I can remember sitting under the tree shown as a shadow in this picture and singing... trying to get my voice to do all the things I could hear in my head. I would sit for hours and sing "Silent Night" and "Over the Rainbow" and any other song I knew or had made up words for. I was four years old when my first critic, Gene Brown, told me I sounded dumb. He was four years older than me, and he couldn't believe I was wasting my time singing in such a dumb way. Up until this point in my young life I had never done anything to bring such sharp criticism! It was shocking! But as God does... He gave me the strength to ignore the critic and continue to sing under my tree. (Although I did start to check the bushes first to make sure Gene wasn’t there.) How many times do we give something up because someone has told us it's dumb? And how many times does God keep leading us back to that same thing? more