Mental Health: Finding Your Path to Thriving with Carla Arges

GRACED HEALTH PODCAST

Episode: Mental Health: Finding Your Path to Thriving

Guest: Carla Arges

Host: Amy Connell

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AMY: Hey Carla, welcome to the Graced Health Podcast.

CARLA: Thank you so much for having me.

AMY: I've been looking forward to this and we have had a decent amount of conversations here on the show about mental health, but I don't think we've had an intimate conversation with someone who very publicly talks about her mental health struggles and as that relates to her faith. So first, I just want to thank you for reaching out and offering to come on because I'm really excited to hear more of your story and more how you are serving women in this space. I was wondering if we could just start with you giving us a kind of a snapshot—which I realize is a terrible word to use, but—

CARLA: The Cliff Notes. The Cliff Notes. Otherwise, we'll be here a long time.

AMY: Well, whatever you feel. You have your own podcast so you know how this goes. Whatever you feel comfortable sharing as it relates to your own mental health story.

CARLA: Yeah. You know, thank you so much for having me and for having these discussions, right? The more we talk about it, the more we break down stigmas. So I really appreciate your voice in this space. 

My mental health struggles became apparent when I was in my preteen age, but what led there had a lot to do with childhood trauma and really the way the nervous system and the brain develops within trauma. I'm a big believer that most mental illnesses have some root in some sort of developmental trauma. And oftentimes when we hear trauma, we think big trauma—like big abuses, big sexual violations. And I don't think what a lot of people realize is that when you're growing up, if there's any sense of unsafety or insecurity with your primary caregivers—and that can be from an emotional or mental perspective—it can create trauma in your nervous system, in your brain. 

And so really I had those roots there that started to show up more in my preteens. I had my first suicide attempt when I was 13.

AMY: Oh.

CARLA: And like I said, there was difficulty in my family home, childhood trauma in my family home, and I ended up on my own when I was 14, homeless and just surviving and not doing a very good job of keeping myself healthy. I turned to alcohol and drugs and a lot of other things to sort of numb the pain and deal with the turmoil that was happening on the inside.

I had been misdiagnosed with a few different types of depression, but got my accurate diagnosis just maybe six or seven years ago.

AMY: Wow.

CARLA: Yeah, it's been a journey. Part of which is, you know, when someone's giving you a diagnosis, they're relying a lot on what you're telling them.

AMY: Mm-hmm.

CARLA: And for me, I grew up having things that I didn't realize were not normal. I thought they were normal. So I wasn't sharing the complete picture of what was happening with me, because I just thought that was me. It was my personality or just how I was wired. Little did I know, that was actually a malfunctioning in my system.

So I got diagnosed with bipolar and borderline personality disorder and have just been navigating that, really seeking God for healing. I was resistant at first to labels in my early twenties. I was resistant at first to medication after having some bad experiences with them as a teenager. I questioned God "why" a lot.

AMY: Mm-hmm.

CARLA: And He's so good and He's so gentle. When I got to the point where I could actually surrender and say, "Okay, Lord, what are we doing here? How can I surrender this to you? How can I partner with the Holy Spirit in how you want to use this in my life and what you want me to do with my life?" And I realized that getting to a place of thriving with trauma and mental illness really was a partnership with the Holy Spirit. It wasn't just praying for instantaneous healing. There was stuff I had to do, stuff I had to lay down, stuff I had to change—empowered, of course, by the Holy Spirit.

AMY: So I'm going to work backwards from a couple things you said there. You know, when you talk about thriving and that was done in partnership with the Holy Spirit—that sounds very familiar to some people who are in recovery and who have gone through a 12-step program. And of course 12-step, the traditional 12-step program, is based in Christianity, but now it's more of just like a higher power. But in terms of laying things down, surrendering and doing that in partnership with your higher power—or if you are a Jesus follower, with God. 

I also feel like I just need to say: I'm so sorry for the circumstances that landed you to be homeless at 14, attempting to take your own life at 13. That's a lot. That's a lot. And that's such a young age to have to carry all of that. I'm sure people have said "I'm sorry," but—

CARLA: Well, you know, thank you. God has—God doesn't waste anything and he brings purpose to so much of our pain. And what was so painful back then I see as such purpose now.

AMY: Mm-hmm.

CARLA: I view it completely differently than I did, you know, 10, 20 years ago.

