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Measured, Unafraid, Captivating, and Heroic. These are traits that embody a M.U.C.H. Woman. On the I Am M.U.C.H. Woman podcast, our goal is to deepen women’s relationship with God and grow in their understanding of His Word. Here, we’ll share stories of inspiration and testimonies to help women embrace their God-given identities and live courageously. Discover what it means to live by a higher standard, rooted in faith, and committed to becoming the woman God designed you to be.
Dorothy: And the blessing is the communication that you start developing, and you start seeing, and recognizing, and knowing that it’s God. That’s why I say, “To God be the glory.”
CortneyJo: And we can’t get it without it.
Dorothy: You cannot.
CortneyJo: Key, key.
Grandma, oh, my goodness, I am so happy. So, let me just say I am sitting here with my gorgeous, beautiful grandma. You see this beautiful woman here, and I couldn’t be more honored to be able to—
Dorothy: Wow.
CortneyJo: —to do this. So yes, I have been wanting to interview my grandmother for a long time because, for years, I’ve been able to sit and listen to her, encourage me, give me words of wisdom. I tell her all the time, “Grandmother, the woman that I am so much of, who I am is because of you and your faithfulness to God.” My grandmother is the example, the epitome of faithfulness to God. She loves the Lord with all of her heart, with all of her soul, with all of her mind. It is so within her.
We were chatting at breakfast, and I said, “Grandma, practice becomes permanent.” So, when she was younger, a younger woman, she practiced, but it has been permanent in her life for decades now. And as a result, this is the legacy. I am the legacy of my grandmother’s faithfulness. So, we’re sitting in a car right now because I said, “Grandma, we can’t let another moment, time, period go by. We’re just going to record this right here, right, now.”
And I just wanted to take a few moments and just let y’all hear some of the wisdom that I’ve been able to listen to for the last, going on 39 years of my life, my grandmother has poured into me and poured into me and poured into me. So, I was sharing with this beautiful woman at breakfast, I said, ““Grandma, the Lord has put in my heart 15 years ago about a ministry called I Am MUCH Woman Ministry.” So everybody, just really quick. I’m taking a little bit of liberties here with this scripture in Luke 12:48. I’m taking a little bit of liberties here, but the verse says, “To whom much is given, much is required.”
Now, the Lord here, God is saying through this verse, He’s talking about leadership, essentially, just leading. And to whom much is given, much is required in return. So, I’m taking some liberties and saying that as a MUCH Woman [laugh] —
Dorothy: All right.
CortneyJo: —to whom much is given—
Dorothy: All right.
CortneyJo: Much is required in return. And yes, I am referring to in relationships, especially romantic relationships. So, just want to encourage some of my sisters out here—and any of the brothers that’s listening, just li—hold on. Hold on. We about to hear some stuff.
But Grandma, so with that introduction, so Grandma, as I was sharing with you in the restaurant, and I was saying, “Grandma, I have this little acronym for MUCH Woman, and I wanted to get your thoughts on it.” So, [I’m going to] share that again—
Dorothy: Okay.
CortneyJo: —and then I want to hear… what does that say to you when I give it to you?
Dorothy: Okay.
CortneyJo: Okay, so M stands for measured. Measured, I love measured because that says to me that this woman, she is deliberate, and she thinks about, and she prays about her decisions before she makes them. U is she’s unafraid, meaning that she moves, and she walks without fear. C, she’s captivating, meaning she’s beautiful, she’s [fascinating] , and she walks with confidence, walks with her head held high. And H, she’s heroic, she’s courageous, she’s determined, especially in the face of difficulty. Grandma, what does that say to you? What comes to mind for you when you hear that acronym, and that explanation of what a MUCH Woman is?
Dorothy: Actually, so many thoughts went through my mind, even back to my childhood. I think, first, as a woman, especially if we realize and have accepted the fact that we are—and I am—a woman of God, then not only should we expect ourselves to walk as a godly woman, so does the Lord. Even when we come to pray, He said, “Come boldly to the Throne of Grace.” So, if we’re going to come boldly to the Throne of Grace, if we’re going to come to God in prayer without any hesitation and without any fear, then when we are faced with different obstacles, whether they be good or bad, we have to have our mind, and it’s not a on today and off tomorrow. It’s a daily walk, just as we daily walk with the Lord, if we are not, we best better get it in order because His timing is not our timing.
