And I think it’s some of the most important work that all of us are called to do. So stick with me through this. This is gonna be, I hope one of the most powerful podcast episodes I have recorded so far and, and maybe we’ll ever record. And I hope it’s meaningful in life giving to you as well. Now, in this episode, I’m gonna be using the analogy of a garden and really what it means to cultivate the garden within us, particularly the garden in our mind. And you’ve heard ster and I talk a lot about negative thoughts and, and using the analogy that they’re kind of like weeds. And so I’m going with that, but I wanna take it a couple steps further and really present to us this idea of cultivating a beautiful garden of  like a beautiful flower garden within us. And kind of looking at the weeds and looking at the flowers, planting seeds, all of that’s gonna be part of the analogies that I’m using.

And I wanna kind of go back to the beginning of our lives. When we were first born, we were infants. We were 100% lovable. Now we still are 100% lovable, but it’s very easy to look at an infant. And, what I wanna say is this, like when we were infants and obviously before a lot of our brain development, but we were 100% lovable, 100% worthy, and we didn’t have negative thoughts about ourselves. We just were who we were like, we were this beautiful creation from God brought into this world and we didn’t have negative thoughts about ourselves. We just let our families know, like when we were hungry, when we were tired, when we needed to be changed, we let our family know, but we just were right. And then as we started getting older and experiencing things, growing up, our brain, developing, having thoughts, being aware of the world around us, we started to take in a lot of information and started paying a lot more attention to the thoughts that we were having.

Now you’ve heard Sterling and I say this, I mean, we have tens of thousands of thoughts a day, and some of those thoughts come and go, but some of those thoughts really impact us. And when, especially the thoughts that we have about ourself, and basically when we have a thought about ourself, it’s just a thought. But if we keep having that same thought over and over about ourselves, it becomes a belief. And that belief feels like it’s who we are. And that’s why when we have these thoughts, it’s like, we believe that it’s who we are. And then as we keep reinforcing that belief, that belief on the third level, like even going a little bit deeper, becomes ingrained in our identity. And it shapes drastically how we show up in the world, how we perceive the world, how we respond to the world and to others, all of it.

So you can see that even from an early age, the thoughts that we had and the thoughts that we entertained, the things that we said, like listened to, perceived, and then started to believe about ourselves, absolutely shapes who we become in a way. And so we go from being an infant, a child, and then, you know, going through you go start going to school. We have people in our lives, maybe it’s our families, parents, friends at school. People. They tell us things about ourselves. A lot of times, those are really good things. Sometimes they’re not so great things. You know, and yet, or we decipher it a certain way or we perceive things a certain way. And then it kind of really has a big impact on shaping who we are. And ultimately, I want us to think of those things as seeds that are planted, we oftentimes refer to them as seeds, these seeds that are planted in our minds, and then they take root and they start to grow.

And this is where I wanna talk to us about planting seeds that grow weeds, planting seeds that grow beautiful flowers. This is really what we’re talking about. And over time we don’t just plant seeds, but then we water them and we cultivate whatever happens to be growing. So if the seeds that were planted were a lot of negative thoughts and then, and we didn’t do anything with them, but we just kept, kept them there or kept planting them. Then we start watering them. We start cultivating them and then they just grow. Now when we were younger, a lot of the seeds that were planted might have come from the adults in our lives or from other people, like I just mentioned. And certainly the older we get, the more, a lot of those seeds that are planted actually come from us or they come from our own thoughts based on, you know, we start, I remember as a teenager looking at magazines and comparing myself and then having negative thoughts about myself.

And so I was starting to plant some of those seeds as well in my own mind, in my own heart. And then cultivating them, just watering those and watching them grow. And this is the deal. Once we become young adults, teenagers, young adults, and adults, we have to realize that we are actually the ones responsible for how our garden turns out. And this is the hope here. It’s a bit of a challenging message to all of us, but it’s also one filled with hope because what I wanna say to all of us right now is we are all adults. And so from this moment on, let’s kind of forget right now about what happened in the past. From this moment forward, you and I are 100% responsible for how our garden is going to turn out. And with this challenge may come the reality that we actually have some really important, hard work that we have to do

We need to get gloves on the gardening gloves. We need to change, like get the clothes on and really take some time to look at our garden to re like, see, what’s really going on in there. And then to determine what needs to be cleaned out, what needs to be thrown away and what new seeds need to be planted from this moment on this is our responsibility. And I wanna tell you this. I realized this probably four or five years ago, I had realized the extraordinary gift of taking some time to like look at the garden in my life, in my mind. And I wanna tell you, four or five years ago, that garden was filled with a lot of weeds. Now, there were also some really beautiful flowers there, but there were a lot more weeds than there were beautiful blooms and plants and flowers.

