mountaintop

Valleys Lead to Mountaintops

Beth Demme Blog 1 Comment

Lately I’ve been asking myself, “What is my life communicating?” After all, we are each writing our own life story day by day. Guess what? Storytelling can be hard. When I was in high school, our 10th-grade English teacher, Ms. Albritton, taught us about something called “The Tilley Plot Scheme.” This is the front of Professor Tilley’s book and it …

grateful adoptive mom beth demme

My Decision to Adopt Was Selfish

Beth Demme Blog 1 Comment

I love to celebrate adoption. My husband and I have two amazing children, both born in Russia. They came home about 3 years apart and they aren’t biologically related or from the same region. We missed out on the early months of their lives, but we experienced the joy of bringing each of them home around their first birthday. When …

Contentment.BethDemme

I Hope You Never Find Contentment

Beth Demme Blog 2 Comments

For a long time, I believed I was supposed to be content. I thought contentment meant maturing beyond my consumerism, greed, gluttony, and selfishness. I thought contentment was the natural outpouring of gratitude and the embodiment of joy. Contentment was so important to me, I tried to talk myself into it. I would mentally list all the amazingly wonderful parts …