And I can be told, “Well, you don’t know when He’s coming, so you can’t say that our time is winding up,” and so neither do you. So, be also, what? Ready.
CortneyJo: Yes, amen.
Dorothy: So, what are we going to do? We’re going to measure our days. You said, M is for—
CortneyJo: Measured.
Dorothy: Measured. Yes, our days are measured.
CortneyJo: Yes. Yeah. Mm-hm.
Dorothy: So, that’s first of all. And then when you say, U?
CortneyJo: Unafraid.
Dorothy: “Fret not thyselves because of evildoers.” So, are we going to be talked about? Yes. Are we going to be lied on? Of course. But when you know who your Lord and Savior is, and you know in your heart you’ve given God all you got, you can walk unafraid.
And you have that wisdom to know when not to walk, so you won’t have to worry about being afraid because God’s going to give you enough common sense to know you don’t have any business after midnight, deciding where you going to go and what you going to do if it’s not something that’s urgent. It’s time to rest. And it’s just—it’s an on and ongoing, everlasting thing that God has an expectation for us, and He wants us to have that for ourselves.
CortneyJo: A MUCH Woman. So Grandma, let me ask you a little bit about—because I love what you just said about the daily walk—Grandma, can you share about, like, the pre—like, what does that look like, that daily walk from a practical standpoint? How can we do that? Like, how do we, from your standpoint, Grandma, like, how do we get to this point where it’s like… this is a daily walk with the Lord, you know?
Dorothy: What I can tell you is how I have been led, what God has done for me, how He has brought me thus far, by faith. And that started with prayer.
CortneyJo: Mmm, okay.
Dorothy: I’ve always believed in prayer. I’ve always prayed, but when things started changing in my life, where I still had my four sons, but their father had gone a different route than where we were, and beside that, I was working unusual hours, but I noticed the young lady that used to, she did my hair for years, she would pray every morning—and I would, I asked her—she would go to the church and pray.
CortneyJo: Mmm.
Dorothy: Six o’clock in the morning. And I said, “I want to go.” You know, we kind of laughed about it. I said, “But I’m serious.” I said, “I know I pray. But no, I want—” and I started doing it. And not… one day a week. And I’m trying to, kind of, cook together the daily walk. Because even if you don’t go to the altar every day to pray in the building, you can pray in your heart. But it becomes a daily walk.
CortneyJo: Yes, yes, yes.
Dorothy: You want to come to God. Before the phone rings in the morning, before you get up to get your shower and brush your teeth, before you get out to start going to work, you’ve already got your prayer in. And you stay focused. And when you talk to God, God talks back to us. That’s why it’s so important that we ask God, when we say, “Speak, Lord.” And if there’s—sometimes it might be a little doubt or uncertainty, so you say, “Speak Lord, speak again.” And once He does that a time or two, then the walk becomes more determined.
CortneyJo: Yes.
Dorothy: The walk becomes without a doubt, no question. It doesn’t have to be anything that you discuss with anybody because it’s between you and your God.
CortneyJo: So Grandma, when you started this daily prayer because you mentioned that after the father of your four sons went a different direction—and this was your husband—
Dorothy: Amen.
CortneyJo: —he decided to go a different direction, what did that daily prayer start doing? When you made that decision, how did you see that change you? What was the change that you saw?
Dorothy: I think the most prevalent change that came to me was my boys. My sons. I didn’t want them having negative thoughts about their father. And so, we started having meetings. I would tell them both—and they were young; they were young—I started telling them that, “Put this down, put that down. We’re going to have a meeting.”
They didn’t know what I was talking about at first. They was just that young. My oldest son wasn’t even ten years old, just barely. And one thing I told them, “I know you realize your dad is no longer here with us, but one thing that I will not tolerate, and that is for you to disrespect him.” There’s going to be a requirement that I expect out of you, and if you can’t give it up, know that there will be consequences.
And you know what some of them is going to be because I’m not going to have that. You best better always love him, you best better always honor him, and you best better always respect him. What went on between your dad and I is not your business. You are reaping some of the pain because you love your father. Don’t forget that.
And to this very day, my boys quote that back to me. They quote it back to their father because their father didn’t realize that I had said this to them, so he thought I was turning them against him, but that was because of his own personal guilt. And when he—and my boys, after they got older, went to him and sat down and talked with him, and told him.
CortneyJo: Grandma.
