HOPE SHARES HER STORY

Hope is a woman who believes in the value of hard work. There may not be anything very unusual about that, of course, but what makes Hope stand out from the rest is that just about every bit of hard work she does is always done for other people.

This is a 63-year-old woman who puts in a whole lot of her time these days as the office manager of a busy counseling center of a church with a large congregation in Niceville, Florida.

“Well first of all,” she explains, “my husband is the executive pastor at the church and we have four campuses. So he’s really busy, and I am the office manager for our church’s Counseling Center. I’ve been doing it for about seven and a half years and it’s just growing and growing and growing, so I have a lot to keep up with. So I juggle lots and lots of balls in the air, because of that.”

Hope squeezes in a whole lot of other things she does for others, besides managing a growing church’s support for its membership, many of whom are struggling from the stress and anxiety brought on by the pandemic. She and her husband also own a couple of business ventures that can eat into their days and nights, including a condo they rent to vacationers coming to enjoy the Panhandle’s fabled white sand beaches.

Hope loves to knit gifts for her large family of children and grandchildren, especially the Christmas stockings she creates for members of her family to hang by the chimney with care. “In our family we have a tradition that I carry on from my mother that I knit Christmas stockings for everyone, and whenever somebody has a baby I knit them a stocking.” She adds with a chuckle, “I’m pleased that we’re at the age now where our children are all having children, so I’m usually knitting a sock every year.”

Even more than her lovingly knitted Christmas stockings, Hope has made sure to give something less tangible but far more valuable to her offspring, which is an appreciation for the value of hard work and doing good things for others. She also loves to cook healthy meals for her family and she tries to work in some gym time for herself when she can.

“My core value is to follow the will of God for my life, my marriage and my family,” she says. “I believe in hard work and have taught my children the importance of being a hard worker from an early age.”

With all the responsibilities she has in her family life and in her work, Hope says she has long felt the need to keep her mind sharp and her memory strong. She relates how several years ago when she managed a local public school cafeteria, she was beginning to feel a mild decline in her memory and wanted to keep her mind sharp. Hope says she happened to hear a message about Prevagen on her car radio and decided to give it a try. She reports that her memory began to improve. “I’m telling you it worked,” she says. “I could tell the difference, and I’ve been on it for about 10 years now.”

For someone with a lot of balls in the air, the ability to keep track of all them is hard work. But that’s something Hope is very good at.