Welcome to my Journey

Welcome to my journey. I began a journal back on March 26, 2015. It was something I had never done before in my Christian walk. My counselor suggested I start journaling as a way to express my feelings and thoughts. Perhaps you are wondering why I am seeing a counselor.

Let me back up a little and share a little background that led up to all this.

I have been married for over 37 years. I met my wife at Church when I was about 16. We dated for about 5 years and got married between my junior and senior years in Bible College. Without bogging you down with a detailed biography of my life since then, let me give you a "short," "brief "synopsis of my life since then. We have six kids and 12 grandkids. I have had multiple ministries and jobs, most of which have ended in some sort of failure. I have struggled with debt my whole married life. My devotional life has been spotty. Television has been my distraction. I love my wife and kids and have always tried to be there for them. I have sought to provide as best as I can for all of them. I have attempted to live a godly life before them, and you would find us in church just about every Sunday and even Wednesday. I made sure the kids were involved in the church, though later on, some experienced disappointments in the church, which led them away for a while. In all this, the desire to serve the Lord has never died, just put off continually by debt and doubt. Doubt that I could really do anything worthwhile for the Lord on a fulltime basis. Failure after failure in my younger years led me to the conclusion that I could never do anything of significance for the Lord.

Meanwhile, I was always involved in my children's lives. Some had debt issues as well, and I would help them with their debt as I was able to. One daughter had continual relationship problems with her husband, and I became involved with that as well. That has continued until this day. Presently I work the graveyard shift in a job that pays reasonably well. I took the job in order to get out of debt and also be able to take my wife on trips to a favorite place of hers. The benefits also were great and helped me to take care of her health issues better. She suffers from various ailments, including joint pain, sciatica nerve problems, and depression.

So all this to say, the reason for the counselor and the reason for the journal is because earlier this year, my wife left me in the middle of the night while I was at work. She had an old friend she had found on Facebook, come and get her. She nows lives with him and his dad. She is the dad's caretaker, and she also is the housekeeper. She sights the feelings of aloneness due to my schedule (he works the graveyard shift too, but would text her from work - something I can't do on my job). She says I never included her in the decisions to move, spent too much time on the computer, and didn't listen to her when I watched TV. She says she felt like a second class citizen compared to the children. She also had issues with the husband of my daughter, who lives next door to us. He had stolen her wedding and engagement rings and pawned them. He had taken and pawned her DVD collection as well. She felt used by our daughter and her husband to wash clothes and watch their children. She was upset with me because I did not kick him out of the house my daughter rents from me. Last year I discovered this relationship my wife and her friend were having by phone as well as an affair they had right under my nose when we went to visit him last year (he lives in another state). I forgave her and began to address some of the issues she had with me. However, having been hurt deeply, I found myself weeping uncontrollably every day and sighing a lot as well. This annoyed her. I sighed, to relieve the stress and pain I felt, and to be honest, because I was seeking an apology, but never got one. I gave up TV and limited computer use. I attempted to try to fix the problem next door, which proved to be complicated. Nevertheless, despite my efforts to change and fix things, she left me at the end of January 2015.

My journal began as a journey for healing and growing closer to God. I felt this was the ultimate wake up call from Him when failure, unemployment, and a stroke didn't get through to me. In it, I share my thoughts and feelings about my life and about my wife leaving me. I record my reactions to things that happen to me daily. I also document my journey through the Psalms and how that intersected with my life in the present. I use various means to share my thoughts. Besides recording my actual thoughts, I include insights from Bible commentaries and Christian authors, words from songs others have written, as well as poems that I write which come to me as I am journaling. In the beginning, there was much less structure to my journaling, but now it has developed into a form that follows a specific pattern. In the beginning, my thoughts were directed towards myself and God. Later, as the idea of sharing my thoughts with others began to form in my mind, I started journaling as if I was speaking to others as well as myself. My journal did not begin with Psalm 1 but psalm 143. I had read through that many Psalms before I started my journal. I started my journal in a journal book. When I had used up all the pages in the book, I had just finished up on Psalm 21. I then began journaling on my computer. I will start my blog with these electronic entries and share them as I am able to. The actual dates of writing will be included with perhaps a daily brief intro preceding it. My goal is to minister to others who may have faced or are facing challenges in their life similar to mine, though I am not restricting it to that. I hope to build a community of believers that I can minister to and comfort as well as be ministered to and comforted myself Cor. 1:3-7). A band of believers who will pray for one another in these last days when:

Matt 24:12
Sin will be rampant everywhere, and the love of many will grow cold. 

Holy Bible, New Living Translation ®, copyright © 1996, 2004 by Tyndale Charitable Trust. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers. All rights reserved.

and:

2 Tim 3:2-5
People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. NIV

If that band be 1 or 1000, or as many as God so chooses, it will be worth it if I can bless the life of another. Even now, the enemy is seeking to discourage me in this endeavor. However, I am not ignorant of his schemes. The Lord has taught and reminded me much over these last months. Let me share two of those:

Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
James 4:7 NIV

The Lord is my strength and my shield;my heart trusts in him, and I am helped.My heart leaps for joyand I will give thanks to him in song.Ps 28:7 NIV

Now may the Lord bless this blog

May it bring clarity not a fog

May it bring glory to His name

May it bring grace and not shame

                                             Amen