Dorothy: And they didn’t tell me that they talked with him. He’s the one that came, my husband—their father, I should say—came back and told me, “I owe you an apology.” So yes, it is a daily walk. Sometimes we might have to cry, but when we know the Word, the Word tells us that God’s going to bottle up every teardrop, yeah. [singing] Don’t worry about the tears that we share [humming] .
That has kept me. And then, God, after 30 years of being a single mother, working on a job for over 30 years, raising four boys, “In the Hood,” quote-unquote, as we called it, as a single black mother. So, a lot of people don’t understand how I express myself now because that’s what’s been etched in stone. Because I be firm, and because I be exact, and precise doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Just when we come, we going to come straight.
That takes a daily walk because it be one thought, one millimeter of a fraction can turn things around, why are we doing the killing that we are having. Done on a daily, a daily walk. So, what decision are you going to make, to have for your daily walk? Packing a gun? So, when somebody say something to you, you don’t like it, pop-pop? Mm-mm. [I’m going to] tell you what I think. I’m not going to lie to you. And [I’m going to] keep on loving you and keep it moving. Daily walking.
CortneyJo: Daily walking.
Dorothy: Amen.
CortneyJo: And that daily walk, it starts with prayer.
Dorothy: You got to pray.
CortneyJo: Pray every day. I read something before that said, “Word before world.”
Dorothy: Ohh, good.
CortneyJo: You know, let’s get the Word in before we start getting to the world, before we go out into the world. “Word before world.” So Grandma, that daily prayer for you in Scripture—and also want to talk about—because we—there’s no way, we’d be remiss if we don’t talk about the prayer line.
Dorothy: I— [laugh] —
CortneyJo: We can’t—
Dorothy: I was wai—
CortneyJo: —we can’t—
Dorothy: —I wanted to keep talking, but I [laugh] —
CortneyJo: we can’t, we can’t—so we got to talk about the prayer line. So, all so, Grandma, I think it’s been about, what, 25 years… because it started in 2000.
Dorothy: It’s been 25 years for the prayer line. It’s been 20 years for me.
CortneyJo: Okay, so 20 years for you. I just remember Grandma telling me, she was like, “Well, I get up at four o’clock in the morning, and I get on this call with all my girlfriends. It’s about 13 of us or something”—
Dorothy: From all over the country.
CortneyJo: “From all over the country. We get up, and we call in on this line at four o’clock, and we pray”—
—“4:30 a.m. and we pray, and we pray daily. We do this daily. We sing, we worship the Lord, and we all pray, and we have our prayer list, and we all pray.” And Grandma, you’re all on the phone for sometimes four hours in the mornings, right?
Dorothy: No, no, no.
CortneyJo: No? Never that long?
Dorothy: I thank God for wisdom because at the time, I was retired. I no longer worked. At the time, I had moved from Kansas City to Blue Springs. Well, the churches that I attended were in Kansas City, so I couldn’t be getting up at 4:30 in the morning trying to get to the altar. So, what God did for me, He had my sister in Memphis, to call me, and she was all exuberant. “I’m this prayer line. One of the mothers at the church started”—yadda, yadda, yadda. I’m listening. I said, “Oh, that’s good.” I said, “So, next time I have a prayer request, I’m going to give it to you”—yadda, yadda.
Until it was in the month of November. I was preparing, trying to get everything together so I can start getting ready for Thanksgiving. And I heard the voice of God say to me, “Get on the prayer line.” And I thought, “I can’t get—I can’t get on the”—it was like, I’m in the kitchen by myself—besides Jesus—so if anybody had come in and saw me, they probably thought, “There she goes.” [laugh] .
CortneyJo: [laugh]
Dorothy: but that’s what ended up happening. The Lord knew my heart, so He set it up where I could [choking up] still come and talk to Him on a daily basis and never leave my front door. And that’s what started me being on the prayer line, and that was in 2003.
CortneyJo: 2003.
Dorothy: And I thank God to this day He has kept me. He has healed my body of cancer. I’ve seen Him heal people. I’ve seen miracles, signs, and wonders. I can’t stop. I won’t stop. My heart is fixed, and my mind is made up. I can’t allow no thing to separate me from the love of God. And He has only escalated it. He has elevated it.
The only time we don’t come together on our prayer line as one is Sunday morning because we all go to church. But God, He added Saturday to it, to where we do our communion and give our testimony. That’s why you got to do it daily because sometimes we are only overcome by the words of our testimony.
