Family

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Dear Dad,

The "daddy dragger" years are gone forever, but not really, because you can never lose a warm, real memory so long as you have the power to recall it.....

It is hard to realize that those days when you shuffled me around the house, balanced on top of your scruffy bedroom slippers that you were only a couple of years older than I am now.....

Yet you still seem that age to me even today, and I wonder how you see me? Am I still your little "Muh-Muh", or am I some unknown woman-child that you have a vague impression about but whose reality lies somewhere in your past?

It is so hard to really see people we are close to or related to. It is so very difficult to change our old patterned ideas and really look for the person who is right out there running around in Dad's or Daughter's clothes so therefore it must be dad or daughter.

Funny how all we have of people we are apart from is memories until "distance" allows us a look again. But even when we get a chance to peek it is so easy to fall back into our memories of who a particular person is and never really know where they have gone in the meantime.

Sometimes I feel that all I know about myself is memories, maybe I have gone full circle and back to an earlier age? Maybe I am finally coming home? Or maybe I am just now, as I write this, realizing where home really is?

I recall all those years of questioning, all the growing pains and, I guess, shrinking and withdrawing pains. I remember all the wandering around searching….. being satisfied for awhile with one friend or another, one man or another or myself. Then I was thinking how I had finally managed to "get myself together", yet still I remained aimless.

I never realized all the time the One I was looking for was not to be found in myself or someone else. It was not because I set my sights too high but perhaps not high enough....

Just like a person can’t find the truth unless they know what truth is..... just like someone can’t find happiness unless they know what to look for..... just as you can’t grasp anything valuable if you don’t know where to seek it. A person can’t find,know or have themself unless they are aware of the Source.

Sometimes it makes me really miserable to know how much I rejected Him and even denied His existence. I think I had to go that way through 9 years of atheism, to come back, full circle, to where I am right now.

The best thing about a relationship with God is that in order for it to be total, complete and full, a person must really come to terms with himself and become totally real and totally true to himself. God won’t have it any other way.

I think of all the dollars spent on shrinks, role playing workshops, group therapy etc. because people seek that which is real, valid and true. Most of those same people miss the basic and INFINITE reality of life…God, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Boy, when I started writing this it was going to be a nostalgic little poem for your birthday and look where it ended up. I even had to rewrite it because it didn’t lend itself to poetic form at all.

Dad, I have found that the most valid and beautifully real thing I can do is give myself totally to God’s will and Spirit. You just would not believe the life changing difference.

All these years even if I was momentarily satisfied with where I was and what I was doing, I had a restless self. I became easily bored and was forever wanting to move on in search for peace and stability. I never realized that it could be found right inside of me, if only I would let Him in!

God is no longer non-existant or someone who lives out there in the sky. He is infinity. He is the past, present and future all run together with no distinction. He is the first and the last. God is absolute reality with the capacity to love. He is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. Best of all, I finally opened my eyes and my ears to ask Him to forgive me and He is WITHIN me!!! My heart is full to overflowing!

I have opened myself until I don’t think it is possible to be more open. I have been filled right up to the top. I have a peace I have never known, a sense of direction, the ability to keep my big mouth shut. (Let that one soak in for awhile!)

I am developing a great communion with the little adage “patience is the golden virtue”….Jesus has so much patience with me now, bless Him. He is making it possible for me, whose first name used to be Impatience, to know and feel and BE patient.

God isn’t something that just happens to me on Sunday. He is there morning, noon and night. He is so real that I find it hard to believe I could have been blind and totally ignoring for so many years.

So much has happened, I hardly touch alcohol anymore (shortly after this was written I was able to quit and have not had a drink since). There was a time when I drank about five out of seven nights. Some nights I drank a bottle or two of wine with dinner and more stronger alcohol later. It was beginning to worry Tom (my husband then). It wasn’t the preacher who told me to lay off; it was me, with the help of God, realizing my limits and basically that drunkenness was breaking His heart. Before,I would try not to have anything alcoholic and would only manage a few days. Each night I thought about how much I missed it and now I don’t even think about it anymore.

I used to be so bored and directionless. Now there aren’t enough hours in the week.

Dad, I am alive, really alive for the first time. And I keep hoping and praying that everyone I know, anyone I touch in my daily life, would take the opportunity to open their eyes and hearts to experience who is just waiting for them to give the word. God has always been there, my denials didn’t alter that, it just meant that for awhile I wasn’t there! All I have to do is read some of my poems to get a feeling of the non-existence I was in.

Guess I’d better wind this down, really, it started out to be a nostalgic poem but I couldn’t get into us, me and the past without letting you know where I am now.

I love you two and may the Lord really be with you!!! Happy birthday Daddy, I’m coming home!!

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