tmichellesmiles

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BEING SELF-PUBLISHED MEANS: Getting your plush dolls AFTER the holiday buying season. Now I have to figure out what to do with all these guys. For starters you can get a FREE one when you buy If Chippy Was Your Dog on Chippy’s Etsy Shop. http://etsy.me/2hQj0A7

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During the most poor and homeless period of my life, I had a lot of people get angry with me because I spent $25 on Bath and Body Works candles during a sale. They couldn’t comprehend why the hell I would do that when I had been fighting for months to try and get us on our feet, afford food, and have an apartment to live in.

Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I��d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse - one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.

I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.

When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.

So whenever I hear about someone very poor getting themselves a treat - maybe it’s Starbucks, maybe it’s a home deco item, maybe it’s a video game… I don’t judge them. I get it. I get that you can’t go without anything for that long without it making you go crazy. You need to pull some joy, inspiration, and motivation from somewhere.

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God rarely just makes our problems disappear but He will provide us with a peace that allows us to think clearly, take the next step and to plan for tomorrow. His peace is a reminder that He is in control and that we don’t need to be paralyzed with worry or bitter with grief and anger.

Markey Motsinger

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Miss y'all already ❤️❤️❤️

With friends 12-30-2017 ❤ @oliviacintron @tmichellesmiles

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GRATITUDE - by Louie Schwartzberg

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As part of TIME Firsts, our project featuring 45 groundbreaking women, TIME and LIFE want to hear stories from our readers. Has a woman or girl you know been a “first”? The first to win the science fair? The first in her family to attend college? The first to become mayor of her town? Share your images and stories with us using the hashtag #SheIsTheFirst, and they could be featured in @TIME. Read more at TIME.com/Firsts. … We look back at the historical figures who shattered glass ceilings. SHIRLEY CHISHOLM became the first African-American woman elected to Congress in 1968 (representing Brooklyn, N.Y.). ( Bob Peterson—The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images ) #SheIsTheFirst

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As part of TIME Firsts, our project featuring 45 groundbreaking women, TIME and LIFE want to hear stories from our readers. Has a woman or girl you know been a “first”? The first to win the science fair? The first in her family to attend college? The first to become mayor of her town? Share your images and stories with us using the hashtag #SheIsTheFirst, and they could be featured in @TIME. Read more at TIME.com/Firsts. … We look back at the historical figures who shattered glass ceilings. SHIRLEY CHISHOLM became the first African-American woman elected to Congress in 1968 (representing Brooklyn, N.Y.). ( Bob Peterson—The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images ) #SheIsTheFirst

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Happy National Dance Day! LIFE is celebrating with the Aug. 23, 1943 cover story: THE LINDY HOP: A True National Folk Dance Has Been Born in U.S.A. The article featured step by step photographic instructions on how to dance the latest craze. Pictured here are Leon James and Willa Mae Ricker demonstrating improvisation. (Gjon Mili—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) #Lindyhop #dance #NationalDanceDay

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60 years ago today, on July 6, 1957, Althea Gibson became the first black tennis player to win a Wimbledon singles title. She is pictured here in an unpublished frame from 1949 by the great Gordon Parks. (Gordon Parks—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) #Wimbledon #AltheaGibson #GordonParks #tbt

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Female pilot of the US Women’s Air Force Service posed with her leg up on the wing of an airplane. 1943. (Peter Stackpole—/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) #1940s #femalepilot #AirForce

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here are 3 pictures i have not seen before

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Love Covers.

Part of my hospital chaplaincy duties is to write a reflection on how it’s going. Identities may be altered for privacy. All the writings are here.

—

I’ve seen love. I mean, pure love. The kind that builds you, that bursts wide open and free, the kind they tell you about, but you were afraid to believe.

A nine-year-old boy comes into the trauma bay with deep, jagged lacerations all over his back. Car accident, roll-over; dad and children nearly ejected, going fifty. His shirt is shredded. His back is really torn up, almost ribbons in several places, blood filling his shorts. He’s fidgeting, squirming, but not from his wounds. He’s trying to sit up, eyes darting, looking for someone. He’s trying to tell something to the paramedics, to the nurses and doctors, to me. 

