hello welcome to a very special segment of truth today my name is gloria i'm your host and i'm so thankful and so happy to be here i want to start the show with a moment of prayer prayer changes things prayer come first the heart and prayer has a way of opening up your heart and your spirit in your soul to redirect anything that might be going on to an even more exciting place that may be headed so i give thanks for this breath i give thanks for this breath because this breath clarifies that i am i alive and well that god's spirit moves through me that the grace of jesus christ abounds in me in that i am in a very very unique special position right now and i take it to my heart with a real r overwhelming joy and a whole lot of gratitude father god lord jesus i come asking you for comforting care to the people in the philippines may you touch their hearts may supplies and medicines and water and warmth and kindness make speedy speedy deliveries their way in may all of the people who have survived that great big tragedy may they have the courage and the strength to move forward maybe have the willingness to move forth and may the world unite in their comfort in their joy in their laughter because one day they will have joy and one day they will have laughter in spite of how devastating it might be right now i come asking prayer for all the children of the world we're headed into another thanksgiving and christmas season i come asking that all the children of the world receive love war that no one touches them in a harmful way no one speaks to them in an interest way and that they may one day bring children in the world that they will be able to spread joy and laughter to i come thanking all the people in my life who have graced me with love and care and kindness and i dedicate this show to every single one of them because i would not be sitting here right now if it were not for the love that i've been given through my life i send this through your son jesus i declare that i will not come back void and i declare that every intent will find  way through this prayer a man who i am in a very big spirit of gratitude as we all are the says the thanksgiving season and the christmas season and and little human beings are certainly deserving of love and care and kindness every single day of the year it's true that more of it spreads during the holiday seasons and in some ways there's more sadness in the world these holidays bring on a lot of pressure a lot of confusion for a lot of people and and so if you're a person who suffers from depression or any kind of mental health issues please get in touch with your providers now reach out to the people that you receive help from now and don't let this holiday season catch you off guard if the holiday seasons  time that you struggle and you are already know you struggle then please give yourself a break please reach out to your providers reach out to the crisis lines reach out to your local churches reach out to your family and your friends and get the support you need so that this holiday season doesn't have to be a very difficult time and while you may not be able to keep from feeling some pain and anguish during this time of the year at least will have to act on it and so i encourage you to do that if you had some recent loss in your family and and loss could be loss of someone you love loss of health loss of any kind of l please reach out early let people know how you're feeling early and so that when the holiday season is comes you're not up against the wall and film unlike you don't have anywhere to turn every single day  are blessed and highly favored really and spite of what messages you met receive and spite of the information that goes on through your head really if you hear my voice and you are able to see the world moving around you you are blessed and highly favored and i encourage you to get the support you need so that these holiday seasons don't cause you too much stress and too much grief and that you come through as the champion that you are i'm very excited for the holiday seasons every year i show as untitled thank you for giving in and really it's dedicated to my mother my father my grandparents my sister my brother my children my grandchildren my nieces my nephews my cousins my friends because every single person that i've come across a my life really has managed to give me some joy and laughter that i would not have had had they not come into my life and so i'm dedicating this show to everybody that i know because really i want you to know that i would not be sitting here i would not be full of the love in the joy and laughter that i have if you had not already poured love and joy and laughter into my life and at some time or another it's so i  just want to know that i'm dedicating the show to you and i say thank you from the bottom of my heart for reaching out to me for giving me a smile given me a laugh a joke a word of kindness a word of comfort when i've struggled because really you have made the difference in my life and even if i don't know you but you've seen the show and you've reached out to all this bath with regard to the show i personally want to thank you and want you to know that you touch my life you make a difference in my life and i would not be sitting here able to do the show if and not if it were not for you so know that the show is dedicated to all of you and i come and deep gratitude for your kindness and your love and your laughter because it made a difference in my life i had the very very splendid gift of taking my mother to beaumont texas for her birthday her birthday was in august but we celebrated it in october and valmont because august is too hot in my mother turned ninety and all of my family gathered we had a big barbecue at my aunt's house my aunt put in huge aluminum parents bullet chicken and relives and lots of food everybody cool tin and my aunt made such a beautiful point she said my mother's name is queen esther she said queen esther has not lived in beaumont for sixty five years and look at all these people who have come to celebrate her today and so it really was just just an exciting experience that was a beautiful experience and i already knew and i said at the barbecue i said you know this is truly one of the most beautiful days of my life and it really was because my mother was surrounded by her family and people she hasn't seen in years and some cc's regular talk to regular and people just came in and decorate added a shout out to pam who did the decorations i hope you get a copy of the show pam i thank you for your grace and your kindness that day and and just all your expertise with your decorating but all of my family came on my daughter kid and my granddaughter page and my mother's god daughter and i we all packed up and went to beaumont texas and we just have a just exquisite time i mean it was really really exp and i'm thankful that my mother was one of the people who was