Quies Christian Counseling Services, LLC

07/29/2025

My daughter broke every dish in my china cabinet during her manic episode, and I sat on the kitchen floor surrounded by twenty years of shattered memories.
The paramedics had just left with her again. Another 72-hour hold. I was fifty-two, alone, staring at fragments of the life I thought we'd built together.
"Throw it all away," my neighbor said gently. "Sometimes you just start over."
But I couldn't. Each broken plate held a story. The blue willow from my wedding shower. Christmas dishes from seventeen years. The teacup my daughter gave me at eight when she still believed I could fix everything.
I swept the pieces into boxes, telling myself I'd deal with it later. Months passed. Then one morning, staring at my cracked concrete walkway that made the whole house look broken, something clicked.
I found this amazing artist on Tedooo app who creates garden mosaics from broken ceramics. She didn't just sell supplies - she understood the story. When I explained what happened, she sent grout and sealant with a handwritten note about "making beauty from brokenness."
Three weeks later, working on my knees in the dirt, I placed each fragment like a prayer. My daughter came home to find me there, covered in dust and tears, fitting the last piece of her childhood teacup into place.
"Mom," she whispered, kneeling beside me. "It's beautiful."
We both cried then, holding each other over the pathway made from our broken things. Some stories don't end with everything fixed, but they can end with something beautiful emerging from the wreckage.

07/21/2025

07/20/2025



07/13/2025



07/06/2025

We talk a lot about finding freedom. Freedom from addiction. Freedom from pain. Freedom from others. And on it goes. What does freedom truly look like? Join our discussion tonight on The Gathering Place!

07/06/2025

06/29/2025

What we think we know about someone: Everything.

What we actually know: very, very, very little.

So don’t compare. Don’t criticize. Don’t pull them down hoping to lift yourself up. Don’t judge. Don’t assume. Don’t make them out to be some awful villain when you don’t know the whole story. Don’t worship them either. They’re just a human. Maybe they’re amazing, but there’s a good chance they struggle too. I mean, we all do. No matter how it looks. We all struggle.

Don’t lack compassion when you have no idea the trauma they’ve walked through. Don’t be all “well what I would do is...” Because aren’t in their shoes. You’ve never been in their exact shoes. You have never, not for once second lived their life.
Don’t delight if they fall. Don’t clap if they lose. Don’t be smug, or prideful. Don’t be envious of their life. Don’t be jealous. Don’t be ugly.

Just love them, walk in grace, and believe everyone is doing the best they can in life. Have boundaries and make wise choices when it comes to who gets your best, but try to withhold the judgement. It’ll keep your heart pure, and in the end, that’s the goal.

Love,
Amy

06/25/2025

During pregnancy, fetal cells migrate out of the womb and into a mother’s heart, liver, lung, kidney, brain, and more. They could shape moms’ health for a lifetime, Katherine J. Wu reported in 2024:⁠ https://theatln.tc/W8aBhPp2
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The presence of these cells, known as microchimerism, is thought to affect every person who has carried an embryo, even if briefly, and anyone who has ever inhabited a womb. The cross-generational transfers are bidirectional—as fetal cells cross the placenta into maternal tissues, a small number of maternal cells migrate into fetal tissues, where they can persist into adulthood. ⁠
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Genetic swaps, then, might occur several times throughout a life. Some researchers believe that people may be miniature mosaics of many of their relatives, via chains of pregnancy: their older siblings, perhaps, or their maternal grandmother, or any aunts and uncles their grandmother might have conceived before their mother was born. “It’s like you carry your entire family inside of you,” Francisco Úbeda de Torres, an evolutionary biologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, told Wu.⁠
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Some scientists have argued that cells so sparse and inconsistent couldn’t possibly have meaningful effects. Even among microchimerism researchers, hypotheses about what these cells do—if anything at all—remain “highly controversial,” Sing Sing Way, an immunologist and a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told Wu. But many experts contend that microchimeric cells aren’t just passive passengers. They are genetically distinct entities. And they might hold sway over many aspects of health: our susceptibility to infectious or autoimmune disease, the success of pregnancies, maybe even behavior. ⁠
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If these cells turn out to be as important as some scientists believe they are, they might be one of the most underappreciated architects of human life, Wu writes.