- Not The Only One!
- Post# 147
- 12 Aug 24
- ” The One’s Before “
- Howdy,
- Thank you again for checking in. This is another one off the cuff and unscripted. I have said before that I often wrestle with the Word of God. I believe that God calls us sometimes to impossible task. It can be something that might make you feel as if your head is about to explode ☺️☺️. Again, I want to remind you that God is not cruel, evil or out to somehow get us. I believe that even in the worse of situations that God is still merciful. It may sound something like” things can always be worse,” and that’s an absolute fact. How many times have you experienced a really bad day and then you see someone else going through something much more traumatic , which makes your situation look like child’s play, or definitely reshaping your thinking as to what a bad day truly looks like.☺️☺️ I believe God to be extremely personal and close at hand. There is this huge lie that gets propagated over and over again, and that is that God will never give us more than we can handle. Absolute falsehood. He will Absolutely, positively bring about things in your life that are beyond your control. So…this brings us to the question, if God is so loving, how come such scenarios exist?
- I have often said that my relationship and understanding of God is enveloped primarily from the view point of parenthood. The things and ways I show love and concern for my kids gives me incredible insights into who God is and the things that He desires for us. God is all about wanting us to spend time with Him, just as we want that from our very own kids. If you raised brats, well that one is all on you☺️☺️. There is certainly a time for us to be friends with our kids, but it’s parent them properly first and the friendship thing will fall into place and come together later. I’m not saying that God causes certain actions, but He will definitely allow them in our lives and sometimes in a very painful manner. God wants us to come to Him with all sorts and kinds of problems , not just the one’s that are out of our control. This is so He can help us, but more importantly to build depth and trust in the relationship. When we were kids , we had to both believe and trust that our parents were going to take care of us and provide for our needs…and hopefully a few wants as well ☺️☺️. ,
- I’m amazed by myself as well as pretty much everyone else as well. We believe that we can trust God with our eternity, but He’s an incompetent goof when it comes to the day to day things of life. I’m not a Karma person and the more I walk with God, the less things that I believe to be a coincidence. I believe that God orchestrates every last detail and absolutely nothing catches Him off guard or by surprise. How can He know the number of hairs on your head, the number of heart beats allotted to you. The number of breaths you will take before it’s your last one, and He just not know our tomorrow and the day after that, and the one after that, and I believe that You are getting the picture ☺️☺️.
- And the story continues. Last week was a hellacious one for me. If it had a sub heading, it would probably be ” no good deed goes unpublished”.☺️. You guys are familiar with this one where you go out of your way for someone, or go above and beyond, and instead of getting that satisfactory pet on the back and hopefully a thank you for a job well done or for some good deed, you are some how not celebrated, but actually somehow in the thick of things, trying to recover from your own generosity ☺️☺️. Instead of being the hero and swooping in and somehow saving the day, you end up with egg on your face. You make that faithful proclamation to yourself….never again or next time I will know better. ☺️☺️. If you are anything like me, you may want to make someone else the villain , and want to rationalize how if one little detail went another way, then the outcome could have been different. I mean our world would just be unrecognizable without a bonafide scapegoat ☺️☺️. If I wanted to relax and have a night cap, it would be in the form of a good old fashioned pity party. Woe is me!! Poor, poor me !
- Actions very often brings about consequences. My good deed that didn’t go unpunished landed me as a captive audience with a fellow colleague serving the role of a corporate trainer. We don’t work side by side every day, but we know one another fairly well, but not away from work. He’s been there the entire seven years that I’ve been employed there. So this begins to unravel by him taking a personal phone call from what turned out to be one of his neighbors. They were pretty comfortable talking with one another and I couldn’t help but overhear, there was no way around that. ☺️☺️. They both were using expletives and talking about how crazy this one women in the neighborhood was. They were talking about her watching a ten minutes tic tok video, which lead her to believe that she could completely install a privacy fence all by herself in the manner of a couple of hours. They laughed and joked about how there was never in the history of DIY projects that could go so wrong.☺️☺️ The conversation lasted about twenty minutes , and here’s the kicker. The woman that the very berating is my coworkers wife☺️☺️. Yep, you heard me correctly. He backed that bus up several times over her ass☺️☺️. Well, he hung up the call and what began with a DIY project, quickly turned into some very deep rooted personal and emotional marital problems. He’s very close to pulling the trigger on a divorce. He has been strategizing, and playing the what if game from every possible angel. He’s played in his head with property distribution and what assets he is willing to let go of, and if she chose to buy him out of the house, he would move out today, but much more like months ago ☺️☺️.
- He tells me that they have twenty five years together but only sixteen actually married, and there is usually a hiccup, and for him, that is two young daughters. His marital problems ran out of him like a leaky facet with a couple of washers missing.☺️☺️. There were pauses in the* dissertation , so a dialog began between the two of us and we began to attempt to hash out exactly where it began to come off of the rails. If you still have blanks on your score cards, this is where it becomes about, “the one’s before “. I have been down this road before, and I’m doing and saying everything to get him to pump the breaks and to slowly step away from the edge. I told him a story that I once heard Dick Channey tell about going off to war. It goes something like you do your scouting reports and gather your intelligence and you have a pretty good idea of how and where things stand, and then when the conflict truly begins its like stepping into a room and then all the lights are shut off and you find out pretty quickly that you don’t know as much as you think that you did.☺️☺️ And make no mistake about it, regardless of how* amicable the settlement may have been or appear, there was a war that took place, and the boundaries will never be the same again. Divorce is the nuclear option and there are no winners, just those who loose less. I have been on the record a few times about how divorce is not something that I would wish on my worse enemy.
