I never planned
to become the woman
who talks about love
for a living.

I started my first business at eighteen. Political Science at Michigan State. Law school at George Washington University. Senate page. White House intern. I had a plan — clear, detailed, unstoppable.

Then Steve walked into Westgate Bowling Alley. He was 6'3". I was almost 5'2". He had wavy brown hair and what I described charitably as a 'quietly confident' personality — which was another way of saying he was a little stuck up.

When he called me for a party, I pretended to check my calendar, jumped up and down for ten seconds with my hand over the phone, and said yes. Ten days later, I asked him to marry me.

I thought my perfect, happy life would go on forever.

Then the phone rang.

I was standing in my bathroom with two of my granddaughters in the bathtub when the surgical oncologist's office called. Breast cancer. Both sides.

The voice on the phone was still talking — blah, blah, carcinoma, blah, don't worry, try to have a nice weekend — when the crying started. Before I'd pushed END on the phone.

What followed was surgery, treatment, and a grief I hadn't expected — not for my body, but for the life I'd imagined. The quiet evenings. The empty nest. The next chapter Steve and I were supposed to write together.

And then, before I had finished processing any of it — the cruelest possible thing happened.

Pancreatic cancer gifted my husband an early ticket to Heaven in March of 2009.

He was gone. And I was forty-seven years old, a widow, a cancer patient, and completely, entirely undone.

I'd been going to Haiti since 2000, when my father and I started Rays of Hope International — a nonprofit that ships medical supplies, serves orphans, and shows up in places where love is both desperately needed and astonishingly present.

After Steve died. After my treatment ended. After I'd watched every episode of Grey's Anatomy twice and run out of reasons to stay on the couch — Haiti called me back. And I answered.

It was in Haiti that I began to understand something no wedding ceremony, no sermon, no self-help book had ever told me. Something about love that could only be learned by living it in the hardest possible places.

I'd heard about a man who spent a year living like Jesus. And I thought: what would it look like to live love — not just feel it, not just describe it, but actually do every single quality named in 1 Corinthians 13 — in real life, in real time, across two countries and a thousand hard moments?

Patient. Kind. No record of wrongs. Not self-seeking. Not easily angered. Always trusts. Always hopes. Never fails.

So I tried. For one full year, I tested every word. I failed at most of them. I wrote about the failing. I found grace in the gap between who I was and who love was asking me to be.

That year became the book Love Is. And that book became the beginning of everything you'll find here.

I know that one person can change a relationship. Not because I read it in a study — because I lived it. As a wife, as a widow, as a woman rebuilding herself one act of intentional love at a time.

I know that the same truth that transforms a marriage transforms a team, a company, a movement. The mechanism is identical. The scale is the only thing that changes.

I know that the women who come to me aren't broken. They're tired. And tired means they still care. Tired means they haven't given up. Tired means they need someone to hand them something real.

Not theory. Not a formula. Truth that cost something — and transformed everything.

That's what I bring to every stage, every book, every retreat, every conversation.

I'm glad you found your way here.