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A single confession at a kitchen counter can flip a life. Stephanie McBrayer joins us to trace the fault lines of family—how a young mom’s near‑abortion, a church VHS, and a daughter yet to be born braided into a conviction that still lives in her bones. From there, we step into Nashville’s CCM hallways where Stephanie turned an interior design brain into A&R instincts, where album shoots became storytelling, and where Avalon’s Jody—her husband—shows how a voice means more when it tells the truth.

Then the conversation deepens. We walk through the day her stepdad collapsed at Vanderbilt while her mother awaited cancer surgery—two crises on two floors, one daughter signing the form to relieve brain pressure and then screaming in a stairwell. Gary survives with a brain injury that made him hilarious, tender, and often childlike; the family learns new rhythms of care, dignity, and patience. Not long after, Stephanie’s brother Wade goes missing, and the worst news arrives on a roadside. She brings us into the unscripted hours: the senior recital that still needed to be sung, the funeral moments that were both sacred and darkly funny because Wade would have laughed, and the nights when sleep evaporated and breathing felt like work. It’s grief without varnish—and community without clichés—as teenagers fill a kitchen with flowers, fold laundry, and tape courage onto mirrors.

We talk about surviving a business collapse during COVID by selling masks, the quiet wars with Lyme disease, heart procedures, and the brutal honesty of opioid and tramadol withdrawal. Stephanie doesn’t preach; she documents—what helped, what didn’t, and what she’d tell anyone facing the same road. And there’s hope that doesn’t flinch: her daughter, Sarah Clayton, charting a path in pre‑law and intelligence after seeing The Sound of Freedom, finding purpose on the far side of heartbreak.

If you’ve ever carried a secret, sat in an ICU, or tried to laugh on a day that didn’t deserve it, this conversation will meet you where you are. Listen, share with someone who needs courage for the next hard thing, and leave us a review with the moment that stayed with you most.

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