A Journey from Surviving to Thriving

 Post #46 — My Final Post  (Written from a heavenly perspective and sent out November 24, 2023, just hours after transitioning to my final home)  Dear friends, as of today, November 24, I am now breathing celestial air—without any supplemental oxygen whatsoever! God has just called me home!! Hallelujah!! Oxygen tanks and tubes are forever gone! My lungs are now SHOUTING OUT praises to God with full capacity… and without a single trace of IPF!! What an amazing experience this has been already! Words can’t even begin to describe it!  I’ve asked my sister and able blog assistant, Ruth Ann, to send you this post in my absence. I am so very grateful to each of you for your partnership we’ve had in our journey together. What an incredible journey it has been! I trust that our partnership has been, in at least some small way, helpful to you in your walk with God. To My Family and Friends I have been deeply honored and gratified for

  Post # 45 - The Gift of Resilience  (Written early November 2023, but sent out November 23, just the day before going Home) Here's a word that's been tugging at my mind recently: "resilience."  What is it? where does it come from? How does one get it? I'm calling it a "gift" --but is it? Or do we develop it? How does having resilience help us thrive? These are the questions we want to explore in this post. What is Resilience? The dictionary defines resilience as "the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness." The word r esilience  comes from two Latin words: Re,  meaning "back" and Salire, meaning "to jump or leap." So, the literal definition of the word resilient  basically means "to jump back" or "to bounce back". We all face those unpleasant or unfortunate situations in life when we've said something or committed a really stupid error that we regret--the sort of th