In this heartfelt solo episode, Anne Maxson shares three personal stories of people who became “pebbles of light” on her path—through big gestures, small timely kindness, and unseen spiritual support. These experiences remind us that God is aware of us, often working through others to lift, guide, and strengthen us.
This episode invites you to reflect on your own light shiners and to write down the names, stories, and moments that have carried you. As you document them, you’ll begin to see the many ways the Lord has placed light in your life.
RESOURCES
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Jeffrey R. Holland quote about angels
Jeffrey R. Holland quote about being known to God
ABOUT THE SHOW
Pebbles of Light strives to help you recognize those who have helped light your path and become the person you are. This helps you to have direction and courage in sharing your light with others. We’ll cover a variety of topics, including: parenting, mom hacks, faith, home life, relationships, traditions, and more.
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Website: https://annemaxson.com/
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CHAPTERS
00:00 Return of the Podcast
03:04 Starting a New Venture
05:03 The Journey of Self-Discovery
07:38 Redefining Failure
09:54 The Role of Faith in Progression
11:42 Navigating Life’s Uncertainties
13:30 The Impact of Family Expectations
15:45 Embracing the Unknown
18:42 Finding Heavenly Help
20:01 Lessons from the Past
22:18 The Power of Faith
24:27 Recap and Call to Action
27:09 Closing
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Pebbles of Light. I’m excited to have you here and listening or watching. Doing the gutsy thing by doing a video podcast for my first episode, so you can find me over on YouTube for that. I’ll put a link in the show notes for you to find it. If you’re listening to the audio version. I’m excited to be here.
My name is Anne Maxon and I am originally from Minnesota. I’ve moved around a little bit here and there. I went to school over on the east coast for a while, and I lived in the Southwest for a while. I lived in Utah for a little bit and my husband and I met there, and now we love Live up in Idaho. We love it up here. We’ve got two boys who just keep us busy all the time. They’re wonderful young men, and my husband and I are both pharmacists and so. I have wanted for a long time to share a little message of hope and a message of light, and so I thought that this would be a great platform. So thanks for being here on this first episode.
I really appreciate you and hopefully we’ll be able to make some connections. I’m excited. So, as I said in the intro, I really wanted to start this show as a way to celebrate those who share their light with others. I think another title of people who share their light is Angels. There’s a quote by Jeffrey R. Holland that I really love that kind of depicts this idea. He says, my beloved brothers and sisters, I testify of angels, both the heavenly and the mortal kind. In doing so, I’m testifying that God never leaves us alone, never leaves us unaided in the challenges that we face. On occasions, global or personal, we may feel we are distanced from God. Shout out from heaven. Lost alone in dark and dreary places often enough that distress can be of our own making. But even then, the father of us all is watching and assisting and always there are those angels who come and go all around us, seen and unseen, known and unknown, mortal and immortal. I have been blessed throughout my life with many, many angels and light shiners who’ve helped to give me a little light on my path, and
I’m so excited to share some of them with you throughout this podcast. In addition, I wanna share those people who have been light, shiners and angels for you. So. Take, take a minute to think about those who have provided a pebble of light in your path and share ’em with me. Instagram is kind of the best place to find me. Pebbles of light is my handle. So find me over there and get in touch. Let me know about those people who have been a light shiner and an angel for you. So today, to start out for the podcast, I just wanna share about three of the most pivotal angels and light shiners that have been in my life. As a little bit of a background, when I was about seven years old, my parents got divorced, which is difficult in trying in any circumstance. In my circumstance. My mom left my dad for another woman, and she had a few different partners throughout the time that I was in high school. All of them were women. All of them were alcoholics and all of them struggled with mental illness, which led to a pretty difficult few teenage years for me. I was blessed with a friend named Melissa, who was such a support and a help to me. She and I went to church together at the Lutheran Church where we grew.
At the time, I wish I had known this quote again from Jeffrey R. Holland. He says, your father in heaven knows your name and knows your circumstance. He hears your prayers. He knows your hopes and dreams, including your fears and your frustrations, and he knows what you can become through faith in him. I had struggled a lot to recognize my own divine identity. I wondered if my mom wasn’t attracted to my dad. Why was I even born? Am I some sort of a mistake? I have no purpose here if I wasn’t supposed to be here. And my friend Melissa, helped me to understand what Jeffrey R Holland taught there about the fact that we can become great through our faith. The Lord, and through the time that I spent with Melissa, so her family was amazing. I don’t know how much they knew of what was going on in my life. I would imagine it was quite a bit, my hometown was really small, Northern Minnesota.
In the late eighties. In the early nineties. Um, my mom’s lifestyle was newsworthy, I guess you could say. And. People just knew, right? And Melissa’s family always took me in. They would say, Hey, do you wanna come over after school? And I would go to their house and they’d say, oh, well, why don’t you just stay for dinner? Okay, I’ll stay for dinner. My mom frequently wasn’t home and afternoons or the evening. So it was so nice to have a place to be and to feel that I belonged in. And in that time that I spent with Melissa’s family. I was able to feel the love of the Lord because they were very spiritual. We went to church with them at the Lutheran Church, and they were just amazing and wonderful, and they helped me to recognize that God was aware of me and that he loved me and he cared about me.
