Beverly Weeks publishes new book 'Get a G.R.I.P.'
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on January 13, 2016 1:46 PM
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Beverly Weeks, center, poses for a photo with Brandy Sadler and her mother, Debbie Anderson, at the women's conference at The Bridge Church Saturday.
Beverly Weeks, a self-professed "people pleaser," is working on tuning out all the negative voices that trip her up.
But that was not always the case.
Once upon a time she was a doggedly determined news reporter.
In 1992, she worked at a TV station in Johnston County.
"Everybody told me I'd never get an interview with a national person," she recalls.
Then she learned that Vice President Dan Quayle was paying a visit to North Carolina.
"I called the White House every day, wanting an interview with Dan Quayle. I did not care that he could not spell potato," she said, a reference to a slip-up made when Quayle corrected a student by making him add an "e" to the word.
The Goldsboro native finally got through to a PR person at the White House, who indulged her request and let it slip that Quayle's bus was passing through Johnston County and where it was scheduled to stop.
"Well, all the big outlets were there -- Channels 5, 7, 9 and 11 -- all the national media and I was in line with all these other reporters," she recalls. "He pulled up and got off that bus (and I yelled), 'Let me on that bus. I'm a starving reporter!'
"Everyone else was standing around. I was standing there waving my arms. The security guy steps off and lets me on. I interviewed Dan Quayle."
She wound up riding the bus all the way to the Johnston County Courthouse, the destination and where other media awaited.
"When I got off the bus, all the reporters were there. I just do that Miss America wave and what happens when you're persistent?" she said with her trademark hearty laugh, before answering her own question. "You get on the front page of the News-Argus."
Instead of just reporting the news, she said, she called a reporter friend at the Goldsboro paper, who in turn interviewed her about the experience.
It was an emotional moment. All those voices. All those other reporters, but she chose to listen to God's still small voice whispering, reminding her she could do it, she said.
"I had a choice. I had these negative voices -- 'You'll never land this.' 'You're not qualified.' But I was not going to listen to them," she said.
That would not be the last time doubts and insecurities crept into her psyche, though. The same thing happened when she landed her job as executive director of Wayne Pregnancy Center in 2013.
She said soon after being hired to the position, she was sifting through applications of her former competitors for the job. Many of them, she said, seemed more qualified and educated than she.
But it taught her something, she says.
"There was a reason I was allowed to see those applications," she says. "So I'd know I was chosen for myself and was as valuable and worthy of the job as anyone else."
These days, in addition to "persistent," she embraces another adjective she values even more -- "faithful."
"I'm learning how to ignore negative thoughts, negative people, these people that have been baptized in pickle juice," she said. "If I let that saturate me, it brings me down but God has so much more for us.
"I just want to be real and transparent."
She recently put her own energetic, "Jesus-loving, girl-next-door" message into a just-released book, "Get a G.R.I.P."
The Southern colloquialism is one she heard a lot as a child. Translation: get over it, let it go, buck up.
Her book is not a how-to manual as much as a helpful companion filled with words of encouragement, hope and little nugget devotionals, she said.
"You're going to be reading a book from an unlikely candidate," she said. "The enemy will come to you at times and tell you you're not qualified for a certain job, for a certain position, to do things. Again, that's an attack from the enemy.
"This is to tell people, again, He (God) does not always call the qualified but He will qualify the called."
The title is also an acronym, representing four steps to overcome the many obstacles that will come our way, she said.
"G is go to God in prayer. That's the first thing you've got to do. R is rally your support team. You need people that are going to speak the truth and not necessarily tell you what you want to hear," she said. "I, ignore negative thoughts and naysayers. When you're going through a crisis, you're going to come into contact with all those people. You're going to have to walk away from them. P is prepare for battle."
And after all that, she says, praise God.
"Because you've walked through it, because we forget to praise Him for bringing us through the battle," she said. "If you don't praise, you forget exactly what He did for you."
The book, from local publisher Freedom Fox Press, sells for $12.95 and is available at Christian Soldier and on Amazon.