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I absolutely love this topic! My top five embarrassing situations – let’s go!

• I’ll start by going way back to Christmas when I think I was 7. I guess I have always loved a stage, but it helps if you know what you are doing when you perform. Without telling my mom, my best friend and I made up invitations for all of the neighbors on our road to come to a “Christmas Pageant.” We dreamed up costumes and finally my mom figured out our plans, but the invitations were out! We wrote out programs and all of the kids had a part. That would have been cute, but I decided we should have music to follow. I had taken a few piano lessons but could not play a note. Even still, I was the pianist and lead singer taking it all seriously and “playing the piano” for everyone to sing along. This went on and on until my mom had to encourage me to let some of the other kids play songs too.

It is the laugh of every Christmas over 30 years later!

• Keeping on stage, I teach communication classes for business leaders. In one class, I was teaching about being expressive with your hands and body language and all of the participants had to act out skits. I was at the front of the room demonstrating their assignment for a skit called “Marvelous Martha.” It started, “Come one, come all to see Marvelous Martha jump from a fifty-foot ladder into one tiny pool of water.” For this skit, you raise your hands really high to demonstrate the fifty-foot ladder and then squat down to show the tiny pool of water. Just as I squatted, I could hear my pants splitting. There were 12 police officers on the front rows and the look of shock and laughter made it very clear we all knew what happened.

I kept my back to the front of the room, invited the other instructor up to keep the session going and went to the bathroom with my back facing the wall. When I got to the bathroom, it turned out it was just the lining inside my pants, but everyone in the room knew what had happened. They were as surprised as I was when I returned to the room in the same outfit. We laughed about it and moved on, but I feel sure if you ask anyone who attended that class they remember that moment above anything else they learned!

• One of my girls went to a Birthday party and I was “regifting” our present. The problem, I didn’t realize they had put their name inside the tag on the ear. I was standing at the back of the party when the mom said, “who is this from, we can’t find a name?” When I saw what she was holding up and then saw her get really quiet I just slipped to the bathroom and acted like I didn’t know anything about it. So embarrassing!

• Years ago, I was in a tanning bed. It was one where there were a lot of small rooms lined up with thin walls that didn’t go all the way to the floor or ceiling. I was laying in the bed with the timer on when I heard someone open the door to my room and come inside. I was horrified because I knew I would have to get out to get my clothes, so I was loud when I said, “get out!” “I am in here, please get out.” “I am not dressed, please leave.” You don’t need me to finish the story because you already know what I missed. It was the next room over and there were a bunch of guys there working on the bed next door. They just looked at me and smiled as I walked out the door.

• When I started dating my husband, I heard about his family sing-a-longs and was excited to hear all of the music. We went to my in-law’s cabin, and it was the second time I had met everyone and so I wanted to get everything right. When the music started, I could tell that not everyone knew the words to the song I requested and so I started singing along with gusto. My husband is the best and always positive, so he didn’t mean it mean when he said it, but he turned around and whispered, “give us just a minute baby, we are trying to get the chords.” The problem, I wasn’t the only one sitting right behind him and so we all heard. It is still a joke every Saturday night that I have the words but never the notes!

I’d love for you to share your embarrassing moments, and if you want to hear more real, vulnerable stories from my life, I hope you will read “Pieces of You.” The book is written to help you discover who you are in light of Whose you are and there is plenty I have learned about myself through laughter and some hard along the way!

Knowing who you are has always been challenging, and in today’s world, more and more voices are coming from more and more places telling us who we should be. The result? A broken sense of identity that we’re struggling to put back together.

In Pieces of You, April Farlow shares how she discovered her identity is formed by the God who made her. Along the way, she’s learned that if we want to put the pieces of who we are together in a real, lasting way, we have to look to Whose we are for help.

It’s time to take a look at the unique pieces that make up who you are …

The pieces you compare …
The pieces informed by the father figure in your life …
The painful pieces …
The pieces of your relationships …
The pieces on which you’ve built your beliefs …
The pieces that give you rules and boundaries …
The pieces that show what you value …
The pieces that give you purpose …
The pieces that help you build a vision for what’s to come.

As we work to put those pieces together, we’ll look to the God who made us, knows us, and loves us to guide us. Because when you take all your pieces—the good, the bad, the broken, and the beautiful—and place them in your Heavenly Father’s hands, there, you’ll find peace. There, you’ll find security. There, you’ll find a real sense of who you are and Whose you are.

Enjoy an Excerpt

Over just a few hours, my Kaleidoscopes began to lean into each other’s stories. Things got real fast. And I think that’s because we took a break from measuring ourselves against each other. Instead of comparing, we chose to share.

And that’s a great place to start.

To stand confidently in both who you are and Whose you are, you must first learn to avoid the temptation to compare. Staying out of the comparison trap is an essential piece of the puzzle that is discovering and embracing our identity.

After our meeting, my friend Angela went home and looked in her daughter’s school folder. There, she found a worksheet her seven-year-old, Elle, had filled out. “Color yourself and then write words to describe yourself in the circles,” the instructions said across the top. That’s precisely what Elle did. She colored her hair and eyes to match hers and wrote six words to describe herself.

Funny
Artistic
Pretty
Love
Kind
Smart

For Angela, her daughter’s list was not only accurate, but it was also a stark contrast to the list she and the other women had made. Angela told me about it later: “I wonder at what age we stop believing the good? I wonder what happens to cause us to begin seeing the negative before the positive?”

I wonder the same for all of us.

About the Author: April Farlow has spent the last 20 years motivating audiences to get out of their comfort zone, speak up, and represent their values. In corporate environments, one piece is missed—the ability to talk about forming your identity in God. Today, as a speaker, author, coach, and non-profit leader, April is changing this by sharing her faith journey and helping others do the same with clarity and conviction.

In 2017, after speaking to a group of foster youth, April founded Lydia’s Place, a ministry serving young adults who have experienced foster care or homelessness. April and her husband have four girls and live on a mini-farm outside of Athens, Georgia.

Buy the book at Amazon.