- It sounds harsh or dis compassionate , but as I listened to a detailed list of complaints, they were all to familiar to me as they were garnished with heavy selfishness with a healthy dose of I just don’t care anymore and we do get to that point, but it’s not a healthy place to be. It’s a proven point that the more time we spend with people, especially the one’s that we are closest to, we have a tendency to take them for granted. This is one of the hardest things that we have to work at to keep it in check and make sure that it doesn’t just become the place that we find ourselves living. He wanted me to know at how hard he had worked at trying to save his marriage and it’s a very commendable list of things, but I distinctly remember rattling of this very same list of things, and God telling me that it was the bare minimums and just not good enough. I was crushed when God said that to me because I thought that I was going above and beyond, and Him saying nope!!, just not good enough! See, I think as men we miss the connection between doing chores around the house or cooking meals and maybe taking a little extra responsibility with the kids as bare minimums, because first of all it’s usually selfishly done, hoping to get laid, and Secondly we probably think of it subconsciously as ” woman’s work”☺️☺️. It’s really hard to fight against those age old stereotypical thought processes which takes us back to being hunter / gatherers☺️☺️. I’m not making a definitive statement one way or the other, I’m just saying that people need to find what works for themselves☺️☺️.
- We covered the gambit from counseling to increasing his support for her love language, which he had no idea as to what her’s is….trouble!. There is clearly something missing from the puzzle and I’m not sure if it’s some past trauma, which I suspect. He’s pretty sure that there is no cheating going on. She works from home and according to him, she never goes anywhere or has any friends, which is pretty strange for a woman not to have other female friends. The one thing that I did pick up on is that his father in law is very condescending and disrespectful to her mother and speaks incredibly rude to her in front of just about everyone. So his wife has taken a page from her father’s book and speaks to my colleague in the very same way. He says that he walks away and refuses to engage with her especially in front of their daughters. I have to admit that I’ve seen this before and fairly recently and I believe that she is trying to ensure that she doesn’t become her mother and is taking a preempted strike to make sure that she sets the tone. We all have some brokenness about us and we often don’t put two and two together to see how those things effect other relationships in our lives.
- I tried to counsel him on seeing a therapist by himself and see if they had any fresh ideas about what may possibly be going on. I told him how important it is to give his daughters a healthy template to follow. Again, his story intersecting with my past. She puts the children before her husband and they have no one on one time together as in date night or anything else in the form of intimacy which , is a straight up recipe for disaster. This is another clear example as to how we get things out of the order in which it was designed to work, it equals failure and ruin. I think that sometimes it’s just good for us to be able to get things off of our chest with a neutral, none invested party and today I got to serve that roll for him. Every family has some sort of dysfunction, because all families are made up of imperfect people. Later in the evening when we were both home, I got a text with one of the most gratitude filled messages that I had ever received. He thank me for listening and for making what we hope were helpful suggestions ☺️☺️. We drew closer today as men , as friends, because we both chose to be vulnerable and share our stories. Somehow!, some of the most painful parts of my life could bring healing into someone’s else’s life because I was one of “the one’s before ” I had walked a very painful road and I was able to share and hopefully encourage him to think twice before making a rash decision that will have ramifications well beyond what he may ever expect. We all may have at one time or the other benefited from those who have gone before us. It may not be as traumatic as divorce, and maybe something much more intense. I recently heard about a man who was contemplating suicide and he heard a song on the radio, which had him change his mind. Someone had gone before him and provided resources so that radio station could play encouraging life saving music.
- I’m not exactly sure why , but it reminds me of In the book of Hebrews , where it talks about such a great crowd of witnesses look on as we run the race of life. It’s figurative language, but it’s talking about all of those who have gone before us, and blazed a trail of faith and left incredible stories of faith for us to follow. Those stories are there to encourage us. We all run an individual race, but we can encourage one another to fight the good fight and sometimes that means not to let Satan get a foothold in your home or marriage. Eat that pride and swallow that indifference, and that will be a huge step in the right direction.
- So this is my story and I’m sticking to it .☺️☺️ God took my no good deed goes unpunished and He even mixed it with my pity party and used it to set the table for me to be a captive audience with a person who’s marriage is in shambles , and for me to be an encouragement and a hope for someone, who has none in that particular part of his life. It’s true that He works in mysterious ways, but we need to look for God showing up in the places that we see brokenness and disappointment
- God calls us his saints, something that I so often feel unworthy of, but on this day, I felt the halo sit just ever so slightly higher on my head. Yes!!, that is pride speaking, but it felt so good to be able to lessen someone’s else’s pain and to be able to offer them hope. I’m truly nothing special, but there is something to be said for allowing God to use the broken pieces of our stories to benefit others. So the next time there is a trial or challenging day or period in your life, instead of head first into the pity party, look around and try to see God’s fingers prints in the confusion, because if it’s not right, then that just means that He’s not finished yet with you or the situation.
- Till Next Time, ✌️ Peace!
- Sandy The Southerner
- Reply
- ,
- Reply All
- or
- Forward
Thank you.Got it.Cool.Send
