Hi everyone, welcome to Add Home with Sally. I'm Sally Clarkson and I have the biggest

privilege in the world to be with so many friends from all over the world who join me every

week to listen to my stories, inspiration, biblical encouragement and I am just so glad that

you're here today. Thanks so much for joining me.

Hi my friends, it's Sally Clarkson and I am jumping into a new podcast series today and

I've never done a podcast series in this. I don't think it's on my old book actually called

Dancing with My Heavenly Father, Choosing Joy in a Less Than Perfect World. And it's

so funny because I oftentimes would get letters from people, not often, I get mostly encouraging

letters, thank you very much. But sometimes I get letters from people and say I just don't

identify with you at all because your life is so easy and everything turns out perfectly

for you and my life isn't like that. And that always makes me giggle because I think that well

for one thing, none of us have a perfect life and the Clarkson's lives have been far from perfect.

And so what I really hope that this will be is a summary fresher for you because I think as I

look back on my own journey as a single woman and then as somebody who's been married for almost 38

years and as a mom and as somebody in Christian ministry and somebody who is also in the work

in world, I've been through a lot of challenges and difficulties and I've been depressed to my toes

a few times when I truly thought, Joy and I and Joel were talking this weekend about two or three

times when I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. And so I'm not giggling about that but I do

look back and I think wow, I guess that sometimes people don't understand that my commitment to this

whole concept of cultivating joy, learning to have joy, choosing joy is something that has had to be

seeds that were planted, watered, weeds picked out and it has taken my whole lifetime to grow.

But I have a lot of people in my life right now, many women who had a terrible growing up,

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