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could invite. They would not give us more than those eight tickets. If I could have bent that rule, I would have. I wanted everyone I knew to watch my DWTS debut!
During the show I was often asked why my brother, Kirk, wasn’t in the audience. Between his six active kids’ schedules and his touring conference schedule, Monday nights simply didn’t work out for him or his family to be in the audience. However, my parents, two sisters, and grandmother were all able to come various weeks and I felt well supported by my entire family.
    The faces you didn’t see were the people cheering me on from beyond the DWTS stage. Starting with that very first show, I had two prayer teams in place led by my friend Clare Smith. Clare is a fitness blogger I met several years ago when I launched a website called Roo Magazine. Clare was recommended to me as a health and fitness writer and joined my team. Because of our shared love for health, fitness, food, and cute clothes, Clare and I clicked instantly. She’s become a close friend. I’ve since taken Roo Magazine down, but my friendship with Clare and several of the other members of my writing team remains. When Clare learned I would be on DWTS , she offered to host a prayer team for me. She asked me for a list of individuals I wanted her to include on the prayer team and suggested we break the names into two groups. The first was an intimate group of prayer partners that she could e-mail the specific details of my prayer needs. That became a tight circle of women who prayed faithfully for me throughout the entire journey. Clare also organized a larger group of about thirty ladies who I trusted to pray for me in more general terms.
    Clare sent out regular prayer updates to those two teams. She would often direct them to pray a certain passage of Scripture for me and would ask me daily how the groups could pray for me. I sure needed those prayers as I faced the first live show, and as the journey continued my prayer team became an absolute lifeline. They prayed me through that first show and they were right there cheering for me as it wrapped. The feedback from that first show was very positive. My phone blew up with texts of encouragement and people saying, “Way to go!”
    All of that fed into my high, but as I looked down from that mountain of excitement and pride and support, I started to worry about the next round of competition. I was proud of myself for conquering my fears and was thrilled that Mark and I had hit one out of the park, but almost immediately I started to fear I had set the bar too high for myself. I don’t like disappointing people and I was suddenly afraid that I wouldn’t be able to live up to the expectations of others. I wanted room to grow as a dancer and a woman, and I was afraid that the judges and the public were going to expect too much of me going forward. They would expect me to improve, but the bar had already been set so high. Just like Peter went from walking on the water to sinking like a stone in an instant, my fears and anxieties started to pull me down.
Here’s an insider’s peek into Clare’s “recruitment letter” that she used to launch my prayer team:
    Friends and Family of Candace,
    It is with great excitement that we usher Candace into a fun, new season of life as she is on Dancing with the Stars ! We know this has been a dream of hers for a while now, so to see it come to reality is quite a blessing! What a fun week we had watching her perform and the outpouring of support from her fans!
    A part of Candace’s testimony is Esther 4:14. “For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” ( niv ). For such a time as this—and this is most definitely a “time”! As she does the works that God has put in advance for her to do, with the gifts