Skip to main content

a moment

We left Montana in November and traveled to Germany in December to spend Christmas with my husband's family. My brother-in-law is stationed over there with his family and their parents joined us from Florida for a true Spear Christmas. Miriam loved her time with her five Spear cousins. We enjoyed the beautiful Christmas Markets, and our passports were stolen.
While that last bit sounds terrible (and seemed terrible at the time), it ended up being easier than expected to remedy. We had to shell out the $$$ for new passports and hang out at the consulate for a few hours one morning and then, voila, we got temporary passports good for one year.
Meanwhile, back in Germany, I was still upset after receiving the replacement passports. I was upset that the trip suddenly became much more expensive than anticipated. I was upset that we missed out on a special family trip while at the consulate. I was most upset at our messed up world that causes people to believe stolen passports are the answer. We walked through a park across from the consulate. Passing by a gazebo, a man sat on a chair with his cello playing ethereal, wistful music. As we stopped to listen, a dove flew overhead, through the gazebo. The sun shone and God reminded me He is good and rules the day, though our messed up world would seek me to believe otherwise.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Rare Disease Day 2024

Today's Rare Disease Day. There's sometimes a particular weightiness to life with a rare disease. All the appointments, emergencies, traumas, doctors, therapists, medicines, opinions, schedules and upset schedules. My touchpoint is being mom to my precious girl with Wiedemann-Steiner Syndrome  (WSS). You'd have to spend a day or week shadowing me to know what it's really like. Doesn't that sound alienating? As though you couldn't possibly imagine if you're not living it? Well, maybe. But think about a time of immense grief you've lived through, or a time when your world seemed to be falling apart around you and it felt like everyone else was completely unaffected. I suppose it's a bit like that. You might have thought that those around you couldn't possibly know how that experience felt to you. A couple weeks ago, I started keeping a list of all the extraordinary things that happened in my life due to my daughter's rare disease. I learned a c

Startup Day 676: MVP coming soon

Hunkering down and revisiting user data consumed much of my last hundred-odd days, resulting in a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Simply built using Softr and Airtable (with tons of gratitude for  INVANTI 's support), I'm testing the willingness of Disability Self-advocates and Caregivers to find and write reviews of providers they recommend. Of the 200+ pain points expressed by Empowered Together's community, 88% can be addressed by the online marketplace simulated in our MVP. Users get to recommend respite providers, social activities, and therapists they love. We're testing a shift from Word of Mouth recommendations to tech-enabled referrals and lead gen, leveraging the collective voice and purchasing power of the disability community. This progress energizes me as a founder. This could be the key to unlock support for families affected by disability. My narrative for a startup bootcamp's application summarizes it best: As Empowered Together’s founder, Sarah has a

Startup Day 703: MVP live...

It's official, you can visit app.empoweredtogether.us  to see what we've been building! It's been a long journey to get here though this is really just the beginning. Yesterday, I reflected on why I'm doing this ( watch here ). I want to dive a bit deeper around the concept of creating the future I want to live in with my kids. I'm building a marketplace to connect families affected by disability with recommended businesses. I hypothesize that this will increase the rate of excellent customer experiences for People with Disabilities (PwD) -- 80% of their customer experiences are currently FAILURES! I also hypothesize that businesses will see the value in welcome PwD and society will slowly become more inclusive and accessible. Big dreams, I know, but that's the future I'm creating. On the personal side, creating that future would be meaningless to me if my kids and I didn't get to enjoy it together. That means it's equally important for me to engage