And someone basically told me the same thing I’m saying to you today. Somebody you told me like, Laris, you have to be the one to do this work. No one can do this for you. You have to do this for yourself. And at first I felt really overwhelmed and like, where do I start? And what do I do? And how do I do this? But then once I understood it, I went to work and I continued to go to work. Because this work is never ending. Like it’s something, a gardener knows this. You don’t just plant a garden once and pull the weeds. And then it’s done forever. A, a true gardener knows that they have to go out on a regular basis and tend to their garden and keep pulling weeds and keep planting seeds and keep and continue to cultivate it and water it and take care of it.

Right? We all know that. And so before I talk to you about really cultivating the type of garden you want, it’s really important for us to talk about weeds. We need to address the weeds in our mind and in our thoughts in our life. And so for a moment, I just want you to think about what weeds are. like, they’re horrible. They’re just, I, I don’t, I don’t understand them, but they’re just horrible. What do weeds do? First of all, weeds grow fast. We know that they grow really fast. And if they’re not pulled, they can take over an area so quickly, they choke out the life of the flowers or the plants, the vegetables, they’re toxic, in some ways they destroy and weeds can be very painful. Now I have learned this firsthand because we’ve recently moved into a new home.

And at the time of buying the house, we didn’t realize it. But once we moved in, we discovered that our backyard was filled with goat head weeds. Now, if you don’t know what goat head weeds are, then just think of yourself. How, like just say, I’m so blessed that I don’t, I don’t have an experience with goat HEADS but for those of you that do right now, you’re like, oh man, Lorissa, I’m so sorry. Like goat heads are evil, horrible weeds. They’re these weeds that grow, they spread so fast. I can’t even tell you how fast they spread. And they create these little they’re like this horrible. I think of them as weapons. They’re these little bulb things that have these really sharp, pointy little things on them. And so there’s like thousands of them in our backyard, even though we’ve tried to clear them out and spray them and all of these things, they just keep coming back and they multiply so much and they’re so painful.

They’ll like, if you walk on them, they stick to your, the bottoms of your shoes. And then I have seven kids. So they’re constantly coming into the house. And then these little goat heads, they’re like these really sharp stickery things that get into our carpet. And so if we walk on the carpet barefoot, like we step on it and they get kind of embedded in there and they’re super sharp. So if you’ve ever stepped on a Lego in the middle of the night, it doesn’t even come close to stepping on a goat head. It will, it’s like a sharp pin sticks into your foot. And it is so incredibly painful. And I’m like literally pulling 5, 10, 15 goat heads outta my carpet every single day. And so I don’t walk around. I put shoes on whenever I walk around my house, but they’re terrible. And getting rid of them has been, we’ve spent an entire year hiring people, trying to take care of them, spraying them, ridding them, and they just keep coming back.

So this, I just really wanna drive this home. Weeds can also be incredibly painful. And oftentimes they’re hard to get rid of, and there’s a point to that in this podcast because it takes effort. You have to keep working at it. My husband and I are committed to ridding our backyard of goat heads. There will be a day when we don’t have them anymore, but it’s gonna take a lot of time and effort and energy and an investment to really get rid of them all, but it will be worth it right now. We’re dealing with them and eventually we’ll get it, we’ll like to work on it. But this is the whole point of why it’s so necessary to talk about this, because this is the same kind of work that we have to be doing in our own personal gardens. Like there are some weeds, like all of us have some goat head type weeds that are taking up space and causing pain in our lives.

And this is what, like, I want us to get rid of those, to dig them up, to uproot them and to clear them out of our lives, because those thoughts, those negative thoughts, those negative beliefs, they’re causing us a lot of pain. And in some ways they’re choking out the life that we really wanna be living and the joy and the fun, all of it that we, that we so eagerly want to have. And that we’re longing for. So that’s the big question. How do we do this? Well, first of all, we have to identify. What’s like the weeds? We can’t get rid of them unless we know what the weeds are and how much they’re, how much pain they’re causing us and what kind of damage they’re doing. And so this for me was one of the biggest epiphanies was really getting clear because a lot of these weeds, they’re, they’re just these really negative self-destructive thoughts that we have.

