I Am Sending You a Son (episode 2)

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Do you love a prodigal?

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Do you feel like you are lost in a scary and endless wilderness?

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Welcome to the When You Love a Prodigal podcast.

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I am Judy Douglass and I spent more than 15 years in that wilderness.

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I believe together we will discover help and hope for your journey.

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Welcome to the second episode of When You Love a Prodigal podcast.

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I am Judy Douglass.

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Last week I took some time to introduce myself.

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Just a very brief summary.

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I'm from Texas, grew up in Dallas.

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I loved riding and horses.

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Riding and riding.

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Majored in journalism at the University of Texas.

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Had a wonderful experience meeting Jesus at a Young Life camp in Colorado.

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Changed my life.

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And the most important thing that you would have heard about me then from what I told

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you last time was the fact that I always wanted my own way.

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And meeting Jesus set me on a path to make choices for his way instead of my way.

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And then I told you at the very end last time about the boy that God said he was sending.

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So now I want to tell you about that boy.

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We were in the process of moving from California where the headquarters of our ministry, Campus

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Crusade for Christ, was moving to Florida where we still are.

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And we had a happy family.

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We were doing our ministry.

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We had two girls.

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They played soccer.

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Michelle the younger was looking into art a lot.

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We were content.

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I was writing and speaking and God said, I'm sending you a son.

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And my response was, no thank you.

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And God said, yes, I'm sending you a son.

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He will be a gift.

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When we got to Florida, it was only a few weeks before a new friend said, do you know

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someone who could take an eight-year-old boy?

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I just froze.

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Tears came down my cheeks.

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She said, why are you crying?

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And I said, because God told me that someone would ask if we could take a boy.

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And she said, well, this boy really needs a family.

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Josh's mother, she'd been adopted and she had a lot of issues.

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And she came in high school an addict, a drug addict and drinking and had a brief marriage

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and a daughter who the grandparents were raising.

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And then she had this boy and she kept him even though she was really not qualified to

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take care of him because she went off on binges or she disappeared with some guy.

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They lived in a little trailer that the grandparents set up for them and there were men in and

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out, drug deals went down, somebody got stabbed there.

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They never knew if they were having enough food.

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And finally the county stepped in and took Josh from his mother and put him with his

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grandparents whom he knew and loved and that was comfortable.

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But they were planning on not putting him back with his mother unless she met some strong

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requirements to get him back.

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And so they were going to put Josh preferably with the grandparents.

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But the grandparents said, we're too old, we're too tired, we're already raising his sister,

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we can't do it.

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And so he was going into foster care.

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And this wonderful friend who asked me was their best friend, the grandparents, and said,

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I'm going to find one of those campus crusade families moving here.

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They'll take him.

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And so God knew all of that and he'd already prepared our minds and our hearts.

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And so we said a tentative yes, we would enter the process.

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We had to go through training, we got to spend some time with Josh.

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But it was almost a year before it actually happened and he was declared our foster child.

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And that day he came home with us and he thought he was coming for the weekend like he'd done

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a couple of times before.

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Oh no, he was coming to live with us.

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And he was in shock and we were in shock.

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But here are the things that were shocking for him.

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He was absolutely shocked that he had to go to bed at a certain time, that he couldn't

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watch TV all night, anything he wanted, that we sat down at a table to eat dinner every

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night and that he went to school every day.

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Oh yeah, and we went to church.

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Just so many things that he couldn't believe were going to be true for him.

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It was shocking for us too.

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He just had so many needs, this high, high need for center of attention.

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And we found out that when people live in poverty, a lot of times, do you know what

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the main source of their vegetables is?

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It's ketchup.

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And so anytime they go to a fast food place, they'll grab a whole bunch of the ketchup

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packets and take them home.

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And so sure enough, I found a whole hoard of ketchup packets in his drawer.

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It was just hard to get used to each other and where he came from.

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And even though they had told us he would probably have reactive attachment disorder,

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which means because he had been abandoned in essence, his dad never showed up.

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His mother usually chose her addictions.

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Even his wonderful grandparents couldn't take him.

