Brave Heart, Brave Soul. She who is brave is free.

“May we think of freedom not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right.”  ~ Peter Marshall I am the daughter of a soldier. I was born into a family of those who serve. My life from the very beginning was one of love for country. From the time I could sit up my heart was wrapped in the red, white and blue. On this day, November 11, 2016 I wanted to say thank you to my dad and acknowledge the great man that he is. My dad was born and raised into the military. His dad was a pilot in the Air Force and served in the Navy during WW2. My dad being the rebel he was decided it wasn’t enough to fly those birds, no; he had to jump out of them. And jump he did. At the age of 17 my dad enlisted in the Army and never fully looked back. He was a soldier, and his life as a GI was carved into his dog tags. He trained hard, sending all his money home to take care of his younger brothers and sister living as modestly as possible. By the time he met my ...

Life can get pretty complicated but so can people. We tend to get stuck in one chapter of our story and can’t turn the page. We simply get lost in this great big abyss of why and what if’s while the story of who we are is still being written. I think in our journey to find ourselves we tend to try and erase all our not so great moments as if they never happened. But is this really the way we want to have our story told? I like what Andrea Dykstra has to say about it. She puts it like this, “In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experiences that shaped you.” Our experiences are profound, and we need each one of them not only to understand who we are but to find ourselves. We can’t change where we’ve been, the pain, the hurt or the rejection we’ve faced. These things shape us, they make us  who we are.  We can't pretend our past hasn't happened but can use each experience to push us forward. We're all lost and insecure at times but that doesn’t mean we ca...