About Kim

I’m a writer, a grandmother, and someone who has spent most of her life learning that hope isn’t a feeling you wait for — it’s a choice you make before you feel it.

I didn’t learn that from a book. I learned it the hard way. The only way, really.

I grew up the oldest of seven, and childhood shaped me in ways I wouldn’t fully understand until much later. What it did come with — the thing I couldn’t have named then but can name now — was God. Quiet, stubborn, present. An anchor I didn’t always understand but somehow never fully let go of.

I got married at 18, and if I’m honest, we were two broken people trying to make a whole. It didn’t work that way. It never does. Our early years were harder than most. It wasn’t until I was willing to do the hard work on myself that anything between us could change. This June, we celebrate 40 years. Not because it was easy. Because we stayed.

Life kept teaching. A carotid artery aneurysm in 1996. Dysautonomia in 2000 — an invisible, exhausting condition most people have never heard of and even fewer understand. And then in 2008, on a Tuesday evening, as I was taking off my shirt, my hand found something that stopped the world.

Triple negative breast cancer. One of the rarest, most aggressive subtypes. Only about fifteen percent of breast cancers carry that diagnosis.

Naturally, I had to be special.

What followed was the hardest year of my life — and also the year I finally started saying out loud what had always been true. Chemotherapy. Hair loss. Fear at 3 a.m. that had no name. And community that showed up in ways that still make me cry — index cards with Scripture written in a friend’s handwriting, a blue bag full of wrapped surprises for the hardest days, a freezer that was never empty.

The medical care mattered. But what carried me was something else entirely.

Cancer didn’t end when treatment did. Seventeen years later, I still spend two hours a day managing bilateral lymphedema — pump therapy, compression sleeves, and the unglamorous daily work of a body that keeps score. I also live with dysautonomia and a medical history long enough that I’ve stopped being surprised by it. I tell you this not for sympathy, but because I need you to know: I don’t talk about hope from a safe distance. I live it on inconvenient Tuesdays.

Through all of it — the childhood, the marriage, the health, the decades of hard things — one thing has never changed. God was the anchor. Hope was the thread.

And that thread was there the whole time. Even when I couldn’t see it. Even when I didn’t have words for it. Even when the only prayer I had was just showing up for one more day.

Hope Lives Now grew out of all of it — not just the cancer, but all of it. It began as a CaringBridge journal, became a blog, and grew into a ministry built for people in hard seasons, whatever those seasons look like. Cancer. Marriage. Childhood wounds that shaped more than I understood at the time. A faith that’s been tested, stripped down, and rebuilt without tidy answers.

If that’s you, you’re in the right place.

For years, I ran Fresh Impact Social Media Management, helping other people tell their stories. It turns out all of that was training for this — the story I was meant to tell and the people I was meant to serve.

One of the deepest callings of my life is to come alongside people who are still in the middle — not the before, not the after, but the hard, holy middle — with hope, honesty, and the reminder that you are not alone.

I’m so glad you’re here.

— Kim