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It's like he doesn't trust anybody.

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He's sure nobody will be there for him.

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And he's on his own for the rest of his life.

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And so he won't attach to us.

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He put up barriers to protect himself from us.

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But there were other things as well.

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He was almost 10, but he was going into third grade, which is an eight year old thing, and

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he could barely read or write.

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And so we get him in school and we get some tutoring for him and some other help to make

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up for what he's missed.

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And that was helpful, but it certainly wasn't enough for all that he needed.

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He had a lot of woundedness because he'd been neglected and abandoned and even abused.

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And so that was hard.

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And his mother was doing drugs and alcohol when she was carrying him.

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And that leads to fetal alcohol syndrome.

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And one of the things that's very impactful from fetal alcohol syndrome is the prevention

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in the brain of a fetus when they're being formed, the means to do cause and effect reasoning.

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Now think about that.

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They can't decide, understand that if you do this, this happens.

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It just makes no sense to them at all.

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And we would think, why doesn't he see the consequence of what he's doing?

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Because he couldn't.

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It takes patterns over and over and over to build those synapses, so to speak, to make

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that understandable.

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He also had ADD.

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He had several learning disabilities.

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It was hard.

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School was very, very difficult for him.

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He had to be center of attention.

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And so he was always disruptive in class.

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And his ADD made him disruptive in class.

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And so he spent a lot of his time in middle school in alternative classroom.

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He thought everyone spent time in alternative classroom.

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It was just a lot of things that he had that had been hard for him that were not his fault.

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They were the things that happened to him and were done to him.

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After three years of foster care, they terminated his mother's rights.

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Oh my goodness, that was a very challenging day.

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We were at court.

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We'd been to court.

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We had to go every six months to get renewed as the foster care for him.

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And we went to court.

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And his grandfather was there with his mother, the grandfather's daughter.

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And I was there with Josh.

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And the court separated them so they didn't see each other.

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And his mother knew she wouldn't get him, but she wanted to fight for him, probably

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for the first time in her life.

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And so she's over here crying with her father.

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And Josh is over crying with me.

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And then grandfather and I traded.

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And I went to comfort her.

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And he went to comfort Josh.

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And it was a hard day.

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And Josh was declared that she was no longer his mother.

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And he was devastated.

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And he didn't know what that meant for his future.

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And we didn't either.

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The county said, he is now up for adoption and you get first choice.

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Well, my family had to make a decision on that because it had been a hard three years

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that he had been with us.

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And did we really want to sign up for life?

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He also had to make a decision because he was 12 now.

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Did he want to be adopted by us?

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Well, here was his response.

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It was like he turned his head and looked around and he went, I don't see anything

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better so I guess I'm fine with it.

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And we had to make that decision.

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And the Lord assured us that he had not sent us this son for three years, but for life.

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So we went to court to adopt him.

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And the judge kept wanting to know why we wanted to adopt him.

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And since we were all a little nervous about it anyway, we probably didn't give him all

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the answers that he wanted.

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And he finally said, do you love him?

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And that really caused a pause for me anyway, because he had done nothing to help love each

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other.

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He was sure that he could never love me as his mother because that would betray his birth

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mother.

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And therefore, he withheld any sense of connection or affection with me.

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But it was like, do I love him?

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I really do love him.

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God had given me an amazing love for him.

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We'll talk more about that later next time.

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So we said, yes, we would adopt him.

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And we hoped that he would feel loved and secure and not abandoned, that we would be

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there for him.

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And therefore, we would get a more peaceful home.

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No, because that's when he entered middle school.

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And it got a lot worse.

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And the journey in the wilderness really began at that point.

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And next week, we'll talk about that.

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Thank you for joining me today on the When You Love a Prodigal podcast.

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If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple podcasts

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or wherever you listen.

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Your review helps the show reach more people with the hope and encouragement of Jesus.

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Don't forget, take a look at the show notes.

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And for more helpful information, resources, and books, check out judydouglass.com.

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That's Douglass with two S's.

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You can find me on Facebook and on Twitter and Instagram at JudyDouglass417.

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Until next week.