Medicine, he says in a choked whisper, medicine for my sister. She has a new kidney. Medicine.

A second later, his four year old sister is wheeled in—they had been in the same car accident. She’s in shock. Her brother keeps saying, Medicine, for my sister. She needs her kidney medicine.

A nurse replies, “On it. I’m on it, little man.”

I go to the nine year old, pull up a seat, and tell him, “You’re a good brother.”

“Thanks,” he says, finally resting his head. The nurses move around us, not missing a beat, and there’s just me and the kid, eyes locked, his eyes on fire.

“What happened?” I ask him.

“I heard the car inside make a boom, like a firecracker,” he says. “I knew something was wrong. I knew it! I grabbed my sister … and I put myself around her, because … because I didn’t want glass to get in her face.”

I remember his back. The lacerations. 

Suddenly, I’m crying. I lose all professionalism. I’m just crying.

“You’re a hero,” I tell him. “You saved your sister’s life.”

“But her medicine?” he asks. “You’ll make sure she gets it? She takes it everyday for her kidney. It was the one that I gave her.”

“Yes,” I tell him, trying to smile through flooded eyes. “Yes. You’re a good brother,” I say again. “What’s your name?”

He says, “Angel.”

Of course it is.

I sit with him, quietly, as the medical team begins to work on his back. He makes no noise, except to ask how his sister is doing. 

I hold back tears. I feel angry, that something like this had to happen to Angel and his sister, that we live in such a world where no child is safe from destiny, from fate, from the universe, from God, where kidneys don’t work and cars roll over—but I think about Angel covering his sister, and that on our tiny fractured little spinning rock in the random cold chaos of meaningless collision, where the world can explode in glass, one child didn’t hesitate to die for love. I think it is awful that they have to be here in this hospital, but my heart stretches to this other place, where love is powerful and real, and that within lawless disorder, very beautiful things can still happen, and that perhaps pure love must be born through pain, through the life of another. 

— J.S.

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Purpose isn’t packaged up into tidy, perfect moments. Purpose is born in the sweat, tears, and hard stuff. It’s nestled inside the unwashed hair because there are just more important things to worry about sometimes. It’s born in the late nights, the hardest lessons, and in the least instagrammable moments.

Jordan Lee (via daughterbydesign)

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We have to remember that our life is not a popularity contest. We’ve all been given a platform…within our households, neighborhoods, friendships, and work. Don’t neglect it just because you think your platform is “too small.” God only expands our territory to make HIS name famous, not ours. “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” (Romans 9:17)

Jordan Lee (via daughterbydesign)

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If they don't play "Before I Let Go" before the party is over, did you really go to a black function?

you did not kind friend.

You. Did. Not. 

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The LIT History Series is for the Legends, Innovators and Trailblazers that have shaped our culture.

It is widely believed that the “Lone Ranger”, the famous cowboy of the TV show and the movie, was inspired by a Black man named Bass Reeves.

Reeves was born a slave, but he escaped to the West where he eventually became a Deputy U.S. Marshal, an expert marksman, and a master of disguise with his Native American sidekick. Blacks were a huge part of the Western frontier despite what’s told to us in pop culture or taught to us in the classroom. “The kids who are learning history in our schools are not being told the truth about the way the West was,” says Jim Austin, founder of the National Multicultural Heritage Museum. “I bet you nine out of 10 people in this country think that cowboys were all white - as I did.” (x)

Cherokee Bill, born Crawford Goldsby, was a notorious outlaw whose father was a Buffalo Soldier. His reputation and career as an outlaw rivals the reputation of Billy the Kid. Bill Picket was a “famous” Black cowboy who toured the U.S., Canada, Mexico, South America, and England, and he was inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame 40 years after his death. (x)

And black cowboys are still here, they do exist. 

That’s a huge part of history that was also erased from the history of America. We need to bring attention to this, because it’s unfair that black people along with other people of color have been erased from this narrative.

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