- Not The Only One!
- Post #135
- 29 May 24
- “Turning The Corner “
- Howdy!,
- I want to say thank you so much for the one’s of you who are faithful readers and subscribers. I heard from quite a few of you over my last post. I guess that I said something or things that caused some concern, but honestly I’m fine and thank You for checking in. I’m not always aware of how my words will resonate with the audience and so I apologize if I sounded as if I was in great distress ☺️☺️. Maybe the last time out was a little heavy and it was unintentional. So let’s see if we can turn the page or should I say the corner☺️.
- I’m not going to keep you in suspense with this one and just tell you that it’s straight up about prodigal love. I’m not sure if you are familiar with the story that Jesus told in the book of Luke in chapter fifteen, but it’s just loaded with symmetry, wonderment and grace. The culture is so totally different from ours that most people just read over the story and never fully consider the implications of what is being laid out. According to the Jewish law, if you had a rebellious and defiant child, you could take them to the city gates, have judgement rendered against them and the community would stone them to death, so there wasn’t a lot of back talk back in the day☺️☺️. Hmm, I wonder how that would play out in today’s society 🤔. Oh! , I know the kid would call child protective services and the parents would be put under the jail☺️☺️.
- No matter, a brief synopsis of the prodigal son. The younger son went to his father and demanded an inheritance, which would normally go to the eldest son, and he wanted it before his father died. The father granted his request and he took his share of the loot, moved away and squandered every last shekel on wild living.☺️☺️. Something disastrous took place, like Covid, ☺️☺️, and his resources ran out along with his fair weather friends and he found himself in dire distress. He violated Jewish customs and found himself working for a pig farmer. Things got so bad that the things he was feeding the pigs began to look good to him for food. Then he miraculously remembered his father, who he had disrespected and thought maybe that his father would take him back as a hired hand, and not as a son. Well, there are a few other things that come into play such as the older brother having a complete meltdown , but the big take away from the story was that his father never , not once gave up on him. When the son was a long way off, the father spotted him and ran to meet him, and then he threw a huge what amounted to a welcome home party. I often wonder how long his father had been looking, watching, waiting and hoping for the return of his long lost son. I wonder if he got up every morning and walked down a long dirt road and looked in both directions, hoping to see him on the horizon . It’s a moving story of a Father’s unfailing love for his wayward son. It’s the story of a broken relationship , that the father never considered over and he never thought that it was good as dead. This story is oddly enough, my story and now also the story of my son.
- I talk a great deal about my daughter and not so much about my son. I think it’s a little bit of birds of a feather flock together. My daughter is so much like me and my son is a lot like his mother. My daughter is a daddy’s girl so she seeks out opportunities to spend with me and to share her life with me. My son is just a ” Dude”, with all of the guy’s mentality🤪. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great kid, that apparently drew the short straw when it came to parents ☺️☺️. I’m not going to cast a broad net and say that kids that come from ” broken homes” , all drew short straws, but that is sometimes the case , as it is here. I know that life happens, and people find themselves going in opposite direction for all sorts of reasons. Sometime ago , I wrote a post dedicated to my daughter called ” The Glue”. She was the one that was trying to hold the family together, when the other three of us were looking for our own personal cliff to jump off☺️☺️. I think that she was the one that came out of it the least unscathed and probably the most objective as well. Somehow she managed to process it all, and as well as she did, her brother was a complete one eighty of that. She processed it all and her brother suppressed it all and went to a very dark place.😪. My daughter was the one holding all of us accountable for our parts, while we all doing our best to play the blame game. In all honesty, she was almost an adult, closing in on twenty and he was a few years behind and very impressionable and full of testosterone ☺️☺️, not usually a good combo, unless they are a young Marine trying to take a hill☺️☺️. My son spent much of the next decade going through life as an angry person that couldn’t escape the wreckage of his broken home, which for him was the equivalent of a broken heart. He was fully in his mom’s corner and then after some time and space , he saw and had equal criticism for both of us.
- He walked away from everything and everyone and that included The Man Upstairs. After all, how could God let this happen?….have you ever been there ?🤔. I think it’s quite natural for us to want to blame God , when bad things happen in our lives, after all , He’s all powerful and can do anything, so why didn’t he keep my family together and keep my parents from behaving like a pair of jack asses!? I think often God is the convenient fall guy, for when we ask why and never get what we consider a satisfactory answer. I’m actually amazed by how much my son’s life is a do over of my own past , with different hurts for different reasons, but I’m all to well familiar with how the pain he feels and how the story goes. I may have been a little hard on him when he was growing up for this precise reason, not wanting to repeat bad family history., and yet , here we are🙃 Two things remained true, and they are that my son is a chip off of the old block, and two, short of being involved in some criminal activity, he could never have been a quarter of the hellion that I was when I was his age.☺️☺️. I was a horrible misfit and still am on some fronts, but this one isn’t about me ☺️☺️.