And so often they’re hovering in our subconsciousness. And so in order to actually really see and address them, we have to bring them to the surface. And so how do we do this? A lot of times, it starts with identifying certain feelings that we’re having more often than not. We feel a certain way. And we have a sense of the feeling because it’s a physical sensation in our body. We feel it like maybe we feel defeated or we feel sad, or we just feel bad about ourselves. And we can identify that first. And then we can stop and pause and say, okay, what am I thinking? And then we can bring the thought to the surface. Oh, I’m thinking this thought again. And so this is what I started to do in my own life. I started to pull those thoughts from my subconsciousness into my consciousness.

Awareness is the key. It’s the very first necessary step that we need to have in order to actually get rid of them. We have to first see them and know what they are and in my life. And maybe you’ve heard me share this before on other podcast episodes, or if you’re in masters, you’ve probably heard me talk about this. There was many, many years, a good 20 some years of my life, where I was constantly telling myself, like believing, like having these really negative thoughts and then believing them. And those weeds that were growing we’re really, really painful. There were a lot of thoughts about myself when I started to really pull them to the surface and look at them. I couldn’t even almost believe what I was seeing. I had major goat heads. in my mind, there are things that I would tell myself and say to myself about myself, things I would believe about myself that I literally cannot even speak out loud.

I can’t even say them out loud. They were so horrible. But some of them, and as I’ve mentioned before, like there is one, like, it’s even embarrassing for me to say this right now, but like one of the thoughts that I would say about myself that I believe that was one of those toxic painful weeds was that I am so disgusting. Like that was a thought that I used to have about myself all the time. I am so disgusted. Like I believed that about myself. There were many thoughts about myself that I believe were just horrible and disgusting. And that’s what shaped me, like when I looked at myself and saw myself, that was the lens that I was looking through. And you can see how destructive that is. And I’m sure that for those of you that know me personally or have been listening to the podcast and, or have been following the work that Sterling and I are doing, like you’d prob like it, it probably makes you sad to hear that, like to think like Lorissa really used to say that to herself all the time.

She believed that about herself. Like that makes me sad. Like it makes me sad to think that I did that to myself. And it also, like I have heard other women say that or very similar things about themselves, like women that I know and love very much. And when I hear that, it makes me sad. It should. And so for me, like pulling those thoughts to the surface, that was the very first step. And then the next step is disassociating from that thought. So many of us believe that the thoughts we have about ourselves are just who we are. Like, our thoughts are who we are, but that’s not true. We have so many thoughts that they’re not, that’s not just who we are. We might be having a thought about who we perceive ourselves to be, but it’s just a thought and it’s one of the most powerful things we can do when we disassociate ourselves from that thought.

So in the example of I’m so disgusting, a way to disassociate from that is for me to realize like, whoa, I’m first of all, look at this horribly terrible weed I’m believing, but then disassociating from it and saying, actually I’m not disgusting. That’s not who I am. That’s not my identity. It’s just the thought that I’m having about myself. And then I can separate myself, my identity from that thought, that’s the disassociation piece. And I can look at it. And this is where we can ask ourselves questions. Like, is it true? Is this what I really wanna believe? Is this thought serving me, does this thought help me to feel better? Or is it making me a better person thinking these thoughts? And one of our truest tests of whether a thought is true or not, or good or not, or self-serving, or not is to actually ask ourselves the question is this who God says I am.

Does God look at me and say, Lorissa, you’re so disgusting when I look at you, I see you as a disgusting person. And when I started to look at it from that perspective, I knew instantly that it was a lie, that it was a thought, it wasn’t my identity. It wasn’t who I was. And it no longer needed to be a thought that I entertained anymore. Now that was just one massive weed. But in doing this process of pulling it to the surface and analyzing it, disassociating from it and really doing this work of saying, is this what I wanna believe about myself? Does this serve me? Is this God’s truth about me? And when the answer kept being no, no. I knew at that moment that I never wanted that weed to ever be in my garden again. And I dug it out and I threw it away.

And this is the deal. No one else could have done that for me. No one, I had to do it for myself. I had to be the one to uproot that thought and to say no more, you are not welcome here. Not in my garden, not in my mind, not in my thoughts. And I can tell you, after having years of having that thought entertaining, that thought, believing that thought. And even though that thought became part of my identity in a few short moments of going through this process, I eliminated it. I pulled it. I eliminated it from my mind and from my garden forever. Mm-Hmm I have not had that thought. I mean, maybe that thought has come up, but I have not given it a second. I have not planted it, replanted it, watered it in any capacity. And I will never, I firmly believe that for the rest of my life, I will never allow that thought to take root in my life ever again, there is no place for that.

