00:00Hey, I'm Lindy Boone and you're watching Life Minute TV.
00:05Daughter of the legendary entertainer, Pat Boone, Lindy Boone grew up performing all
00:10over the country as the Boone family with her parents and three sisters.
00:15Years later, after a successful career as a fitness trainer and raising three kids of
00:19her own, she's still singing, writing songs, books, and spreading a positive message of
00:24faith, hope, and love after tragedy.
00:27This is a Life Minute with Lindy Boone.
00:31When your happy turns to tears and you're broken by your fears...
00:37We learned to sing in the car with my mother teaching us.
00:41I have three sisters and she sang with her sisters and my dad is a singer.
00:47And my mother really started off as a singer as well, but she ended up having four daughters
00:52really fast and was a stay-at-home mom.
00:55But she taught us to sing and then we ended up traveling as a family in my dad's show.
01:02We ended up performing and that led to recording.
01:06So we did a lot of singles hoping to have that breakthrough single, but we did some
01:13Christian albums that were well known and even got nominated for a Grammy on one of
01:18those.
01:20So we sang a lot together until we ended up splitting up to have our own families and
01:25move away.
01:26And it got to be too hard and Debbie's career took off.
01:29And you light up my life.
01:37Spend some time with your Creator.
01:40Are you grateful that He made you?
01:43What came to my mind was the word, word layer.
01:47I had actually concocted that word many years before when I had a book coming out.
01:53And it was the spiritual journey of after my son Ryan had had a brain injury.
01:59And so word layer had a lot to do with my awareness of the power of my own words that
02:05I would speak as I was going through such a difficult time.
02:09The reason it got made was I eventually played the song for him when I got to sing it at
02:16my church.
02:17I spoke and I sang it and I just showed him on my cell phone.
02:22Oh, Daddy, I sang the song I wrote.
02:24And even though I had played it for him before, this was different when he saw me standing
02:28there and singing it.
02:30And his record company guy was there as well.
02:34And this was just in his family home in Nashville, just a few of us in the kitchen.
02:39And they both went, wow.
02:41They wanted to know what I was doing with the song.
02:44And I said, oh, well, it's in my computer and I play it for people from time to time.
02:49And they definitely wanted to see it made into a full production.
02:55And they made it possible later on in that year to come to Nashville, fly my sisters
03:01in.
03:02We hadn't sung together in a really long time.
03:04And we created the song and the video.
03:07And so it's a YouTube video as well.
03:10If people haven't seen it, it's kind of the making of the song.
03:13My dad was in it.
03:15He was there hearing it for the first time and needed a tissue right off the bat because
03:21this is so meaningful for him to see his four daughters singing this song with this meaning
03:27after a long time since we've sung together.
03:37Ryan was my first son.
03:39I have three kids, all very wonderful.
03:42One day he went up to the roof of his apartment building with his roommate and he stepped
03:46on a skylight.
03:47And the skylight, he really didn't mean to step on it.
03:50He was trying to step across it and his foot came down on it and it broke.
03:54And it was three stories above the ground.
03:56He fell and he incurred a severe brain injury.
04:00So that changed all of our lives.
04:03And that was about 23 years ago.
04:06So we've walked this brain injury world for a long time.
04:10He has come back to us in many ways, but he still lives with us.
04:15He has caregivers 24-7.
04:17He's in therapy every day.
04:19But he has regained an awful lot that wasn't expected.
04:25And I just am so grateful for what has returned.
04:29And I focus on that and every day celebrate the fact that I can hear his voice because
04:35it took 15 months before I heard his voice again.
04:38He can smile and say, I love you.
04:40And he's got great command of his vocabulary, but he also has behavior that, you know, we'd
04:47love to do without, but that's part of TBI, traumatic brain injury.
04:52So we started a nonprofit, Ryan's Reach, and that's been about 20 years ago.
04:58And we've been able to help an awful lot of people get therapy after their injury and
05:03insurance cuts them off.
05:05And we also started two group homes for people with traumatic brain injury because there
05:10are just hardly any homes out there for people with brain injury.
05:13And it's kind of specific.
05:15And before we started them, we could only find homes that were homes for the elderly.
05:20And they would place one maybe younger person with a brain injury in an environment like
05:25that.
05:26But we've started two that are strictly for people with TBI, the younger population that
05:33we hope to see continue to recover and be stimulated and have as normal of a life as
05:38they can have in a residential community.
05:41It's shocking when you've never had suffering in your life.
05:45And I never had.
05:46I was 45 years old and everything had gone fairly well.
05:50So it was shocking to see something that you always kind of would hear about and think
05:55it was always happening to somebody else, but not to my son, not to my family.
06:01And so it's an opportunity to grow.
06:04And I definitely being from a family of faith, I dealt more into impressed into my faith.
06:11You ask a lot of questions and you kind of all the other peripheral stuff falls aside
06:17and you ask the important questions and you decide how you're going to face it.
06:22And for me, it was leaning on family, leaning on God, believing that prayer matters,
06:29believing that my own words matter, and then having acceptance and looking for what I had
06:36to be grateful for every day.
06:38And that's a lesson that, you know, it takes time to practice it.
06:42There's an awful lot you can dwell on of sorrow.
06:45But I recommend to people to start listing the things that you can be grateful for.
06:52And sometimes it was as simple as I'm grateful he can swallow.
06:56I'm grateful that he wasn't alone when he fell because somebody could call 911.
07:02I just started with very basic things.
07:05But now I'm so grateful I can hear him say I love you.
07:08I'm so grateful that I can feel his arms around me and he can hug me and he knows who we are.
07:14Even though his life, he doesn't remember what he had for breakfast.
07:19He lives in this present moment.
07:22And as he's living in the present moment, he's teaching me to live in the present moment
07:27and say right now I'm grateful.
07:30Right now I am content.
07:32And so that's how I get through.
07:37Dad's 90th fabulous weekend with our immediate family, my sisters, their husbands, their kids, their grandkids.
07:45Dad has, he says 17, I think he's off count.
07:49I think there's 15 great grandkids.
07:56People say what's next musically?
07:58I never wrote a song before Word Layer.
08:01I have written a couple songs since then.
08:04But I don't really know if they have commercial value or if they're just for me.
08:09I've written a song for my grandson because I'm a new grandmother.
08:14And my husband said, you should write a song for Bryce.
08:18And I laughed and I said, you think I write songs now?
08:21But then a title came, the words came.
08:24And I wrote this really sweet lullaby for anybody that has a grandchild called My Baby's Baby.
08:31So there's something in my heart that wants to see that come to life.
08:36And then I also have written a worship song.
08:39So I have songs that have been coming to me.
08:43And maybe they'll get made, but I'm very open to it.
08:46And when people say, what's next?
08:49I go, I don't know.
08:51We'll see.
08:52To hear more of this interview, visit our podcast, Life Minute TV on iTunes and all streaming podcast platforms.
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