CortneyJo: Grandma, I love that.
Dorothy: It’s, it’s, God is good.
CortneyJo: Grandma, I think about some of the things that have happened in our family, some difficult things—
Dorothy: Yes.
CortneyJo: —and things that, even to some of the members in our family, like, they shouldn’t be alive today—
Dorothy: Amen.
CortneyJo: And I have always attributed this to, I said, “We are all hanging on by wing and this woman’s prayers, you hear me?”
Dorothy: [laugh] . Thank you, Jesus.
CortneyJo: [laugh] . Because I believe wholeheartedly that it’s been Grandma, Grandma getting on these 4:30am prayers every day. Because some of us, literally, the fact that we are still walking and breathing, some of us with some of our testimony, some of our stories. I really do believe it’s because Grandma’s faithful prayers. So Grandma, we’re going to wrap this up, but I want to talk about how I love what you—I feel like the best thing that you’ve given us—I mean, you’ve given so much today—but the best thing that you’ve given us is telling us about the importance of prayer—
Dorothy: Amen.
CortneyJo: —and the power.
Dorothy: Yes, yes.
CortneyJo: So, being that MUCH Woman—because measured—
Dorothy: Much— [crosstalk] .
CortneyJo: To start, right, measured—
Dorothy: Measured—
CortneyJo: That M, because that woman, she’s deliberate, and she thinks about, and she prays about her decisions before she makes them. It starts with prayer.
Dorothy: Yes.
CortneyJo: It starts with prayer. So, Grandma is telling us, do it daily.
Dorothy: Daily.
CortneyJo: Now, whether it’s 4:30 a.m. whether it’s 6 a.m. or 8 a.m. Grandma is saying—
Dorothy: 12 noon.
CortneyJo: 12 noon, Grandma said, devoted prayer Grandma, that’s what you’re telling us, right?
Dorothy: Yes.
CortneyJo: Devoted prayer every day. Devoted prayer every day. Daily.
Dorothy: And the blessing is the communication that you start developing, and you start seeing, and recognizing, and knowing that it’s God. That’s why I say, “To God be the glory.”
CortneyJo: And we can’t get it without it.
Dorothy: You cannot.
CortneyJo: Key, key.
Dorothy: Yes.
CortneyJo: We cannot get that without it.
Dorothy: Without. That’s right.
CortneyJo: Without that daily commitment, we can’t get some of the things we need with God because we won’t underst—there’s some things that we need to learn and understand, and we just can’t learn them—
Dorothy: You can’t do it.
CortneyJo: And understand them without—
Dorothy: Without.
CortneyJo: That committed time, prayer. Because like you said, like, it teaches us how—it’s a part of our relationship with God, our personal relationship with God, but it teaches us how to commune with Him.
Dorothy: Amen.
CortneyJo: So, not only are we praying to Him, but it teaches us how to hear Him. It teaches us how to know His voice versus our voice, or other—
Dorothy: and I was getting read—see you just—I heard something else. Because when we pray, we listen and obey. It’s like on-the-job training. It’s like you are in a class. The difference is, you don’t have to worry about student loans. Only thing you have to worry about is obeying the Word of God.
And when we pray and get the word on from a personal level… and then we can take that same word and apply it to the Holy Word—
CortneyJo: Mm-hm, mm-hm, mm-hm.
Dorothy: —then what it does for you can only be done through the love and the glory of God.
CortneyJo: Amen.
Dorothy: Amen.
CortneyJo: Amen. Grandma, thank you so much.
Dorothy: I love you, baby.
CortneyJo: I love you dearly, dearly. I have been able to, I mean, listen to this and be poured into by my grandmother for years, and years, and years, and again, it’s because of her, and I appreciate the devotion that she has to God. And as a—just real quick, just so we clear, this started when she was a young woman. So, this is not something that we got to wait. Oh, once we get 60, you know, we’ll be able to get there. You were a young woman with four boys under the age of ten.
Dorothy: Wasn’t even 30 years old.
CortneyJo: Wasn’t even 30 years old.
Dorothy: I was in my middle 20s.
CortneyJo: —and she had to be praying because she told them boys, after her husband—her children’s father, her boys’ father—and it was her husband at the time—after he done decided to go left [laugh] , she had to be a prayer woman to be able to tell them boys, you better not disrespect him. Because sometimes, I think some of us—ladies know, you know—in some of these situations, they’re difficult, they’re hard, and it really takes a beautiful, faithful, believing woman of God to say, “We’re still going to honor him.”
