Well, hello, friends, welcome back to the Ruth Joe Simon's podcast. I recently was asked a question

while I was on stage for a Q&A, and the question was,

have I ever experienced? They asked, have you ever experienced a time where you lost a friend

or didn't have support for when you were first starting out in your work.

I think I got that right.

So the question was basically, have you ever experienced lack of support or just felt that your friendships fell off when you were just starting out and trying to do this work that, you know, at the time on stage,

they were addressing things like my book

writing or starting a business or being online. And I smiled and I said, oh, yes, I know that feeling.

Maybe I have not experienced it to the degree that some others have, but I have a story to share

about that. You see, when I first started off, I remember

the blog started in, I think, 2008, I believe that's right. And I don't know if you all know this,

but I started the blog because I had a PC and we kept all the photos on that computer. And man cub number three, Judah,

who went through the spine surgery, if you guys have listened to the previous episodes,

he is now 18, but he was a toddler. I think he was two years old. And the computer crashed and we lost

all our photos. And so I started the blog and I called it Grace Lace, Finding Grace in the

everyday, in part because I thought, okay, rather than just keep all these photos sitting here,

I'm going to not only document my family and

my life, but also talk about how God's grace intersects my daily life. That's always been my

goal. And here we are all these years later. And even on the Ruth Joe Simon's podcast,

I'm really talking about how God's grace and how the gospel impacts our everyday life. And so I started writing.

And at first, I knew it wasn't like a photo journal. I knew the blog wasn't a photojournal. I knew it was

to kind of work out some of these things that were going on in my mind and my heart. And then a few

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