AMY: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you know, you say you didn't get a diagnosis until six or seven years ago. Do you mind sharing your age?

CARLA: Oh yeah, so I am in about three weeks turning 46.

AMY: Okay.

CARLA: And so I had diagnoses, but the treatment for those diagnoses was never working. And so it wasn't until we had the right diagnosis that we could tackle it with the right treatment because not all mental illnesses are created equal. And depression can be a symptom of a lot of different illnesses rather than being the main illness itself. And with me, I tend to be on the depressive side. So I was always diagnosed with different types of depression until I actually ended up with a manic episode and they're like, "Oh, this is bipolar. Why didn't you tell us that you were having all these other experiences?" And I was like, "Oh, I just thought those were high energy days."

AMY: Right, right.

CARLA: And those were good until it got not good.

AMY: I apologize if you get this question a lot, but are you familiar with or have you read the book "Every Note Played" by Lisa Genova?

CARLA: I have not.

AMY: Okay, so Lisa Genova is a brilliant author. She's a PhD and I think she's a neuroscientist, and so she will take issues of the brain and create a novel around it. So it's a novel. And so she wrote "Still Alice"—a lot of people are familiar with that—in terms of dementia and Alzheimer's, early Alzheimer's was the main character. I literally just finished this book and it was about a young, it was about a 20-year-old girl who was diagnosed with bipolar and was written from her perspective. And so it's interesting too, because like one of the things it was saying in that book was sometimes you get medication for your depression, but that can trigger—

CARLA: Mania. Yeah.

AMY: Yeah.

CARLA: Yeah. SSRIs are not the forefront of bipolar treatment now, for the most part, unless you're medication resistant. Bipolar is highly, highly effectively treated with the right medication. So when I struggle day to day now, and I do, it's less about bipolar and much more borderline. So borderline personality is the nemesis I face on a more daily basis.

AMY: Can you tell us what that is? Because I'm not super familiar with borderline personality disorder.

CARLA: Sure. It's not multiple personalities, which sometimes people get that confused. Borderline personality, unlike bipolar which is a mood disorder, borderline personality is a personality disorder. It has similarities to bipolar in that there's highs and lows. But bipolar, your highs and lows can last weeks and months at a time where borderline, your highs and lows can switch multiple times in a single day.

Borderline has high, high rejection sensitivity, high, high, high rejection sensitivity. So any sort of perceived rejection, I feel like I'm going to die.

AMY: Okay.

CARLA: Like literally in my body, it feels like I'm going to die.

AMY: Okay.

CARLA: There is high instances of substance abuse and suicidality with borderline. Not everyone that has trauma will get borderline, but most people with borderline have trauma in their past. So it is highly correlated to brain development during trauma.

AMY: Mm-hmm. And going back up to when you were saying you didn't disclose a lot because that was just normal to you. I think it would—it's very easy to not recognize things because that's the water you've been swimming in.

CARLA: Exactly.

AMY: Yeah. And then sometimes just getting out and having new experiences or learning more can help us realize like, "Oh, that, you know, maybe that's not quote unquote normal."

CARLA: Yeah, I mean, you don't know what you don't know. I didn't know that not everyone's brain didn't race a hundred miles an hour.

AMY: Right?

CARLA: I didn't know that, you know, me suddenly having a great new business idea one week and then crashing and burning the next week was like hypomania. I didn't realize that, you know, some of the rage I experienced—I had like out-of-body rage—was borderline. I just thought, "Man, I have a bad temper. That must be the Sicilian in me." Well, no, it wasn't.

AMY: Yeah. Well, thank goodness that did end up coming out and then that you were able to start healing and getting treatment from that. Which is a good segue into my next question because you have talked about navigating your mental health issues while living out your faith. So can you talk about—you came to a place of healing with that, what that looks like in practice and then also how that threads into your medication. And because I love that you're talking about this because, you know, like I have hypertension, I'm on blood pressure medication. I feel no shame about it. And, you know, people should feel no shame for taking medication for that, or SSRIs if that's what they need to have. And for some reason there's just this—I think we're getting better about it.

CARLA: Yeah.

AMY: I would love for you to talk a little bit about that and overlaying faith. And also there's—if you can address too, when your faith really started playing into this, because you said earlier, you know, you would ask God "why." And I love that you had that in you at 13, at 14, to be asking God about that despite the struggles, because I think a lot of people would be like, "Well, if God loved me, he wouldn't let me feel this way."

