For Us, For Me, For Every Created Thing To See

It has been a month since my last post. Things have been hectic with the holidays coming. Work is picking up. Kids are growing and more demanding. Life is just plain faster and harder. I fell off a step ladder last Thursday and sliced my left forearm open requiring multiple sutures and staples to close. That injury kinda slowed things down a bit. I actually took a photo of my arm before and after suturing and my crazy yet lovely wife posted it to Facebook. I mean really, we live in a world where I can cut my arm halfway off and the next moment its digitized and spewn around the planet. Crazy cool times we live in now.

More seriously though is the time with our families and friends. I have the pleasure of having a wonderful wife and family. I serve the one and only God of all things. My God, my King. Sadly this has not always been so. I served myself first for a long time. I lived without thought or consequence of a "God". I lived, I lost, I destroyed the things that were close to me. I lost all my family, all my friends, all my self respect because of brokenness, hopelessness and despair brought on by addiction and more specifically no relationship with Jesus Christ. This is no fault of Jesus I'll let you know. Looking back I can see where He has extended His hand countless times offering me the unconditional love I have always sought. The love that we all seek. I found Jesus Christ as my Savior when I was 12 years old.
I promptly took that experience and started burying it with the "junk" of this life in the "junk drawer" of this life. I kept on living and kept filling that junk drawer with the things I thought I wanted and needed. I lived hard and played hard. I ended up married and soon thereafter suffered a broken neck and ended up paralyzed from the waist down. Soon after surgery to stabilize my neck I discovered I had contracted Hepatitis C from surgery. Hepatitis C from my surgeon. Six months later it was discovered I had liver tumors. I had cancer. In a two year period I had went from owning life to being a prisoner of life and the hits kept coming. My marriage deteriorated. Life was insufferable. I sat day after day mentally and physically deteriorating. I gave up. The desire to live, left. Then in the fourth year following experimental viral treatments for the cancer and Hepatitis C something remarkable happened, I was cured. No detectable tumors could be observed, the liver biopsy showed no cirrhosis. and the Hepatitis C was undetectable with RNA testing. My physician called it a miracle. I really can't recall rejoicing. The grip of depression and loss was greater than the news that, yeah! now you get to live a long time in that stinking chair. Talk about ungrateful, no good self serving, feeling sorry for yourself scumbag. That was me. I could have had a goose that laid a golden egg and I would have been mad cause I couldn't fry it. Two years later four significant things happened. 1. I began to regain feeling in my legs. 2. My mother died. 3. Our daughter died. 4. Within two years I learned to walk again. All this and not once did I say thank you God. I just took, hid it, buried it, faked it. My physical abilities improved my mental abilities deteriorated. My addiction dominated my life. My wife sat in a chair in our living room and disappeared. My marriage was over. My life was over, or so I thought.

I believe I once was the most ungrateful human that has ever lived.I stole lied cheated, decieved and in doing so I found a new life and a new friend, Unfortunately for her she didn't get to meet the real me until after she married me. We hadn't been together long and the addiction became unmanageable and without bounds.My firsy ex-wife committed suicide and almost a year to the day my new wife divorced me and I was on the street, living to die. I lived from shelter to shelter. Hopelessness abound. I still can't wrap my head around how God could have delivered me from so many hopeless situations and I not be able to see it. Well. finally I'd had enough. It came time to die. I had a plan. My ex-wife told me that night she never wanted to hear from me again. Never wanted to see me or have anything to do with me. The last thing i told her was she'd never see me again. That night I overdosed on methadone and was found dying in an alley. The ambulance took me to the hospital who saved my body. My soul was still lost. I woke up in ICU five days later mad as a hornet because I was still alive. I raged against God. What kind of God would make me suffer like this. How could I be so selfish? Why couldn't I see every blessing that He'd given me? I felt the presence of the love of God laying in that hospital bed. I cried to Him to do what the Bible said He'd do. Save me, Forgive me, Help me, Take this horror and pain and hopelessness off of me and please God do it now cause I can't stand it another moment. Jesus won't let me die ans I can't live without Him. I gave my life to Christ that moment of that day Better yet He gave me life that day. The sacrifice He made on the cross at Calvary where he Died so that I could live. I accepted that gift that day.

I escaped from the hospital that day a homeless half naked former drug addict. I walked to a place called The Union Rescue Mission. I stayed therefor a year and went through their rehab program. I established a relationship with Christ. I found a new family at a Church that God led me to, The First Assembly Of God North Little Rock. The closer in relationship I grew with God the more I had to cry and tell Him I was sorry for not seeing the blessings and gifts and miracles he had done in my life, all my life. One day my ex-wife contacted me. I didn't know if I should have contact with her. I had prayed for many months for our relationship to be restored. I didn't know if I was strong enough to just "be friends". We met I showed her MY CHURCH and her comment after an hour was "I think I need to bring the kids here, we need to be in Church". I knew it then and there. God was up to His stuff again. Within a year our Pastor married us, again. We live today so the kids will see everyday how God can take a broken helpless sinner and love him into a worthwhile, purpose filled person. I live today to share my story of how far God will let you go just to get you into a position to choose Him.

I understand today that Jesus not only died for us, He was born for us. He lived for us. He loved for us so we could know what being born, living, loving and dying meant. I have come to know, for me , the meaning of Christmas was the birth of my Savior. The thing that has recently come to my knowing is that God created us so He could show all His creations what love was. We were given the free will to choose to love God or reject God. The son of God came and lived among us and let it be known that he was dying for us to abolish all sin for all time. All we had to do was accept that truth, that reality, that gift. In doing so we exercised our free will and fulfilled God's grand design that above all else love triumphs.

In this Christmas season I urge you to open your junk drawer of life and remove the clutter, broken,useless, meaningless junk that covers the glowing gift that Christ has given to us all. If you've accepted His gift of salvation but buried it with the trappings of life dig like crazy to rediscover it. Find it and nurture it because frankly, it's all you got. If you have never accepted Christ's gift of salvation, Now Is Your Chance To Use Your Free Will. There is a God, His son is Jesus. He lives. The stories you've heard about how He came to earth as a baby, grew to manhood, lived a sin free life, taught the truth about who He is and who we are, and that these truths are found in a book named The Bible. These are all true. Find a Bible .Open it to the Book Of Luke and read. Let your heart feel the truth. Go around the corner from where you live and go into the Church. Say hello to anyone. Set down. Open your heart close your eyes and hear the truth. Believe it or not, YOU are the meaning of Christmas. It was all for you and I. Jesus in the manger, Jesus the teacher, Jesus the sacrifice. It was all for you and I. Jesus made Christmas for us. We didn't make it for Him.

This season hold your children. Hug your parents. Greet your neighbors. Call your families. Gather together and remember the Christ who loves us. the Savior who gave all for us. The God that opens His heart for His children and offers them the unconditional love that He created. God bless us all, Merry Christmas