instrumental in change in this world she is a part of the northern migration and that's the movement of african american people who left the gulf coast in the southern states and moved to the midwest and to the west and to the east and to the nor in the forty's in the fifty's in the sixty's and that movement of human beings changed the world it changed the nation as we knew it and that changed cost change around the world many people have designed massive movements of human beings based off of the moment movements of african american people from the southern states to the west and the east and the midwest in the north in the forty's in the fifty's in the sixty's and so that move the people changed the world it changed the nation first and then it changed the world is so i am very grateful to my mother who had the courage to be one of those people that left everything she knew a moment and moved to san francisco not only did she do that but she made it a point to send me and my brother my sister to beaumont texas every year for the summer so i know what you call a  transplant and i have the gift of growing up and spend in my summers there i've taken my children back i took them back every year for the summer and now i take grandchildren back and so i'm i call myself  bicultural because i had the experience of been born on the west coles and raised there but i also spent my summers in beaumont texas i lived there for a couple years if so i have what i call biculturalism with regard to being born on the west coast but we i so thankful to my parents for making it possible for me to go to texas every year and for all the love that our receipt for my family in beaumont every year with their every year play with my cousins they are every year my grandmother showered me with love and care and all of my cousins did the same thing and i love them all back and and i really feel like i have so much love in my heart today because of all the people who took the time to give me love all the people who took the time to pour into me with love and care and kindness and great food i have had some great food in my life i come from a long line of good cooks and having grew up in the jiffy corn cornbread era or the frozen pike ross era i grew up when everything was made from scratch and i'm very thankful for that experience today because it has allowed me to learn things about cooking that i would not have learned and so my heart is very thankful today for all the people who have poured love into me and in all the hard times i've been able to get through you know i celebrated twenty seven years free of active active addiction to drugs and alcohol in october on the twenty seventh of october well i would not have been able to done that had i not received a lot of love through my life and had i not gotten myself some help so if you're struggling right now with with drugs alcohol with gambling with shopping with eating with anything that really has you depressed and has you not feeling good about yourself i encourage you now to please get help if you're in a relationship that has four or five people in it please get some help if you're comfortable and you're happy with a situation like that by all means go for it live your life however if you have a lot of heartbreak as a result of that if you have a lot of pain and agony as a lot as a result of that if you have a lot i hated for other people as a result of that please get yourself some help i learned the hard way that i struggled in my life with regard to marriage or relationships because of the lack of love i have for myself and for the kinds of things i was willing to settle for and i don't have to do that today i don't have to do that i don't have to encourage anybody to do that and i understand that the women that i grew up under were locked into very painful situations and marriage locked into very painful situations or relationships and they did the best they could but a woman or a man does not have to commit to misery today like we don't have to so please don't and if you're struggling if you're in a marriage and your marriage is in the i c u get yourself some help you don't have to throw your marriage away because it's in a bad place you can get some help and save your marriage you can save your children you can save your family but you i have to start with yourself first my for children are very happy people today in spite of their own struggles and they have them but they're happy people today because they care for themselves and they love themselves in a way that i was unable to love myself even when i was there an age but they're healthier today than i was at their age and that's because they have learned the value of loving themselves and they have learned the value of not settling for things that don't enhance you that don't delight your heart that don't give your heart joy and laughter i'm so many people have a commitment to be an angry to be an unhappy to be and full of anguish and there they're like i call them human cannons they're like people they're like human candidates who are just waiting in the fire off that people because they want to hold people accountable for their anguish further anger for their own happiness for their shame and their guilt and there were more they actually want to make somebody else responsible for that and they want to make somebody else accountable for that well that doesn't work but that locks you into a place of not healing and little growth or no growth and so i encourage you today to not let yourself be locked into a place of anguish and a player a place of unhappiness and a place of dysfunction because you're not willing to exercise the help to exercise the means to get the help you need so you can grow past that the dysfunction that operates in the world today is not mandatory like it's not a necessity there's many avenues for help and once you start getting help eventually you're going to land with god you know no matter whether whether it's a mental health professional whether it's a twelve step program whether it's self discovery you're going to land in a place where you're going to be searching for god and you're going to be seeking because ultimately that's what's going to lift you past your pain and anguish right now and so i'm just really delighted this holiday season i've had what i call a pretty holiday season with the gift of being able to take my mother to texas and just to spend that time with her she got sick while we were down there and she was hospitalized and and we had to stay extra week but even that was a beautiful experience she got a lot of help from the people at the baptist hospital in beaumont and at the baptist and they took very care of her and you know it was just a very loving experience all the way around  daughter gayla became a mother she's got the care of two foster kid isn't two little boys that have added to our family and delighted to our love and and really enhanced our