CARLA: Mm-hmm. Well, I will say that I have, you know, some people may call this church hurt, but I have had people in the church say things to me that are not helpful. So, "If you just prayed more," "You need to have more faith in God that heals," right? "You got to search your life for unrepentant sin." 

Just last year someone went to my husband and said, "Don't you think Carla's limiting the power of God to move in her life if she's taking medication?" And so there's still these ideas that exist in the church, and all that does is heap spiritual burden onto someone who's already struggling. 

Now can we experience depression and anxiety from a spiritual realm and as a consequence of misalignment in our spirit and in our life? Absolutely. However, unless you're a professional and able to determine what's going on with someone, you should never just assume that, right? Depression, bipolar, OCD, borderline—these are physiological things as much as they are anything else. 

And so for me, I went from asking "why"—I grew up in a Christian home. I think part of my confusion with God is that I was a PK. I was a pastor's kid, and yet I had all this trauma and darkness in my home behind closed doors, and I had a really hard time reconciling the God I was hearing about on a Sunday to the life that I was living the other six days of the week in my home.

And I moved away from God a lot in my teenage years, even though he didn't move away from me. And when I came back to God, because he never stopped calling me and inviting me to draw near to him—in my early twenties after a lot more trauma, addiction, homelessness, teenage pregnancy, you know, just the devastating effects that borderline had in other areas of my life—I asked "why." I had bitterness and resentment in my heart towards my parents. We went through periods of estrangement and the Holy Spirit redirected me back to who loves me, who never leaves me or forsakes me, who redeems me, who restores me. 

And so that started what is a long journey in working with God on my health. And that started with not being afraid of a diagnosis. I think one of the things that happens is that there's a tendency to see a diagnosis as your identity.

AMY: Yeah.

CARLA: And when you operate from identity that's not rooted in Christ, you're going to not live the life that God has designed for you. So one, understanding that a diagnosis is just information about me that allows me to make decisions that better serve me. It's not my identity. 

And God took me through this deep dive Bible study on who I am in Christ. Looking at all the scriptures and really rooting down who I was in Christ. You see, childhood trauma, mental illness tries to speak into our identity and we create a set of core beliefs about who we are based on our wounding rather than based on the word.

And so learning how to rewrite those things, which is taking Romans 12:2—"be transformed, how? by the renewing of your mind"—and seeing what that looked like practically and seeing how neuroscience reveals how we renew our mind practically was one step towards healing. 

Another step was going to a therapist and working specifically with a trauma-informed therapist to do very specific trauma healing. We know that in the Bible we're told in a spiritual way we have pastors who can spiritually shepherd us. We see Luke was a physician. We know that for our bodies, we go to doctors. Well, our mind is another element of how we were created. So it's okay to seek guidance, support, expertise in that area too. So I became very open to that and I still am.

And then God showed me that, you know, thriving with mental illness, thriving with trauma had a lot to do with my individual choices. Not that I choose trauma, not that I choose mental illness, but what are my daily choices that either help me thrive or enable me to fall back into old patterning? So things like, what is my time with God? Things like, you know, what am I learning about my nervous system? How can I regulate my nervous system? God created our nervous system to protect us. It's a very good creation, and just like anything else, the enemy tries to disrupt God's creation.

So learning about my nervous system and how to practically reset that and heal that. What am I consuming? From food, because food can impact mood and brain chemistry, to what am I looking at on social media? What am I listening to? What is my rhythms of rest? Not just nighttime sleep, but what is our rhythms of rest? Oftentimes when people come from trauma, they have perfectionistic tendencies, over-performance tendencies, people-pleasing tendencies, all these things that actually lead to burnout. So what are the rhythms of rest am I incorporating into my day? And really looking at healing holistically. 

And some Christians cringe at the word holistic. They think that's woo, but God made us mind, body—

AMY: Because I use that word all the time.

CARLA: God created us mind, body, spirit, so we do ourselves a disservice when we look at mental illness just through the lens of spirit. We have to look at it through mind, body, spirit.

AMY: Amen. I am actually right in the middle of a small group study with my church, and we are talking—we've spent a lot of time on emotions. We have, I mean, and we have talked about the mind. Actually they say they do body, and then instead of mind, they'll say soul, because soul is part of your emotions and your mind.

