Happy Muscles Therapeutic Massage

Financial peace is not always about making more money.

Sometimes it is about creating more margin with what you already have.

• Pay off high-interest debt
• Build an emergency fund
• Live below your means
• Invest at least 10%
• Eliminate unnecessary payments

Every good financial decision gives you more breathing room and more freedom.

What is one financial move you can make this week to create more margin?

I DON’T CARE IF YOU’RE GRANDMA, GRANDPA, AUNTIE OR UNCLE. MY CHILD DOESN’T OWE YOU A HUG.

A lot of us grew up hearing, “Go give them a hug. Don’t be rude.” Even when we didn’t want to, refusing somehow became disrespectful..

In our house, I’ll teach my children to greet people, use their manners and treat family with respect. But if they don’t want to hug or kiss someone, I’m not forcing their body to say yes after they already said no.

Call it disrespectful. Call it making children too sensitive. I’d rather deal with an offended adult than teach my child that keeping an adult comfortable matters more than their own boundaries.

Respect can be taught without teaching forced affection. ✍🏼

Harriet Tubman’s story did not end with the Underground Railroad or the Civil War. She lived until 1913, surrounded by younger generations of a family whose history stretched from slavery into freedom. Among those relatives were Eva and Alida Stewart, pictured here around 1910. They were Tubman’s great-nieces, descendants of her brother John Stewart, one of the brothers Harriet helped escape from Maryland in 1854. Their photograph gives us a rare opportunity to look beyond Harriet herself and see members of the family whose freedom she had risked her life to secure.

John Stewart had been enslaved on Maryland’s Eastern Shore alongside other members of the Tubman family. After Harriet escaped slavery in 1849, she repeatedly returned to Maryland to guide relatives and others north. In December 1854, she helped John and two of her other brothers, Ben and Henry, escape. The journey eventually brought members of the family to Canada, where the Fugitive Slave Act could not legally force them back into slavery. Following the Civil War, members of the extended family established new lives in freedom, while Harriet settled in Auburn, New York, where her home became an important gathering place for relatives and others in need.

By the time Eva and Alida were photographed, they belonged to a generation coming of age nearly half a century after emancipation. Their lives unfolded in an America that had abolished slavery but had by no means achieved racial equality. Black Americans faced Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement, racial violence and widespread discrimination, yet this was also a period of tremendous institution-building within Black communities. Families pursued education, established businesses, built churches and civic organizations, and created lives that previous generations had fought desperately to make possible.

Ta**us slows down. That’s where the joy is.