Day Thirty One

Day 31

Understanding My Shape

Abilities, personality and experiences, how do they shape who I have become? Where do I begin? My first God given ability or talent I can remember was at the age of five on my grandmother’s piano. I started playing it on my own with no one in the room all by myself. Simple songs like Mary had a little lamb and Twinkle Twinkle little star all by ear. My parents leased a piano when I was six years old and I began to take lessons to see if it was something I was interested in and I kept on playing for the rest of my life. By high school I had stopped the lessons and all I needed was an audience. It came naturally to me this gift of music. If only I could sing I might have gone on to do more with it. Up until high school, school was pretty easy for me, my grades were mostly all A’s and I never seemed to struggle at my school work. God did not fail at blessing me with an intelligent mind either. To be able to pick up music like I did there had to be something upstairs that worked I guess. It wasn’t for a lack of knowledge in high school that my grades became less than average, but it was my emotional state of being and my depression that got the best of me where as my attention to my school work and my motivation to succeed failed me. But at the same time my school work lagged, I found a new passion to replace it. A new part of my personality emerged. I replaced my depression with giving and helping others. I knew that my childhood was not a peaceful or pleasant one, but by serving and working with the children’s department at my church, I found a way to replace my brokenness and at the same time forget about my emptiness by making others happy and seeing the joy that I could bring to others by just being myself without the pressure of what I was going through trying to be someone everyone expected me to be everywhere else. This was the first time in my life I felt truly happy in life. I felt loved, accepted, appreciated, needed, all the things a human being was created to be but never seemed to get anywhere else except when I was at church teaching or spending time with the kids and the parents of those kids. It was safe and secure. What could ever possibly make me want to leave all that? But yet I did. While I was involved with the children’s department I found that I had a great personality that the kids seemed to gravitate towards. I was someone that they all wanted to be around. Their parents couldn’t stop praising me for what ever it was I had their kids couldn’t stop talking about MIKE and their child’s desire to spend more time with me. Even after the year that they would spend in my class they never stopped coming by and visiting. There were always the kids of the families that were the regular church goes that would always be there, but I always seemed to gravitate toward the one kid or the many kids that were not there with any family or parent, the ones that had no parent connection. The one that maybe came just for the girls, the one that came because of a special event and I saw as an opportunity to get to know that may struggle with a drug problem or a law enforcement problem, the kid that didn’t go to regular school but to a continuation school. You know, the kid that was DIFFERENT! All ready even as a teenager God was putting it in my heart to reach out to the people, the others in this world that were different and not like all the others, because even as a teenager I was already feeling different and not like all the others. The ME I am now is the same ME I have always been. It doesn’t matter today if the different people are still teenagers or if they are adults, they are all the same. I see them all every day I am on the street and I am glad I have the personality to still be able to mix and interact with them all just as well. The only thing I think that has changed is the date on my ID. It says I am another year older, but as long as I don’t feel it and as long as people still say I look and act many years less than it says I am, I feel great.

It wasn’t until after I left this safe and secure environment that the experiences became my training ground for my life lessons. And like high school, I wasn’t a very good student. I had to take the same classes over and over again, some for almost twenty years. Again it was my personality that was my biggest selling point. Once I was over the hurdle of my awkwardness and my newness to a world I didn’t understand, my ability to talk my way into situations that would get me what I wanted was easy. I didn’t have to try very hard to get what I wanted out of this new life. Things, this or that seemed to come very easy to me. In fact everything I desired was mine for the taking. This is why I became so hooked if you could use that word, to this new lifestyle. Was it all my and my wonderful personality that got me the desires of my heart, or was it the enemy that gave them all to me? Either way I was like a kid in a candy store and all the sample were free and never ending. I could talk my way into anything, or out of anything if I found myself in a situation I didn’t want to be in. Very rarely did I suffer at anyone’s hand. I should have gotten into a lot more trouble at times than I did, but somehow I always managed to talk my way out of them.

Working was always something I was good at. My work history while I could change jobs early in life they were not menial jobs, they were very good high paying one. From building airplanes for McDonald Douglas at age eighteen, to driving eighteen wheelers at twenty, to managing a business from twenty three to age thirty, I knew how to make money, keep a job in the mist of my addiction and disease, and perform it well. When I have something I am responsible for, I can get the job done. I know how to put more than one hundred percent into what ever it is I am doing. That has always been something I do well. I take pride in what I am given to do. I think this comes from my father always telling me I was no good and couldn’t do anything right growing up so I became someone that overachieved at what ever it was I did. THANKS DAD! You taught me something even if it wasn’t in a positive way.

Everything in my life as it’s meaning and it’s purpose as I just found out in that last couple of sentences. How God can use circumstances is very unique. I never would have thought that all those years of my father being the man he was would have ever taught me anything positive in my life or that it would have ever done me any good in life, but as I can see now, it did have an affect on me that was used for my good. It made me want to strive even harder at what ever it was I was asked to do because I didn’t want to hear anything like what I heard all my life from him. WOW, I can’t believe I am just now realizing all this for the very first time. This must be why I am sitting here this morning writing all this down. Thank you FATHER in Heaven. Thank You Rick for writing this book, I have really found much more healing here than I ever imagined. And Pastor Mike for listening to God and suggesting this book for me, it is exactly what God wanted me to do instead of finding a counselor this year to start off with. I am shaking right now feeling the touch of God all over me imaging and hoping for what is next in my life.

What is God going to do with all the abilities and experiences I have had I can only imagine. If you can compare the hurt and harm to others in my life and turn the tables on the enemy, WATCH OUT WORLD, there’s gonna be an explosion. When the Lord finally releases me on it, there is not telling what we will do together.