CARLA: Yeah.

AMY: Same. Same. Right.

CARLA: Yeah.

AMY: And then spirit. So it's however you want to define it, but yeah, absolutely. And I love all of these choices that you lay out for us on a day-to-day basis. I mean, gosh, who wouldn't benefit from all of this? Whether or not you have a diagnosis or not? I mean, time with God, regulating your nervous system, what are you consuming? Whether it be through your eyes, through your mouth, through your ears. Rhythms of rest. That just sounds—it sounds reflective and peaceful and like something that I think everyone here in this Graced Health space is looking for. I think that's a good takeaway for everyone.

CARLA: And understanding what thriving actually means. Like I will have clients come to me and their vision of "I'm finally healed. I'm finally thriving" is "my whole life is lived on the mountaintop." That's not the human experience, right? Even people without trauma and without mental illness have highs and lows, have joy and sorrow. It is the human experience to go between the mountaintop and the valley. That is not really the evidence of being healed or thriving. 

The evidence of being healed and thriving is how do I navigate in the valley? How do I navigate on the mountaintop? It's how we move through life that indicates whether or not we're healed and thriving, not just having mountaintop experiences. We can't live in elation all the time.

AMY: Right. No, that's a great point. And I'll hear people say, "Well, I just want them to be happy," or "I just want to be happy." And yeah, sure. And you can't look any further than the Book of Psalms to see despair and lament and questioning and, you know, down. So I like how you're saying it's how do I navigate that? Because we will, we all have tough stuff.

CARLA: Yeah.

AMY: I've had lots of conversations with one of my kids. I'm like, look, I won't cuss because it's a Christian podcast. But I'm like, everybody has their stuff. Like everybody has their stuff. They're just—some people are not ready talking about it or not. And so it's how do we navigate that? How do we work through that?

CARLA: Yeah.

AMY: Yeah. And so I like that guidance that you give us of like, let's talk about navigating through that rather than avoiding the valleys.

CARLA: Yeah.

AMY: It reminds me of my dad growing up. He's a man of few words. Every now and then he'd go, "Peaks and valleys. Peaks and valleys." And it was normally like him doing a little pep talk to himself because, you know, tough at work or whatever. And so he was in the valley. He is like "peaks and valleys."

CARLA: Yeah. That's a human experience.

AMY: Exactly. I would love to hear, Carla, how God has been showing up in your life in unexpected, in powerful and beautiful ways when coupled with your diagnosis.

CARLA: Yeah, I mean, one of the big unexpected ways is what I do now for a living. You know, when God heals us, it's not just about us, right? He has—

AMY: Oh.

CARLA: A rippling effect he wants to do, and so he has not wasted my pain. He has taken what the enemy has wanted to use to harm me, and instead is allowing me to empower other Christian women as a mental health coach, as a podcaster, as a writer. I would never imagine that I write for the Bible app. I never would have thought that would be something that existed for me. And so turning my graves to gardens is one of the big ways he shows up and it's beautiful because—

I had this struggle with my borderline personality. Holding down a job for which I am technically trained for is just not possible. My background in university was in communications, corporate communications. I worked corporately nine to five, and every attempt that I have to work a quote unquote "normal job" almost leaves me hospitalized. And so I was like, "I can't do that, but I have to have something to give this world. There's got to be something." 

And God has taken me on a journey and it started with creating a deck of biblically based affirmation cards coming out of a year-long study he took me through. Then it came to like writing a book on Amazon that is geared towards supporting people with mental health. It's taken all these different routes that I would never have expected. 

I see God show up in how he has also taken my experience to make me a better mother. I have a son that has OCD. I am figuring out how to navigate that in ways that I would not know if I didn't have my own experiences and I didn't have my own healing. I'm able to help him and understand him in such a greater degree, and it has been a gift in my motherhood to be able to do that, and it has been a gift for him to see me, how I navigate through these things. And it's been a safe place for him to land. 

So God has taken what seems like a noose around my neck and made it into a great gift. And I remember one time when I was praying for healing—because listen, God still heals, you can still contend for healing and prayer—He revealed to me, and this was his personal revelation to me, it's not necessarily applicable to everyone else, but he revealed to me that he's using my illness to keep me tethered to him.

AMY: Oh.