ability to love and so you know i and know that love is furry is free love will take you to places unchartered territory that you never dreamed of but you have to make a commitment to love love pastor pastor injury meet everybody you see with love from a loving place don't go into a situation and hateful and angry and broken it won't it because you're going to create more anger more eglash more brokenness more wounds please take a breather stop if you know you're hurting if you know you're angry if you're know you feel anguish just st your tracks take it easy take a deep breath and declare a new world for your self declare a new place of joy and laughter for yourself a word of love over your life i heard this song i listen to the song a lot my daughter had by fred hampton the weapon formed against me and i realized that one of the problems with the weapons formed against me is many times those weapons were formed between my two ears how amazing it is that the weapons formed against me had been mainly between my two ears so i can stop the negative chatter that's going on between my ears if i can stop being in this place that i'm a victim that everybody's against me that i can't trust anybody if i can stop my participation in that place then i get to land in a place of love i get to land in a place of care and comfort and that's no matter what anybody does you know i experience painful things i experience heartbreaking th i experience things that make me downright angry but i don't have to stay there i meet my situations head on with love and that's if i have to lie i don't lie to myself but if that  let me back up that's if i can go in was outlined to myself how about that the lies i tell myself are the most tragic lies i've ever experienced in my old life how about that and so if i can stop lying to myself and if i can meet where i am and i play in a position of love if i can those weapons form that gets me that are between my ears that tell me things that aren't true that tell me painful hurtful things if i can stop those weapons in their tracks guess what i've won the war i've won the world the war the war that's in me i've won i'm victorious and i get to lead the battlefield with the victory of winning the war and i get to share that with everybody i come a contact with i get to share that no matter what somebody else is going through i get to share that with every human being out my eyes on because every human being i lay my eyes on is worthy of my love how about that how about if everybody around the world right this minute assume the responsibility for love and every human being they laid eyes on wow would that be the most miraculous thing in the world would that mean that all the pain and suffering that's going on in the world right now would just sees this i mean it would that mean that every hurting little child every hurting little boy little girl would stay would cease having to hurt because no brute broken wounded adult would be harming them or hurting them in any conaway no adult that's hurting and being harmed right now would have to suffer that harm in that hurt because every person in the whole wide world would be looking at every other human being in the world would love with care with kindness i know that many people listening to me right now might think that i'm in a fantasy land but really i'm not that really is what god had in mind when all of this came to be it's made a kind who decided to create all this activity that has separated us from that we do not have to stay stuck in these places of sorrow of happiness of injury of wounds and brokenness we don't have to even if we've landed there it is nothing mandatory saying that we have to stay there so i encourage everybody who can hear my voice to really meet your fellow man in love please and i guarantee you you will be thanking people everywhere you go for just looking at you for just sharing a kind word a people will be thanking you for sharing a kind word for saying hello good morning how are you the world changes one human being at a time and so i declare that every single human being right now has the possibility for change as long as we have the desire in amman and our heart and so  down to the end of the show and i got a couple of announcements now i routinely don't like to make announcements because i sometimes hear the show over and over and you may see the show later when these events are over but i want to share first dr helen stevens is there's going to be an appreciation and retirement for dr helen helen stephens on sunday december the eighth at love centers ministry on stevens i've been listening to her sing since i was a young girl or listen to the people she's worked with so i was a young girl and just just incredible gospel saying in also on december thirteenth the fourteenth my favorite group of all times next to the temptations talk of the town is going to be at a black black repertory on december thirteenth and fourteenth and they're going to do a christmas show and kids have a discount price on the show i don't remember what the price of the tickets are but blow support talk of the town annoy you feel more in a view hundred point people remember talk of the tao we all grew up with him and so last but not least this sunday january the ninety eight at good hope baptist church the gospel southern nears now that's my second favorite gospel group the gospel saw the jacksons southerners i'm sorry going to  be at good hope on sunday january the nineteenth and two thousand and fourteen at four p m in the doors open at three and then also a good hope on december first says the untouchable sons of the soul revival so lots of very good gospel music going on this holiday season december first sunday december first at good hall saturday and sunday saturday is sunday  at the black repertory for talk of the town and then dr stevens so i have two minutes i want to know that i'm so very thankful for your love and your kindness i'm so very thankful for the opportunities that i have to sit on the set and do this show to all the staff and beatty and all the staff over in san francisco who make this show possible to everybody around the bay area my heart is just full of gratitude and joy a very thankful i've been able to celebrate my mother's ninety of the birthday and i know that's a gift from god that i didn't even have enough sense to pray for about that i prayed for many things i never say god keep me here and keep my mother here so we could celebrate her ninetieth birthday together and yet i got blessed with that gift so please reach out and give us a call let us know what you think about the show e mail us but please love yourself take it easy on yourself get some support through these holidays and reach out to somebody especially somebody you know that may be hurting more than you you'd be surprised at what your love will do for somebody else have a great holiday season and i'll see you next year good bye