Live your life, you know, you have to take chances, you have to believe in things, you have to try and you have to never take a day for granted.

Welcome to the Jesus Calling Podcast. When the problems of our life are pressing in from all sides, we can be blinded to the beautiful moments that are also happening.

Through our grief and pain, our sorrow and confusion, it's really tough to turn our eyes away from the wreck that's happening in front of us to focus on those little moments of joy that are inevitably sprinkled into the tough times.

Romans 3.5 tells us, we joyce in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Our guests this week were able to find rays of hope through times of adversity and change. We're speaking to talk show host Amanda Clutz, who lost her young husband Nick Cordero to COVID-19 in 2020, and managing editor of Catholic Women's Ministry Blessed Is She, Nell Illiri. Let's begin with Amanda's story.

My name is Amanda Clutz and I do a lot of different things. I am a talk show co-host on CBS show called The Talk. I am an author of The Book of Your Life. I own a fitness company called Amanda Clutz Fitness and I am a mom.

I grew up in Canton, Ohio, which is a suburb of what's about an hour south of Cleveland in a beautiful neighborhood called Avondale. It was kind of this idyllic neighborhood, kind of like a Norman Walkwell painting and a lot of old homes and beautiful tree covered streets.

There's five siblings in my family, so five of us total. I mean one brother, four sisters. We were all very close in age and we loved spending time together, loved doing things together, supporting one another.

My mom is a housewife and my dad's old insurance for his entire life worked every single day of his life except for Sundays.

And they just taught us the importance of hard work and kind of what it means to be a family and loving each other and putting family first and putting God first.

And we had a beautiful church that we went to with a Lutheran church and we were very involved in the church Sunday school, vacation Bible school, choir, catechism, acolytes and, you know, and Sundays and just kind of also loved that whole community growing up as well.

I wrote an essay and sixth grade that I wanted to be on Broadway and be a radio city rock cat. And we all went to a performing arts middle school, like a magnet school.

It sadly doesn't exist anymore. And so that's how I started dancing and performing in musicals and just fell in love with it.

And my mom and dad took us to New York for like a Easter weekend and I saw the Rockettes perform and I was like this is what I want to do with my life.

And so I knew very early on and kind of always just had that in the back of my head as I grew up and went to high school and then deciding what college to go to.

I definitely was the only kid in my family that wanted to move to New York to be on Broadway.

But luckily with a lot of persuasion from teachers and myself, my parents actually moved me to New York when I was 18 years old and allowed me go to musical theater school conservatory and efforts to make those dreams come true.

I remember even at a very, very early age starting to dance and just loving how it made me feel.

While I was dancing, well, you know, I would be even in ballet class at the bar and hearing the pianist play music and dancing to it moving.

For me, movement in any kind of movement, whether it's dancing, you know, a ballet class or running on a treadmill or jumping rope or, you know, whatever it is going for a walk, it's like it's just an instant mind shifter, body shifter.

It never doesn't help. So I feel like that's how I could best describe it. It just never doesn't help. It will always make me feel better, especially if I put music on.

I don't know. There's just something about movement for me that really just kind of is my number one mental health anxiety stress reliever.

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