CARLA: That without it I would be very prone to wander and do things my own way. And it's something that's keeping me tethered to him. And it reminds me of Paul. He didn't take Paul's thorn and said, he said, "My grace is sufficient." You know what that meant? That meant Paul had to rely on God for grace. There is a dependency that had to exist that maybe Paul, with all of his scholarly knowledge, would not have depended on God as much as he needed to be. And so sometimes what we think is our biggest thorn is actually a gift.

AMY: This is when it's hard to be a host, because if I was listening to that, I would pause and just let that sink in. That was so beautiful and powerful. And when you were talking about your son, you used the word "gift." That was exactly the word I thought of—is like, what a gift to have you as a mom who understands, you know, the paths that are not necessarily the traditional paths, but you can still navigate it.

CARLA: Yeah.

AMY: Oh, that was beautiful. Thank you for that. Let's talk some about one thing you mentioned earlier of people in church community saying, "Well, that's, you know, by taking medication that's just not allowing the Holy Spirit to fully work through her" and other nonsensical things. Sometimes we can, you know, sometimes we do hear messages that faith alone should be it to manage our mental health struggles. So how can you—how do you help women? Because I know you do coaching, you've got your podcast, and I want, I don't want to let you go before you tell us about your Bible app. Because I think that's something that a lot of women in my community would be interested in. But how do you help women blend these practical mental health tools with the biblical wisdom without, you know, with reminding them that they're not lacking faith if they're also utilizing other tools and resources that are out there?

CARLA: You know, tucked away in Timothy—I can't remember right now if it's First Timothy or Second Timothy—there's this verse that seems a little bit out of place, but I think it was a gift given to us. And so Timothy has been struggling with these stomach issues and it's impacting his ability to show up the way Paul has called him to show up and God has called him to show up.

And you know what Paul does? He gives him the medical advice of that time. He doesn't say, "Keep praying for your stomach issues." He says, "Take some wine and mix it with water and drink that," right? That was the medical equivalent of medicine to help heal his stomach. Probably he was drinking water that was contaminated. He had a stomach bug. Alcohol could be a good killer for that. And Paul said—maybe even passed along from Luke in companionship—said, "Put some wine in your water and drink it to help your stomach so you can get back to work." 

And so I love that little addition into the Bible where, you know, even Paul and the disciples would utilize the medical wisdom of that day. Why? So they could be more effective for the kingdom, right? In the same way—

AMY: I've read that and I've never, I've never read it that way.

CARLA: Yeah. And in the same way, if something is going to make us more effective for the kingdom, right? And that's the litmus test. Is this going to make me more effective for the kingdom? Then it's a gift. Then it's a gift. God in, especially in North America where we have access to so many things, God often uses that access to those things—to medicines, to therapists. 

And I'm not saying every mental health issue needs medication. I think probably there's been an over-prescribing of SSRIs in some capacity, especially with aging women going into perimenopause and looking at the fluctuation of hormones, giving an SSRI versus treating the hormonal deficiencies, right? So we may not—

AMY: That's a medical tool.

CARLA: Yeah, exactly. So the world may not have gotten it right perfectly in how they've been prescribing medication.

AMY: Mm-hmm.

CARLA: Yes. But medication is not a cure. It's an aid. You still need to—I call them my four pillars of thriving. You still need to be doing your pillars of thriving. You still got to be looking at nutrition and movement and renewing your mind and rest. Medication's only a tool. If you have everything else in your life still garbage, you're still not going to thrive just because you take a pill.

AMY: Mm-hmm.

CARLA: Right. So it's just one of many tools in a toolbox you can use in order to be your best for the kingdom.

AMY: Yes. I think it was in Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's book "The Body Keeps the Score"—I think it was in this book, but don't quote me on that. But he said if medication worked all the time, then we wouldn't need therapy. If therapy worked all the time, then we wouldn't need medication. So there absolutely is a place for both to coexist and to help each other out as part of the healing process. And that's not even including, you know, our lens of faith on the forefront of that.

CARLA: Because there's very real things like the way that my brain chemistry works. I'm bipolar. It is not helpful for me living a successful life. So I take a medication to address how my dopamine is functioning in my brain, and all of a sudden I'm a better mom. I'm a better wife. I'm capable of running a business. I am thriving in every aspect of my life. This has been a gift and so has therapy, particularly I've done ART. ART is just another form of EMDR, slightly different. A huge tool for trauma, huge tool that has helped me so much.

