourself, be a good mom, be a good wife, be a good friend, be a good woman. No way, no way. You're too broken, you're too messy, you got too much junk that you're bringing into relationships, that you're bringing into parenthood, that you're bringing into marriage. There is no way you're gonna be good enough to be able to do any of those things. Um, statistically speaking, when John and I went to premarital counseling right before we got married, you know, you meet with the pastor for a couple of sessions if you get married through the church. And um never forget, never forget, first time we met with him, Brother Glenn uh sat us down and said, Statistically speaking, I brought an 85% chance of divorce into my marriage. Uh however, it's actually a higher number, he said, because of what I came from. And it's very interesting that statistic, I don't know where it lands now because uh John and I have been married 29 years, so I'm I'm sure that's even higher, which is I don't even know how it can be. But apparently, children of divorce, and then if your parents have been like if your parent that raised you has been divorced more than one time, right? The statistic, the great the number just rises. So 85% chance if you have um divorced parents that the likelihood of you getting divorced. That was the statistic back then. Um and we were both kind of baffled by that. But then I think for us we kind of took it as a challenge. So it wasn't a bad thing necessarily for us, it was just more shocking than anything else. So even in, you know, just getting married, I could have felt really hopeless in that situation, right? Like, oh my gosh, why bother? Why would we even get married if it's so likely that we're gonna wind up getting divorced? And I, you know, we could have, but we didn't, thank goodness. So throughout all of these, I've like rambled off what I don't even know how many opportunities and situations that I've had to be able to fill this hopeless situation. And I think that where I find it interesting is how hope, you know, is indeed a practice of our faith and what we have faith in. And sometimes when we're trying to feel that hope in the moment, right, uh, it can make us feel I don't know, kind of a sense of weakness. And I think where I used to land a lot of the time is just the old saying of waiting for the other shoe to drop, you know, which is kind of going to the worst case scenario, uh knowing sky's falling, like I said earlier, chicken little kind of a thing. Going into that mode, if you will, when it comes to having those moments where where feeling hopeful feels so hard. Uh, because it's like you just want to yell out to the world and be like, look at look at all that is like catastrophic in my life. And literally the whole world is on fire right now, and I don't know what to do with it. There's there's nothing. There is nothing that is gonna make this better. There's nothing that's going to bring me out of it, or even if I do get out of it, something else terrible is gonna happen. You know, that kind of a mentality. And what I have learned over the course of these years, right, and even now, y'all, even now I'm still learning that hope is a much deeper thing than that surface level. And it's a quieter thing, it's not loud like the world is, it's not chaotic like the world is, it's not just all over the place, like life feels so much of the time. And it is, it's just that on a deeper level, and I mean, let's be real, it is stubborn, hope is, because the thing about it is, is it hope does not say, hey, everything's gonna be easy, life's gonna be amazing. No, no, that's not what it does at all. What it says is that God is still present, that God is still working, even when I can't see what in the world the whole picture is, which is always, right? Like you and I can never see God's full picture. God can see everything from the beginning before the beginning of time throughout eternity. He sees it all, he knows it all. And we can't do that. So, this whole interweaving of my faith and my hope, like I said, there you can't have one without the other. There is no hope without God. And I'm obviously am not going to keep you for hours to explain every little detail, but I can say this beyond a shadow of a doubt when it comes to my faith and me being able to have hope in really hard situations. That even when life feels out of control, it feels uncertain, I I literally have no idea how a situation is going to play out. The one thing that I absolutely know is that no matter what, I am never alone in any of that because of my faith in God. So with that kind of belief, there is always something to hope for because I know in my life, no matter how difficult things get, there is light at the end of a tunnel, there is a ladder that's going to come down into that pit, there is a hand that's gonna help me out, there is someone, some way that I am going to be able to move forward. Now, please do not hear me say that because I have faith and because I have hope in God, that my life is easy. I think if you've listened to my story so far, you definitely know your girl has been through some things. And I've been a Christian since I was five. So it's not to say that hard things aren't going to happen, because they are. In fact, the Bible promises us that, and the New Testament promises us that our faith is not going to make our life easier. If nothing else, it will make it harder. And that is because Satan is all about coming in and trying to wreck it all as soon as he finds out that someone believes. Because his goal is to bring everybody to hell, and God's goal is to bring everybody to heaven, so that it's this constant battle. So don't hear me say that it just, you know, oh great. Well, now that Amy said we should believe in God, that our life is going to turn into this made-for-tv movie, rom-com kind of situation. No, it's not. Not here on earth. Now, once we leave this earth, we get to go to heaven. Everything's perfect, got a new body, no pain, no tears, no sadness. Don't even have to eat up there, y'all. Uh, because you don't need to. Everything is gonna be amazing, and so much so I couldn't even begin to put it into words. But while we're here on this planet, we're around a lot of human beings that are a hot mess just like us, that make choices