And there is no place for a thought like that to ever be cultivated in any garden in any one of us. Now, this is the deal though, when we uproot the weeds and throw them out, we are left with kind of a hole there, right? Like there’s a hole like, and there’s dirt. And we don’t wanna just leave it like that. We don’t wanna just have a plot of dirt that doesn’t have weeds in it. What we want to do is replant, beautiful flowers that begin to grow and blossom. And this, my sisters in Christ, this takes work too. And when I’m working with clients, part of it’s like twofold work. It’s, it’s digging up the weeds and throwing them away and that’s hard and that’s painful, but then it’s planting the new seeds and planting the new thoughts and the positive ones and the things that we want to really believe about ourselves.

And this is really hard for a lot of us to do. And it was hard for me to do at the beginning. It’s gotten a lot easier, but this work is super important. And I think one of the reasons why it’s so difficult is because it feels uncomfortable. We have no problem watering the negative seeds and letting those weeds grow. But man planting the good seeds, planting, the beautiful ones, that’s hard and it just takes practice and it takes work. And I wanna tell you again, no one else is responsible for that. Now we will look to everyone else in our lives. Like we long for, deep down inside, we wanna be seen, we wanna be known. We value compliments. And when people say nice things about us, it does feel good. But all of that doesn’t really matter if we just have a bunch of weeds in our garden.

And it also doesn’t matter if we just have a bunch of plots of dirt, we have to be the ones that are cultivating and planting the flowers. And we can hope that other people will plant seeds, those good seeds within us, but we actually have to do the work first, those other people’s thoughts about us or their compliments about us, those will only go so far. Those aren’t really being planted unless we’re willing to take them and plant them. They can’t plant them for us. They can kinda sprinkle ’em out there, but they cannot actually plant and toil and water them. And so we have to do this work ourselves. And so where do we start with this? Cuz sometimes it’s really difficult to come up with and believe really good thoughts about ourselves, especially if for so long we’ve been believing the negative ones.

But first of all, I want you to think about the beautiful plants and flowers that you wanna plant in your garden. I want you to think about the roses HRA Lily’s PS, tulips, lilac. Lil’s like, what are they? I want you to just imagine for a moment, this beautiful, beautiful garden and know that this my sisters in Christ, this is what we’re called to cultivate and every good and true and beautiful thought that comes into our heart and mind from God. And the truth of who we are. These are all these beautiful flowers and this is the work that we’re called to cultivate. And so to start with this, what I want you to do is I want you to imagine yourself as a little girl, maybe six or seven years old. I want you to cl if you, if you’re not driving or walking right now, I want you to close your eyes.

And I want you to picture her just sweet and innocent and loving and kind like, look at her. I want you to imagine she’s like maybe standing outside and in some grass in a grassy area. And like, what do you see when you look at her? You see just like a beautiful, precious daughter of God. And right now I want you to think about the things that if you were to be able to plant really beautiful thoughts in her mind about herself as a little girl says six year old. And those were the thoughts that were gonna grow over the years. What would you wanna tell her if you had this one moment in time to plant the thoughts that would live in her, in her mind for a lifetime, what would those thoughts be? What does that little girl need to hear at this moment from you? Would you tell her how beautiful she is? How loved she is, how amazing and talented she is, how proud you are of her and how she’s gonna become an amazing young woman and eventually an extraordinary mother. Like what would you like if you could plant the most beautiful seeds that will become and blossom into the most beautiful flowers, what do you wanna tell her? What do you, what seeds do you wanna plant in this little girl’s mind?

And then I want you to think about yourself as a teenage girl, maybe 13 years old, like just going into those teen years. If you could go back and sit with her for a few moments, what are the seeds that you wanna plant knowing that there’s gonna be some weeds coming into her, into her life, but what are the beautiful seeds that you wanna plant in her mind? You wanna tell her that she’s an amazing and beautiful, bright, hardworking, intelligent, young woman, that she has so many gifts and a true heart for loving and caring for others. She’s a good friend and she has big dreams. And do you wanna just tell her, like, just hold onto those dreams that God loves you and he sees that you are so good and so beautiful. Like what would you wanna tell that 13 year old version of you?

