No matter how high your mountain, or how deep the valley; life is beautiful! By: Susan Deborah Schiler Welcome to TeamFamilyOnline.com where we share stories about hope, redemption, restoration, and creating our best real lives following the pain of divorce, death, sickness, and the trials of life. I am a storyteller. The subjects I write […]
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Together By: Susan Deborah Schiller Together we are unstoppable. Unbeatable. No mountain in our path is unconquerable. If one of us is weak, the stronger one carries her. If one falls down, the other one picks her up. Together we can make it to the top. To the source. To the solution. To the provision. […]
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Serving Up Smiles By: Susan Schiller Today is 2-for-1 smiles…. The horse on top – his name is "Fire" and my mom snapped this picture just as he turned his head at the sound of her voice. What a perfect moment! I hope Fire brings you a smile. He also has his very own funny […]
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All is Well By: Susan Deborah Schiller Trekking through the wilderness with my children helped me to trust that "all is well" in the world, even if something insidiously evil had just threatened to suck me down into the abyss of despair. When I simply say the words, "all is well," a new wind blows […]
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Around the Bend By: Susan Deborah Schiller My husband and I have been exploring rivers this year, sometimes in a motorboat and sometimes by canoe. The Tongue River in Eastern Montana is my favorite, because it bends and twists on itself every few hundred feet. For miles and miles you never hear a sound except […]
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A few years ago I was in a webinar led by PJ McClure, who has been dubbed "The Mindset Maven," and he taught us a simple method to discover our passion, called "The Three-Year Old Path to Success". Don't worry, it doesn't take three years to discover your purpose, but you do need […]
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Hay! Follow Me! By: Susan Deborah Schiller I followed the elk herd with my camera lens from the security of the living room window. How did they know it was the day after hunting season? How did they know we had just dumped a bale of hay in the horse pasture? I like to keep […]
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The Race of My Life By: Susan Deborah Schiller The odds are stacked against you and me. This world's system has fixed our race so that we cannot win on solely our own strength. We are not alone, thankfully. Jesus won the only race that counts for us all… and because He lives […]
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Laundry By: Susan Deborah Schiller Her chubby cheeks dimple in a wide smile as orange Popsicle goo drips down her chin and all over her sunsuit. Seventeen months old and life has no limits except for the ones I must enforce near the busy road in front of our house. Her sister, nearly three-years old, […]
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Serving up Smiles: King of the Jungle From the Series, "The Good Humor Barista: Serving Up Smiles" Source One morning a lion woke up with an incredible desire to be recognized by community as the king of the jungle. So he marched right over to a monkey and roared: "Who is the most strongest and […]
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Serving up Smiles: The 40th Wedding Anniversary Gift Retold with poetic license by Susan Deborah Schiller From the Series "The Humor Barista: Serving Up Smiles!" One of the best ways to help a survivor is to develop a repertoire of jokes and funny stories. It sounds really simple and it is… but it works! For […]
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The Good Humor Barista: Serving Up Smiles By: Susan Deborah Schiller A funny movie, a hilarious joke, and a deep belly laugh all have one thing in common… they release a powerful hormone in your body called oxytocin. Ocytocin is often called the "love hormone" or the "trust hormone" and it's a chemical that has […]
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Saddle Up Your Horses – It's the Ride of Your Life! By: Susan Deborah Schiller I can honestly say it's all been worth it. I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life. I'm learning to ride in this great frontier of spiritual freedom and rest. Many of us, over the past 1-2 decades, have […]
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“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” ~ Oscar Wilde I’ve always had difficulties with my identity. Being abandoned by my mum as an infant left me growing up with extreme insecurities about being unloved and unwanted. It changed how I perceived myself […]
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Ordinary By: Susan Deborah Schiller I want to be like Mother Teresa who looked for Christ in every human being. I want to be like my Lakota friends who see a splash of Divinity in every part of nature: plant, animal, and rock. I want to walk in the Truth that all of life is […]
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Out of Darkness and Into the Light By: Susan Deborah Schiller Photo Credit One of the first steps in recovering from long-term abuse is discovering how powerful God created our hearts and minds to be… powerful enough to create the atmosphere surrounding us. What we believe determines our reality, and most of what we believe […]
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Why I Write By: Susan Deborah Schiller God is raising up Dread Champions, like David's Mighty Men, from the survivors of sociopathic abuse. We've been trained in the desert. We've been behind enemy lines. We've heard and seen what most doctors, therapists, and religious leaders have not learned about, until now. End of Story: We enter a place where […]
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"Vaccination Against Abuse" for Children By: Susan Deborah Schiller As good parents we take our children to the pediatrician for regular checkups and many doctors offer a wide variety of vaccinations. We have vaccinations for Chicken Pox, Polio, Mumps, Measles, Rubella, and a host of other diseases. I have my own opinions on those shots, […]
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A Cure for the Deafening Silence: Prayer By: Susan Deborah Schiller There are two kinds of silence; one very good and the other very bad. A good silence renews our minds and refreshes our hearts, because we're withdrawing from the noise of the world to listen to the heartbeat of our Creator. There's another kind […]
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May "The Jackal" be our Wake Up Call By: Susan Deborah Schiller May "The Jackal" be our wake up call. While the Jackal exists on an extreme end of the evil spectrum, his sociopathic strategies are the same as those on the low end. He depends on our "niceness" and our lack of knowledge of […]
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