AMY: Yeah.

CARLA: Now I'm better. I'm more effective.

AMY: Yeah, both. And.

CARLA: Yeah.

AMY: Ands in our life rather than either/or.

CARLA: It's Bible and therapy. It's prayer and a lifestyle that supports healing. It is, you know, seeking the spirit and then also seeking intervention if needed.

AMY: Mm-hmm.

CARLA: It is "and."

AMY: Yes. Yes. Oh, that's so good. As we finish out, what do you wish—let's just say my community. So my community is primarily Jesus followers, women in their forties, fifties, sixties. We've got some a little bit on either side, but what do you wish that we knew about mental health issues? You can answer it however you want.

CARLA: I wish you knew that you didn't have to merely survive, that God's heart for you is to thrive and it's never too late to partner with the Holy Spirit in practical ways to do that.

AMY: Oh, that's really good. Okay. Thank you for that. You have mentioned several pieces of content that you have created. Tell us the name of your podcast. Tell us the name of your book. Tell us the name of your Bible app. I assume this is a devotional, like all the places, because I'm sure people are going to want to know and connect with you more.

CARLA: So I'm a content writer for the Bible app. So if you look at my name, you'd see different plans. I focus on the woman that's struggling in her mental health.

AMY: Okay.

CARLA: Because I focus on women that struggle. I write in bite-sized nuggets because I have found women that struggle don't have the capacity in the thick of it to digest big, long, deep things. So these are bite-sized bits of truth and encouragement and practical things that you can do. 

My podcast is called "Affirming Truth" and we just recently went on YouTube as well, so I think I only have three episodes on YouTube, but you can find it on all the podcast platforms. 

My website is carlaArges.com so if you ever wanted to explore any of the courses that I have—like I have a mini course on regulating your nervous system, I have a course on biblically based boundaries. And also if you ever wanted to explore working one-on-one with me, that would be the place that you would go.

AMY: Okay, that sounds good. And I told you this before we got on, but y'all listening, if you want to see a beautiful, stunning website, just go to carlaArges.com. It just takes my breath away. It's—

CARLA: Oh, thank you.

AMY: Yeah, it's so pretty. Mine is in desperate need of a makeover. Desperate. Okay, I've got a few questions I ask guests.

CARLA: Yes.

AMY: One of them is I love learning about people's tattoos because I found that when people choose to put something on their body for the rest of their life, they often have a meaning behind it. So I was wondering, if you have a tattoo, would you mind sharing what it is and the meaning behind it? And if you don't have one, but you absolutely had to get one, what would it be and where would it go?

CARLA: So I don't have a tattoo.

AMY: Okay.

CARLA: Honestly, there would be no circumstance that I would have one. What I would do is take that money because tattoos are expensive, and I'd go do a tour of the Greek islands. I love to travel. I would rather put any tattoo money to a trip.

AMY: Okay. I don't think I've ever received that firm of a no. I will not get a tattoo, but it is welcome here.

CARLA: Although, I mean, I guess technically I have a tattoo because I have my eyebrows micro-bladed.

AMY: Okay.

CARLA: Okay, so there you go. That's a tattoo.

AMY: Well, your eyebrows do look great. I will say that. Okay. You have shared how people can connect with you. Is there anywhere else besides your website that you want to point people?

CARLA: The website is basically a catchall. I also have lots of free resources on the website.

AMY: Okay, sounds good. Do you have a meaningful Bible verse that you would like to share with us?

CARLA: Yeah, I mean it's kind of cliche, but Romans 8:28 is always such a good encouragement for me that, you know, he will work all things out for good, for those who love him, for those who are called according to his purpose. And I have seen him work things out for good according to his purpose. Whenever I'm up against a new obstacle, whenever I'm up against a new struggle, I try to look at it instead of with dread, with curiosity. Wow. How is God possibly going to use this?

AMY: Yeah. That's great. I love that. That's the "and" part, right? Like, ooh, this is tough, and how is God going to use this? Okay. I'm going to let you have the last word. What is one simple thing that you would like our community to remember? Big or small, but just one nugget to walk away with.

CARLA: That you are seen and that you are loved.

AMY: Amen. Okay. That is all for today. Go out there and have a graced day.