that make our lives maybe difficult. And if we're honest, we make a lot of choices that make our lives difficult for ourselves. Yes, I know I am definitely team difficult choice maker, and not in a good way. Uh, definitely my plans versus God's plans send me into a whole whirlwind of mess. Um, if I would just be faithful and obedient to Him and obey, then life tends to definitely move along in a way that feels less strenuous, if you will, uh through those hard times. And so I think the beautiful thing about having hope because of my faith in God is being able to then look back at all of the situations that I shared with you. And there are situations I hadn't I didn't even list off. There are other things that I've gone through that have been really hard, and that that that heaviness and that hopelessness has crept in. But the beautiful thing is it grew me in being able to hope in ways I could have never imagined, ever. It it allows me the opportunity to find things to be hopeful for. And what I guess what I mean by that is I'm trying to think of a more recent situation. Well, our company, like I've shared about the fact that John and I started a new company at the end of 2024. And we quit our corporate jobs, sunk all the rest of our savings that we had, uh saved up, and started a company. Went back into the building realm. Uh, we're doing renovation and remodel work. And um there have been times in that where we're like, okay, God, we know that you want us doing this because we've prayed about it, we've had open communication, and we do this daily. Like we pray, read scripture, we pray, we talk about it, right? This is a daily habit we have. And so it's abundantly clear, God, you want us here. If that has changed, just please show us by way of an opportunity. Somebody comes across our path and says something to where it's obvious to us, okay, maybe we need to rethink this. Uh, but we went through this dry spell of not giving any uh estimates or quotes to people, not getting to bid any jobs for months. And I was looking for a job and got told no daily, daily, um, and could not fathom why. Like, why I couldn't even get a job at Target, y'all. Like, I could not get a job. And we knew though, in it, as hard as the days would be, and as difficult as it is to constantly be told you are rejected, the reality is that our hope was lying in what God had for us. And the beautiful thing to see as opportunities have now opened up and unfolded over the past several months, is He is taking us in these different paths on our journey that we had no idea were going to be opportunities for us. And the way that all of it came to be was literally the craziest story ever. Just absolutely crazy how it all worked out. And here's what I can tell you is when I get to look back at this story, even now, it started in 2020 with a Bible study I joined online. And because of who my leader was and her connection in her industry opened up opportunity when I had hip surgery that then opened up opportunity for us to then partner with these businesses. So please, anybody out there that's like, oh, there's no such thing as God, and whatever, y'all need to DM me and we need to have a convo. Because I can tell you stories like that that I have lived in 51 years on this planet over and over and over again. You will never convince me there's no such thing as God. Um and I welcome the opportunity to chat through it with you and be able to give you my side of why I would never say yes to there not being God out there. Um, but all this to say, for any of you who are with me in this journey of healing, right? Like we're we're we're on this journey path and path of healing from really hard stuff that we have endured or are are working through surviving right now. I think the beautiful part of hope in God is that whole theme throughout scripture, and that is he will never leave us or forsake us. We will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be alone because he won't let us. He will not allow us to be alone. He will always remain a part of us when we let him in. And I think what we get to see is that we are survivors. We survived things that the world would tell us there is no way you're gonna make it out of this. There's no way, Amy, after having the childhood you had, that you're gonna marry a man and you're gonna stay married to him until death do you part, that you are gonna be able to raise two children and they are gonna become useful, helpful, engaging humans in society. That you are going to be able to have a career and you are going to also have the opportunity to be a great stay-at-home mommy. Like my past says no to all of those things in terms of what the world standard is. But the gorgeous part of where my hope lies truly is in God and what he is capable of because his currency is not dollars and cents, his currency is never statistics and data. He doesn't work that way, and golly am I thankful for that. Because if it weren't for him, I don't know where I would be, y'all. It definitely would not be here living my best life out in Texas. I can tell you that right now. So, if you're questioning where your hope lies, I truly hope you will seek God in that. Because I'm gonna tell you what, when you offer him the opportunity to come be a part of who you are and offer him a seat at your table, man, he will show up and show out in ways you cannot, you can't even wrap your head around. And even when you go back to tell the story to someone else, it'll get you teary and it'll get you just goosebump covered because you will be able to see it is only with him, only with him that you have hope in the midst of hopelessness. And so with that, you guys, I'm gonna leave you to it for today. But thank you so much for being a part of this journey with me. Thank you so much for coming to my table. And if you haven't already, do me a huge solid. Would you please subscribe, give me a thumbs up? I would love it. And so would my algorithm. In the meantime, be sure to tune in for next week's final episode of this mini-series in March. And if I am being completely honest, probably the biggest one that I still struggle with to this day, and that is what am I still learning about rest? Don't be a stranger, grab a seat and come join me next week. Until next time, y'all, have a great day.