“Whatever happens, Stay alive.

Don’t die before you’re dead. Don’t lose yourself, don’t lose hope.

Don’t lose direction. Stay alive, with yourself, with every cell of your body, with every fiber of your skin.

Stay alive, learn, study, think, read, build, invent, create, speak, write, dream, design.

Stay alive, stay alive inside you, stay alive also outside, fill yourself with colors of the world, fill yourself with peace, fill yourself with hope. 

Stay alive with joy.  There is only one thing you should not waste in life, and that’s life itself.”

Virginia Woolf

Happy New Year!  The month of January represents new beginnings.  January is also National Stalking Awareness Month

Why We Do What We Do, part 2

Every October, my daughter-in-law puts up one of our purple DV Awareness Month yard signs at her driveway on a moderately busy, somewhat rural road in the Snohomish area. One day she came home to find that someone tied a purple balloon to the sign with a note that said: “You don’t know how much this means to me.”

Wow!  I have no words except profound gratefulness that our little bit is making a difference.  Keep doing what you are doing!  You are making a difference, even if you never quite know!  And one person will help another.  That’s our story.  LK

Know It, Name It, Stop It        

The above is the tagline for National Stalking Awareness Month. The term “stalking” means engaging in a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to fear for his or her safety or the safety of others or suffer substantial emotional distress.

The Stalking Prevention Awareness and Resource Center is a federally funded project providing education and resources about the crime of stalking. SPARC aims to enhance the response to stalking by educating the professionals tasked with keeping stalking victims safe and holding offenders accountable. SPARC ensures that allied professionals have the specialized knowledge to identify and respond to the crime of stalking making sure that the victim service providers (including domestic violence shelters and rape crisis agencies), campuses, law enforcement agencies, and other places where stalking victims come for help and support have the training and resources they need to better respond to victims and survivors. See their in-depth website for information, curriculum, brochures, training opportunities and much more.

The Weight, and the Growth of Divorce

Divorce often carries a silent weight, the thought “I must have failed”.

Maybe you worked harder than most to make it work. Maybe you gave 100% of yourself, and still the marriage ended. It’s so easy to look at that outcome and think, “I am the failure”.

But here’s the truth: divorce is not proof of failure. It’s proof of courage, because it takes courage to face what’s not working and to choose a different path forward.

We’re conditioned to see failure as the end of the road. But in life and in divorce, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Think about it this way:

Divorce teaches you what doesn’t work, clearing space for what will.

Divorce builds resilience, the strength you’ll carry into your next chapter.

Divorce reminds you that growth rarely happens without discomfort.

Failing at something doesn’t make you a failure. It makes you human. And if you learn from it, it’s not a loss at all, it’s a stepping stone toward the life you’re meant to build.

 “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

By: Leah Hadley, CEO     Intentional Divorce Solutions

Our official address! 

We are now ccsfnewhope.org.  Any search for us at our WordPress address (ccsfnewhope.wordpress.com) will take you directly to ccsfnewhope.org.  We also have a QR code!  We will continue to update our website with monthly enews and resources.  We thank each of you for being on this journey with us!

Scripture Verse

Isaiah 43:18-19 NIV  “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.  See, I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”