That being said, a few years later I went off to college and when I went to college, I was involved with campus ministry. I went to a Catholic college in northern Minnesota. I was involved with campus ministry. I was involved with different spiritual things, but I didn’t really attend church. And by the time I was a senior in college, I didn’t see Melissa very often. She’d gone to college kind of on the other side of Minnesota. So we didn’t see each other very often. I lost that connection and I lost that I for, I forgot, right? I started to forget. My divine identity and forget how important I was to God and forget that he cared. So by the time I was done with college and I was getting ready to go to graduate school in Chicago, I started to really be like, well, why am I even here? Like, what’s my purpose? I don’t think I would say that I was suicidal, but I definitely wasn’t really on the high list of caring whether or not. I was around or not around, and I honestly, I didn’t know if other people cared or not. And I started to really struggle and I told a few friends about my struggle and one of my friends, so this is light shiner. Number two is Carly and I had had a rough, rough night and she didn’t know about that. But the next day she sent me some flowers just completely out of the blue. And the only little thing on the card said, you’re a blessing in my life. Love Carly. They came at just the right time, and her message was just the thing that I needed because I wasn’t sure if I needed to keep going. So to know that I was a blessing in her life was something divine and something orchestrated to make sure that I was able to recognize that. But it was just a simple little thing I should find out from Carly. I should, I should talk to her and find out why she sent those flowers that day.
Carly interestingly, so we haven’t seen each other in probably 10 years, but every year on my birthday, which was just last week, every year on my birthday, I get so excited ’cause I know I will hear from Carly. And the same thing on her birthday. We, that’s kind of the only days we communicate is her birthdays, but I so look forward to that, like leading up to my birthday. I will look forward to just knowing. I’ll get a text or a voicemail or something from that. Dear friend, Carly. Every time I do, I remember those flowers and that moment of recognizing, okay, I have a purpose. I can help people.
My last light Shiner was about that same time period was my pastor in the Lutheran church that I attended, and his name was Pastor George. And I started to realize, kind of after I got that message from Carly, I thought, wow, like I’m really struggling. I need to think about things here and make sure that I’m in an okay place. So I’m going to go talk to my pastor. So I made an appointment and I went to go visit with Pastor George and he sat down. I still remember exactly kind of where everybody was sitting and whoa, where the two of us were sitting. We were the only ones there. But I remember sitting down with him and talking to him about how I was kind of struggling and wondering if I had a purpose or, um. Like what I should do next, and if there is even any use going to graduate school and all these different things. And I remember him reaching across the table and taking my hand and saying, Annie, you need to know that I have a list of people that I pray, pray for every day, and I rotate through the list of people that attend this congregation. I rotate through them of who I pray for, but you need to know that you have always. Been on the list ever since I met you, and I’ve met him probably about 10 years before that. And like I said, my mom’s situation was not a, a secret. And, um, people knew that middle school is hard, but middle school in that level of societal acceptance of my mom’s lifestyle is extra difficult back then. And, and in that location, and to know that he was aware of that and that he cared enough to pray for me to help support me through all those things that I went through, and those, those moments of questioning my purpose and moments of wondering where I belonged, to know that he’d been praying for me, help me. To recognize the goodness that I have in me and that he was willing to, to sacrifice his time in order to do that. And just to be aware, it helped me to know that God was aware of me and cared about what was going on in my life.
So my quick little three examples there were. One, Melissa did the big thing, right? I spent more time at their house than I did at my house growing up. Her and her parents and her family did the big thing. They were just there constantly. They were my, my safe haven as I grew up. My friend Carly did a really little thing in the scheme of things, right? But it was, had a huge impact on me. Pastor George did something I wasn’t even aware of. So our light shiners, they can do the big thing. They can do the little thing or they can do the thing that you’re not even aware of. And I’m sure you have done those things for others. You’ve done the big thing, you’ve done the little thing, you and you’ve done the thing that people aren’t even aware of.
So this week is kind of our little, I wanna try and. Add in important little nuggets of information. I’ll call ’em our pebble, right, because pebbles of light. So our pebble for this week is to think about those who have been your light shiners or your angels, those who placed a little pebble of light in your path, and then write it down. That’s the big step is write it down, take some time and write down those people. And you’ll find as you start to do that, you’ll start to recognize how many there are. I have such a huge list of people that I want to interview for this podcast of people who have been provided a pebble of light for my path, and I’m excited for you to do the same thing and start to think about those people who’ve provided light in your path. And let me know.
Reach out to me because I have the goal. I think it would be awesome to share listener stories and reunite them with people who have provided light in their path in order to just kind of share that so that other people can see the same light that they have. The ways others have lit their path and the ways that they can let others pass. And I just wanna do that as a way to incorporate that into the podcast. So please, again, Instagram is probably the best place to find me. It’s pebbles of light is my handle there, so find me there. And yeah, the reason to write those down, so even if you have people who provide you a pebble of light, even if it’s a message. Save it. So just in March I accepted a calling at church. That was really overwhelming for me, and I had reached out to a few people and said, what am I doing? How do I do this? And I got a few emails back from very dear close friends, and I saved them. And I, I just started a go or a Word document and I just, I copy and paste and I put those messages there. I’ve gotten more as, as the months have gone on. I’ve gotten a few messages here and there and I’ll copy and I’ll paste ’em there so I can go back and read through those and remember, oh yeah, I can do this. This person believes in me. This person is providing light for my path. So take some time, document those who have been your, provided you with a pebble of light.
Document what that pebble is if you can. And yeah, reach out to me and let me know. What you, what you remember, and what you can find of those pebbles of light for you. And I would love to share some of your stories. So again, come find me and thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Have a great day. Thank you for tuning in today more than what’s been said. I hope that you’ve been able to listen to your thoughts and feelings. Maybe you’ve thought of someone who’s brought light to your path. Let them know of your gratitude. Maybe you’ve been inspired as to how to add some light to your own path or the path of another. Do your best to act on those feelings and impressions. I would love to learn more about you and your experiences. Please come find me on Instagram and Facebook at Pebbles of Light. If you like what you hear, please review so we can spread this light further. Until next time.