And then jump ahead into your young adult years and early twenties when the whole world is ahead of you, what do you wanna do? What would you wanna say to her to build her up? What sees you on a plane in her mind? And so you can see how this exercise is so important. And even after this podcast is over, I want you to spend some time thinking about this, maybe journaling about it, going back and writing down all the things that you would wanna tell yourself at, at different stages of your life. And then I want you to look at those. Look at those words, look at those phrases. And my sister in Christ. These are the phrases that we want to replace those weeds with.

These are the ones that we want to plant. Like we pull the weeds, we pull up all those negative thoughts. We pull ’em and we get rid of them. And now we have to kind of toil the dirt a little bit and plant these new seeds. And it’s hard sometimes to believe these things about us, that we’re beautiful and good and smart and hardworking and talented and amazing. But this is like where we need to go. And the beauty of these thoughts is that we can look at them again. They’re just thoughts. We can look at them and say like, are these the thoughts that are these, like the truths that God believes about me? And we can embrace that and say, yeah, when God looks at me, he sees that I am good. And he created me to be his beautiful beloved daughter.

And he has given me gifts and talents to make a difference in this world. And this is the work that we are called to do again, my sister in Christ, no one else can do this work for us. We cannot hire a gardener to come and do this no matter how much we wish we could. We have to be the one to put the gloves on and to do this for ourselves. But my goodness, when we do it and we pay attention to those thoughts. And when we become very intentional with what we wanna plant, it changes things. It changes our life. It affects who we become and how we see ourselves. And it does impact our identity and how we show up in this world. And it does have an effect on our daughters, our children, on those around us. They start seeing it.

And our beautiful garden starts to bless others in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine. And so my sister in Christ, are you willing to do this work? Are you willing to get your hands dirty? Are you willing to go all in, on yourself? And the real question is if you don’t, what will it cost you? What is the cost? What is the cost of continuing to water the weeds and to let them grow for me. As I mentioned before, it was 20 years of 20 to 25 years of a lot of negative self-talk that affected my self-esteem, my self-worth, my self, my dignity, my value, all of it. And it had a really negative impact on me. And once I realized that I didn’t have to live like that anymore, it really did change everything. And my life significantly improved because of it.

And I’m not done. Like my work is not done. I still have a lot of work to do. And I have a lot of hope for my future because of it. But I honestly believe this. I believe that the quality of my life and the moments within my life will be directly impacted by the quality of thoughts that I have about myself and about my relationships, about my dreams and about who I believe God made me to be. There’s always a correlation to that. And in the years ahead, I want to create the most amazing life for myself and for my family. And I know it starts with creating and cultivating the most beautiful garden that I can create. And it’s, and it all starts with my thoughts. It starts with how I talk to myself, how I treat myself, how I compliment myself, how I celebrate my wins, how I recognize, like when I do something well or do something good.

And I, and I acknowledge that when I make mistakes, it also means how, like I talk to myself about that. Do I beat myself up? Do I kick myself when I’m down? Or do I have compassion? Do I pick myself back up? Do I dust myself back off? Do I go to confession? If I need to, I treat myself with mercy and compassion, all of that, right? All of that is indicated by how I’m taking responsibility for creating a beautiful life for myself. And I know that I am worth it. And this is why. And this leads to probably my biggest question for you. And for me, are you ready? I wanna know this. Whoever asked you for your permission to come into this world, do you have any memory of God ever asking you before you were born? If you even wanted to come into this world to have a life, to be born into the family or into the time that you were brought into, did you give permission for that? As far as we know, the answer is no, none of us gave permission. None of us said, yes, I wanna be born. I wanna be brought into this world. And yet my sister in Christ, here we are. We’re here. We’ve been given one precious, sacred, unrepeatable life. We are here and it begs this question. Why, why are we here? If we didn’t, we weren’t asked if we wanted to be here, but we, we just are. And ultimately the answer to this question comes down to this. God wanted us.

He wanted you. And he wanted me here right now in this world, in this time, in this life. And there has never been, and there will never be another you and there will never be. And there has never been another me. We are meant to be here because God wanted us here. And God gave us personality and gifts and talents. And he saw that it was necessary and good for us to be in this life at this time. And that he has a plan and a mission. And not only that, it’s not only what we can do or what we can accomplish, but God just wanted us. He wanted us, he created us out of love simply so that he could love us for all of eternity. He loved us into existence. He holds us in existence by his love, and he desires to love us forever.