- Let me introduce you to my son. He is biracial. He is tall, really good looking, highly intelligent, and a head of hair just like all of those pictures you see of Jesus ☺️☺️. He’s always been someone who picks up things really quick, but if it’s not quick and easy for him, then he can loose interest in whatever it is very easily. The funny thing is he likes to go around and tell people that he was an oops, after we had already had the perfect child , his sister, but nothing could be further from the truth. He was planned and his mother and I both know exactly when he was conceived. I only make mention of this because of the great humor that followed, because we were thinking how great it was going to be for both of our kids to have the beauty and full richness of two different cultures in their backgrounds . Well the joke is we never considered him getting the worse parts of us to go along with that cultural richness ☺️☺️. He absolutely got some of the worse character traits from his mother and I. I’m not going to go into what they are, that would just be TMI,☺️ but I will give you my favorite one as a bonus and that is the whole cutting off of your nose to smite your face….and did he get that one down to a science ☺️☺️
- Two things have always characterized my son and they are he is one of the most tender and kind hearted people you will ever hope to meet. He is also known for being equally hard headed…don’t touch the stove ,it’s hot….are you sure??😆. It’s true!, he’s both kind and generous, and would probably give you the shirt off of his back. I remember him playing football in school. He was a defensive end and any time that he got a sack on the QB , or took a running back down for a loss, he was the first one helping them up off of the ground and making sure that they were OK. I once remember him helping a lady on the side of the road with a flat tire. She had recently lost a loved one and was having a horrible day. In addition to having a flat tire, she confessed that she had just tested positive for Covid. She was really having a rough go of it, and he gave her a hug, exposing himself to Covid, just because that is what she needed that very moment. You may get the impression that he is soft, but You would be wrong. I think his only soft spot is for his mom, but he can be extremely sensitive at times. He would be the person hiding complex emotions behind some Sarcasm or a deep bellowing laugh.☺️☺️.
- I’m going to hit the fast forward button, just a little. We have spent much of the last almost two years working on our relationship. He really got caught up in the short hairs of his mother’s and my mess. She lead him to believe that it was much more about him than it actually was. He became her pawn to sacrifice and it took him quite some time to see and figure out that it wasn’t about him. Kids usually blame themselves in the first place and it played to her hand. I’m not here to throw her under the bus, I believe that part of it was unintentional, but…..there were some intentional dagger along the way. ☺️☺️ It’s a little odd, but my son and I kind of bonded over us both having failed relationships with people that we both cared for very deeply. Once he mourned,, grieved , and put a fist through the wall over that relationship,☺️ I believe that was the beginning of him turning the corner. He moved to the Midwest a few months ago and surprisingly our relationship took another positive step with us having honest and genuine conversations and we even started praying together over the phone. I can’t explain it other than to say that God is at work. There is just something so special about a father and son. We are a long way away from when he was little and I use to dress him up like me☺️☺️. He has always for the most part been pretty responsible and good with money, but that doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been the occasional not the best choices made, but overall he’s a pretty solid young man. Well let’s see if I can wrap this up . He applied for a job back on the coast, so he’s coming back close to home. I’m looking forward to cooking for him and us just hanging out. I’m not disappointed that things didn’t workout in the Midwest, it definitely had some positive take aways. As my son is turning the corner, I’m hoping to pivot and turn a corner as well. I have made mention several times before about me and tough love. Well, that’s was an absolute failure with my son and I realized much to late that it was Crushing his spirit . I can name at least three different places in the Bible where it says to not exasperate your kids, for fear of discouraging them and Crushing their spirits and I unanimously across the board failed with that one🥲🥲. If you take nothing else away from this post, just believe me that tough love is not a one size fits all. I have been working on a great many things in my life and when it comes to my son, it has been a lot of knee mail of late. I said that our stories are similar, well the back story is that I wouldn’t even probably be here, or even ever had a chance to be a dad, if it was not for my mother and grandmother praying for me…relentlessly ☺️☺️. That is the formula and format that was laid out for me and that is what I resulted to, just calling on and asking for God’s help. I need help to stop and think before I speak and think about how what I say may be received by him. I have to break some bad generational things that I picked up along the way. I don’t know why certain people think it’s a good idea to always remind people of their past mistakes and failures. They bring it up as if it’s going to somehow energize you to reinvent yourself into some kind of super hero, just not usually helpful. I think that most of us are aware when we get a no go, and try to put some distance between ourselves and the haunting memories. I’ve been praying and God’s been answering, and somehow that equates to my son turning the corner.
- It’s not a complete done deal and I’m not sure that it ever is for any of us. I know that some of you have kids or other family that you have been praying for, for what seems like forever. I know that some of them are wrestling with additions. Some have lost themselves in not good relationships, and some just seem as if they can’t get out of their own way. I want to say , whatever the madness and chaos is, don’t stop praying and bringing them before the thrown of grace. God is always working, even when we can’t see it, feel it or even believe for it. Sometimes people just take a lot of detours in life, before they figure out that the shortest point between two destinations is a straight line . I know that I’ve taken a few, and almost on any given day, I could be tempted to take another 😅 ☺️. The book of proverbs tells us if we raise up a child in knowing God and to understand that is the beginning of wisdom, that when they get older, they will not depart from it. I want to remind you that is just a proverb and it speaks to things that are usually true, but it is not a promise from God, so don’t be like many who blame God when things go airy. Again!, don’t stop praying and seeking God .
- Till Next Time ✌️ Peace!
- Sandy The Southerner
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