What is sharon randall doing now

Sharon randall lifetime fitness
Award-winning writer Sharon Randall is a syndicated columnist whose work has been distributed to more than 400 newspapers and an estimated 6 million readers.
Award-winning writer Sharon Randall is a syndicated columnist ("Bay Window") whose work has been distributed to more than 400 newspapers and an estimated six million readers nationwide.

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Life and Love Persist

How do you teach a child to understand something you have never quite understood?

Growing up in a big Southern family, I knew what I wanted to be someday: A grandmama.

I loved my parents. But my grandmothers were the two most important people in my life. They made me feel safe and loved and smart.

And they taught me all sort of things—how to read and write, how to listen closely, tell a good story, and look beyond someone’s face to see what’s in their heart.

Mostly they taught me how to love with abandon, holding nothing back, the way that they loved me. I knew they would love me forever on this Earth and someday from Heaven.

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Every child needs that kind of love. It was a gift not only for me, but for my children and grandchildren and generations to come. Money helps, but love is a far richer inheritance.

My children never knew their grandmothers. Their dad lost his mom before we met. And we lived 3,000 miles from my mother, and visited only a few times before she died.

I wanted to teach my c

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Sharon Randall: What's Your Dream?

For days now I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you something that I promised to tell you a long time ago, if it ever came to pass. Which, much to my surprise, it finally did.

All right, I’ll just say it: I finally published my novel.

Yes, that would be the novel that I’d been planning to write (off and on, though mostly off) for most of my adult life.

Occasionally, over the years, I would mention in a column that being married to a high school basketball coach with three active children and a full-time job left me little time to breathe, let alone to focus on finishing a novel I hadn’t even started.

Then I’d get a stack of mail from readers like you telling me: “Never give up!” “Follow that dream!” “Write that novel!”

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Readers can be tough on a writer. If you’re one of the kind souls who sent me those notes, let me assure you, I am grateful.

Encouragement is the oil that keeps the wheels of a dream turning. Some of us need it more than others. It didn’t give me more time

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The book started without her even realizing it, more than 20 years ago, when she was writing for The Monterey Herald. Columnist Sharon Randall had written a short story for the paper, a Christmas tale that had come to her in moments much more clear than a dream. It was about an aging mountain woman who realized, with her husband long dead, and her children gone, some grown and others lost to war, this winter just might be her last.

As the woman absently scattered seeds for the birds, she told God, if He planned to keep her around, she’d appreciate knowing why. Just then, she heard a car grinding up the gravel drive, heard a car door slam, heard the car spin round and leave. All she saw was a cloud of dust until it cleared, revealing a little girl, kicking her toe into the dirt. The woman not only recognized God’s response; she recognized the child.

Sharon Randall still has no idea where the start of that story came from or why she understood, so clearly, how it played out. She saw it as a gift just as it was but felt fairly certain it was destined to become much more