Meet Grayson: the 9-year-old founder of Gray's Bake Co, a Mississippi bakery that started with a sourdough starter and a memory of Disney World. In this episode, Grayson talks about building a real business as a third grader — production schedules, pricing, hiring help, and the surprising amount of work that goes into a farm stand bakery.

He also opens up about the parts of entrepreneurship that don't make it into the highlight reel: the days he wants to quit, learning to ask his family for help, and the ongoing work of being proud of himself. Along the way, he shares his dream of a small storefront, his plan to donate profits to people in need, and — because he's still nine — exactly how many cookies he can eat without getting sick.

This is a conversation about grit, generosity, and what it looks like when a kid takes an idea seriously enough to turn it into something real.

At 21, Emily Rhodes got a phone call that split her life into before and after. In the chaos following Hurricane Katrina, her father was shot and killed on the wrong side of town — a case that was never solved. Months later, a minor car wreck led to a prescription for pain medication, and Emily discovered it numbed something the doctors hadn't been treating: the grief she had no idea how to carry.

What followed was years of addiction — first to prescription painkillers, then to street versions of the same relief — hidden from almost everyone who knew her, because, as she puts it, she was never supposed to be that person. This conversation traces that unraveling honestly, without shortcuts, alongside the slow work of recovery through her Catholic faith, a 12-step ministry called Catholic in Recovery, and a mother who refused to give up on her no matter how far it went.

Emily talks about rock bottom, about relapse, about the lies addiction tells you about who you are, and about her five-year-old daughter Lucy — deaf, hilarious, and her biggest cheerleader. It's a conversation about how grief and forgiveness can exist in the same body at the same time, and what it takes to believe you are more than your worst years.

Stephanie Johnson married her high school sweetheart in 1998. Eleven years later, six months after his leukemia diagnosis, she buried him. She was 32 years old, with three children under seven — the youngest born in the middle of his treatment.

In this conversation, Stephanie takes us back to the night before Jason's diagnosis was confirmed, when she says she fought a spiritual battle she couldn't yet name or explain to him. She describes the single practical conversation the two of them allowed themselves during six months of chemotherapy — a conversation neither of them wanted to finish. She talks about the hospital, the goodbye, and her three-year-old son showing up in rain boots on a clear day.

Most of the episode lives in what came after: the specific hour every evening that became the hardest part of young widowhood, the fear that her children's futures were already written by statistics she couldn't stop thinking about, and the slow, cautious, sometimes guilt-laden path back toward loving someone new. She talks about a friend's dream that gave her something like permission, about introducing her kids to the man who would become their stepfather one at a time, and about a four-year-old's silent gift of a ceramic cross that meant more than words could have.

The episode closes on the night her children — unprompted, on her wedding night — asked her new husband if they could call him dad.

This is not a tidy story about grief resolving on schedule. It's an honest account of what it actually looks like to keep going: the nights that don't get easier for a long time, the community that carries you when you can't carry yourself, and a family that ends up whole again in a shape nobody would have chosen but everybody is grateful for.

If you're walking through loss, remarriage, blended family life, or simply wondering whether faith holds up under real pressure, this conversation is for you.