And our little tiny brains could spend a lifetime just trying to unpack this one truth that the God of the universe, the star breeding God, that breeds planets and galaxies into existence actually just wants us and loves us so much like that. That’s like we could spend forever just unpacking that. But what does this tell you? What does this tell me about us and our extraordinary value and our extraordinary worth and our dignity is to tell us everything. And it also tells us a lot about God and who he is and what his love looks like and what he thinks about you and what he thinks about me. If he felt that it was necessary, if he wanted to create us, it should tell us something really, really important about us. It should tell us a lot of things that we want, that we were dreamt up millions of years ago as the heart and mind of God who is love.

And I don’t know about you, but when I take some time to actually think about this and contemplate this, my heart wants to explode. The fact that he wants me, that he created me simply because he wants me is breathtaking. Beautiful. And to think that he has given me this one life to know that he loves me and to be loved by him, means something really significant to me. And the things that I’ve come to discover in my almost 46 years of life is that when you realize how deeply loved you are by God and how much he wants you and how much he believes in you and how much goodness he sees in you and how precious your one life is. You start to realize that you don’t want to waste another second watering the weeds that keep us from realizing the truth of who we are.

My sister’s in Christ our days and hours are literally numbered. Our life is so sacred and so precious, but it is like we don’t have forever to figure this out or to take responsibility. Like we have to do this work now because the weeds, they just get in the way of who God knows we can be and wants us to be. And they get in the way of us showing up as his beloved. And when we truly and completely embrace the reality that God loves us more than life itself and that we are here because he wanted us here, changes everything. And then we realize, now it’s up to us. I know I take full responsibility. Like it’s up to me to love myself in the fullest ability that I can to constantly be working on loving myself and recognizing the gift that I am in this world, recognizing that we are sacred, that we are his beloved, that we are precious and talented and amazing.

And all the things like that’s my job too, to really plant those seeds. And the more I plant them, the more I can hear him telling me these things and the more I can hear and experience and receive the love from other people as well, because mine is well planted and it’s blooming and I’m cultivating it. And I get to just reap the rewards of feeling good about myself and seeing my potential and knowing that I can do great things and build up his kingdom. Because when I love myself, it is a form of loving him back because he made me, he sees me as his precious gift. And the way I love myself is honoring the precious gift that he made of me. But when I cultivate the weeds, I’m simply just focusing on all my inadequacies and my life turns very inward. I actually feel very self-absorbed in some ways, even when I focus on all my negative attributes, I find myself complaining more often, I place myself small, I feel self consumed and I get wrapped up in all my insecurities and my weaknesses and my lackings.

And this is why like, this is why we have to uproot those weeds because they don’t serve us. And they certainly don’t serve God in any capacity. But when I focus on planting seeds of self love, I begin to focus on my purpose. I see my gifts and talents as extraordinary assets from God. And I turn outward as myself, love and myself worth and myself as self worth. And my self esteem grew. It pours out. And I show up in this world wanting to glorify God with who I am. And again, as I mentioned, then my garden becomes a gift to others. And we know how this works when we’re in the presence of another woman that we know, like she really loves herself in a beautiful and true and authentic way. Like we are so drawn to that. It ignites something within us.

Like we’re like, wow, look at this woman. And, and I’ve been blessed to have women like that in my life that I’ve been around. I’m like, wow, look at her, look at her light shine. And so we need more women in our lives like that. And we need to be the women in other women’s lives that are like that. When we truly love ourselves, we give others the permission and the inspiration to do the same. And most particularly the children and the daughter, like our daughters and our sons in our lives and the people that look to us and look up to us and truly they want so badly to see a woman that knows her worth and knows her dignity and knows that she is beloved and she lives like she is. She treats herself like she is like, that is who God is calling us to be.

And that is where we can have such a big impact in the lives of others. And finally, my sisters in crisis, I wrap this up. I wanna say this, although we are 100% responsible for doing this work for ourselves, we need each other to help support us in it. And so I want to invite you. This is the day to day hard work that we are doing in our master’s program. It’s the reason why Sterling and I created, made for greatness. This podcast, and ultimately masters, was to create a community of women that are committed to doing this work. And we believe that in doing so, we will change the world and that we will continue to cultivate and grow so many beautiful gardens together. We need each other. We need to surround ourselves with women that are focusing on doing this and living like this and who are committed to loving themselves fiercely so that they can go out and love others in a far deeper and greater capacity. Because as you know, my sister in Christ, we are Made for Greatness.