I didn’t know what I was doing when I started.

I’d just sold a real estate company I’d built from the ground up. I started with no experience, grew it to eighteen agents, worked twelve-hour days until my husband said it was time to move across the state. I went from business suits and title company meetings to a small town of 3,500 people, eight miles out in the country, and no idea what to do with myself.

So I opened a gift shop.

Two days a week. Friday and Saturday. I served soup and a roll and cheesecake on Fridays. I made a secret recipe tea. I played Alan Jackson hymns overhead. And I opened the door.

I didn’t know how to buy inventory. I didn’t know how to find sales reps. I was in business for three years before I ever went to market. I just figured it out as I went.

The Growth

What started as a two-day outreach became a real business. My husband saw the numbers working and said move to the bigger town. Then someone from Lake of the Ozarks asked me to open a second location. I told Jimmy I didn’t want to. He said I needed to.

At our peak, we ran two locations, seven days a week. I carried 14 brands under mapping contracts, and beautiful items from more than 150 companies. High-end jewelry, leather handbags, clothing, accessories. People came from a extended radius to shop with us. Brides came for their weddings. Families came for graduations. We had on e of the largest selection of jewelry in the Midwest.

But here’s the thing nobody saw from the outside: the store was always ministry. We prayed with customers. Sales reps called me to pray for them when they were sick. We watched people walk in carrying things they couldn’t name and walk out lighter. I saw miracles in the middle of an ordinary retail day. God trained me in that space, not in a church building, not in a seminary. In a gift shop.

The Closing

During COVID, my husband looked at the numbers and said you need to scale back to jewelry, handbags, clothes and accessories. So I did. It seemed the perfect time to restructure. We scaled back. We moved into a smaller storefront. Build a website. Everything seemed to working out perfectly. The landlord began to redo the exterior of the new location. Then the construction disaster happened.

A contractor took down an interior wall without permission over a holiday weekend. Dust and debris covered everything. Thousands of dollars of inventory from nearly 70 venders, all of it compromised. The Saturday after Thanksgiving. Christmas would have been over by the time we could reopen. The insurance company offered to buy out all inventory.

Jimmy said take the deal and don’t start over.

The business didn’t close on my terms. It wasn’t my decision. Twenty years of building, and it was gone in a weekend. I’d just finished loading fourteen thousand items onto the website, one by one. Months of work. And suddenly there was nothing to sell.

It felt like an out-of-body experience. Everything just… gone.

What Rose From It

Within months, Jimmy got a call to coach Division I men’s basketball in Louisiana. We left. And he said, “You’ve got those trademarks. Work on that.”

So I did. I worked to fill the trademarks for Thankful Sheep. I started building what would become a design house. The idea for Mercy in the Morning came alive. The book that had been pressing on me for years finally had space to be written. And the building we’d purchased a decade earlier, the one I always felt was meant for ministry, became the home of Good & Perfect Gifts International.

Everything that exists today grew from the roots of a two-day-a-week gift shop where a woman who didn’t know what she was doing just opened the door.

The store is gone. The mission never left.

Every good and perfect gift is from above. James 1:17