Dorothy: and that’s what it’s all about because it wasn’t so much, I don’t think that—because of I was—the smartness and the knowledge that I had, I had to trust God because had I trusted my feelings, it would have been a different story.
CortneyJo: Oh, Grandma.
Dorothy: And I’ve heard so many things over the years how a divorce is, it’s almost in the same category as death, and the Lord has allowed me—
CortneyJo: It is. The death of a marriage.
Dorothy: The death of a marriage—
CortneyJo: Death of a marriage.
Dorothy: —is like the death of your spouse. And I’ve experienced them both. And there was a difference, but pain is pain. You don’t categorize pain. So, I—and you know, that’s another entire talk show there, but—
CortneyJo: [laugh] . Yes.
Dorothy: — [laugh] because I can open up a whole can, but I just—I always say, “To God, be the glory.” That was Him educating me, being as a young woman, what to do and how He wanted to be done. And as a fact, as a matter of fact, it was also teaching my sons. I didn’t realize at the time the impact of honoring your mother and your father. That thought—I’m not—I can’t lie and say I was all that holy and glory, and… no. I wasn’t thinking about that. I just didn’t want my children disrespecting their dad.
And as I got older and got more into God and into the Word, I realized, He said to honor your mother and your father, that your days may be long upon this earth. So, when your dad, when God allowed me to stand and see a man, not only with a gun in his hand, but pulling the trigger, and the bullets went, [Then come now they’re] dwelling. He said that your days may be long. Not the first time. Yeah, I could have gone somewhere when you said that we are here today only by you said, “My prayers,” but it was by—I know what you meant—the grace of God.
CortneyJo: The grace of God. But God’s grace, Grandma, because of them prayers, right?
Dorothy: Yes. Yes, ma’am.
CortneyJo: Grandma, His grace—
Dorothy: You’re right.
CortneyJo: Those prayers.
Dorothy: I’m not diminishing here.
CortneyJo: We are—I mean, I feel like it’s, wouldn’t you say, like, it’s God, like, is activating our faith, Grandma.
Dorothy: Amen.
CortneyJo: That is the—
Dorothy: That’s good, baby.
CortneyJo: —activation of our faith, right, Grandma—
Dorothy: Yes. Yes.
CortneyJo: Is that we’re saying, God, that I believe you, I trust you—
Dorothy: I trust you.
CortneyJo: —but I do that through prayer. God, I’m going to pray, and believe, and trust in you, and His grace is as a result.
Dorothy: He said, “My grace is”—
CortneyJo: He loves us no matter what, right?
Dorothy: Ohh.
CortneyJo: He loves u—His grace is sufficient for us. He loves us no matter what, but when we activate our faith, when we actually, when we pray, when we actually, you know, that action, it tells God it’s real, you know? He experiences our faith, Grandma.
Dorothy: And He already knows in the first place. He wants us to do it, so that’s His way of telling us about—He’s telling me about me.
CortneyJo: Yes, exactly.
Dorothy: But He has such an expectation of each and every one of us. He wants to know, am I willing to fulfill God’s expectation that He may want me to have to be a blessing for somebody else.
CortneyJo: Mm-hm, mm-hm, mm-hm.
Dorothy: I might have to cry my tears and feel my pain to where when I see someone else that does not have that connection, I can be an encouragement to them and let them know. That’s why we said, “Let my light so shine.”
CortneyJo: amen. Amen.
Dorothy: Because we want God to get the glory.
CortneyJo: Yes, amen.
Dorothy: To God be the glory—
CortneyJo: To God be the glory. To God.
Dorothy: For the things that He has already done. I’m ready for the other stuff. He’s got s—ohhh. Oh, [I’m going to] say this, and that’s—please—that’s because, you know, we can talk about this all day.
CortneyJo: We can go, but we’re going to keep going.
Dorothy: [singing] . We know God to blow my mind. We know God to blow my mind because He promised me that He would. He said, “I’m going to do all things that you have not even thought of.” I’m waiting on God to blow my mind. That’s my testimony.
CortneyJo: Amen, Grandma. I love—
Dorothy: and that’s sitting here with you today.
CortneyJo: Oh.
Dorothy: He’s blowing my mind.
CortneyJo: He’s blowing my mind.
Dorothy: [laugh] .
CortneyJo: I love you so much.
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