changes me, changes you

I must apologize to Crimson Fable family and fan(s) for the title of this post....

One of the things that really fascinates me is how huge events in one's life bring about changes in things that seemingly have nothing to do with the event itself.  And, even more fascinating is when that happens to you.  Luckily, I’m either overly self-aware enough or completely narcissistic enough to notice some of those types of changes in myself.  

(Shut up, Gary Z.  No one asked you.)

When I tell people that I was dead for 8 minutes, I’m almost always asked how I managed to not have any brain damage.  I have no idea how that happened, but my overly-glib, smart-assed self almost always gives an equally smart-assed retort like, “you mean even more than I already had?” and I can manage to not really answer the question.  But the fact of the matter is that I have been changed from this experience. I'm not the same person I was.

I have made a statements here like how I’ve de-constructed my faith.  Dying has nothing to do with it.  Honestly, I was on that road months prior to December 13.  My de-construction wasn’t kicked off by dying; dying and what I experienced during death was more a confirmation of my suspicions than anything else.  No extra clarity was presented here.  No, nothing that grand or that obvious.  The changes I've noticed in me are far more subtle than that.

When I got home from the hospital on December 23, a full 10 days after the event, I sat on the couch in my family room and I cried for a full 30 minutes straight.  I’m talking utterly uncontrollable, biblical-style weeping.  I was completely overwhelmed by everything that had happened to me in those 10 days.  I had been convinced that I was going to die in that hospital; that I would never see my family and friends again; and that hadn't been the case.  I was home now, but what came home with me was an overwhelming sense of grief, guilt and loss over the fact that I would never be the same again.  I was now a burden to others.  I was completely disabled.   I would have to be hooked up to a machine on a regular basis, and not being hooked up to that machine meant certain death in under 5 days.  I wasn’t ready to retire, financially, and yet there was no way I could work as I couldn’t walk, couldn't breathe or see well, couldn’t drive and had absolutely no energy whatsoever.  I had to sleep 18 hours a day.  I had no retirement savings left, as I had to spend it on house payments and bills since I had been laid off from my job just prior to getting sick.  I felt that while I had managed to cheat immediate Death in the hospital, it wouldn’t be long before Death found me again, and this time there would be no escape.  I was terrified, anxious, overstressed and overcome with guilt and grief and could do nothing but let my wife hold me as I sat on the couch, while I just came completely and totally unglued.  And this is where, even in the midst of this grief and fear, I noticed the first small change in myself as I finally stopped crying.

It was silent in my house.  Not a sound. 

I know how strange and kind of anti-climactic that sounds, but silence is something I cannot handle.  It has always made me really nervous and anxious to be in a completely silent environment for any length of time.  I’ll almost always cough or sneeze or crack my knuckles in those situations, but for some reason I didn’t do anything.  I just sat there.  My wife started to back off the couch, and gave me a kiss on the forehead.

“Are you hungry?”, she started to ask. 

I closed my eyes and held my index finger up in front of my lips, in that universal sign of “be quiet”, but I made no sound.

“What is it?”, she said, looking a little concerned.

I said nothing.  I sat back, staring at the ceiling, tears and snot from crying running down my face and soaking my shirt. I didn't make a sound.  My wife stared at me for a couple of minutes, and got up and walked out of the room, looking confused.

I sat, alone, in that family room, completely silent, not moving, for 2+ hours.  My mind was totally blank the whole time.  I wasn’t ruminating on recent past events, nor was I considering what life held for me going forward.  I wasn’t thinking about the inevitability of death and a life changed like I had just been.  I had absolutely nothing on my mind at all.  I just sat there and stared at the ceiling.  And the weird part was that I knew I was just sitting there and I knew what this looked like, and still I just sat there.  I wasn’t thinking, “I don’t care how this looks”- I just sat there.  Blank.  Alone.

I’d like to say that I had some epiphytal moment where everything came together, or that something was made clear, but that didn’t happen.  I’d like to say that I was enjoying the peace and quiet, but that wasn’t the case, either.  I didn’t have more questions after just sitting there.  My wife came and went from the room several times, and I was aware of her, so I wasn’t catatonic.  She made no attempt to engage me, and I said nothing.  In that 2+ hours, absolutely nothing happened.  At all. And, after 2+ hours, I simply got up (as best I could), made my way upstairs (with a lot of help) and went to bed, saying nothing.  The next morning, my wife asked me what was I thinking about during that time the prior evening, and all I said was, “Nothing”.   I spent much of Christmas Eve Day saying nothing at all.

This strange occurrence has happened more than a few times since then, but never for a full 2 hours- more like 20 minutes or so- but never in my subsequent hospital stays.  It’s kind of like a reboot, and I don't have any control over it. It just kind of happens......

A couple of weeks ago, a very close friend asked me if I could help his business with a tech project.  This friend had visited me numerous times in the hospital, and he knew all too well everything I had been through. He demanded that if I did take on this project, that I not over-commit and over-stress myself, and work no more than 10-15 hours weekly.  I agreed.  Whenever I take on a project like this, I start to do research, which almost invariably means I’ll write some code- something I haven’t done in a long time - and something I almost always dread doing.  (I have a crippling case of 'imposter syndrome' where coding is concerned....) This was no different, so I went about researching my solution with technologies like NodeJS and ExpressJS, JWT, MySQL and Vue3, all running on Linux - all technologies I know pretty well.  (with the possible exception of Vue3, that is)  As I dug into it and started coding, I found that I was really enjoying it.  I only needed a barely running portion of code to demonstrate the idea I had (aka "Proof of Concept"), but before I knew it, I had built a fully-fledged backend, complete with tests, a GIT repo with CI/CD- and all in the space of a few hours.  That’s weird- I never really enjoyed writing code like this, and something like this would usually take me hours and days to do, but…….

This afternoon, I picked up a bass for the first time in 5 months.  I haven’t touched a bass since this whole thing began way back in late October/early November of last year.  Didn't really want to.  My favorite bass- my beloved pre-CBS Lake Placid Blue 1964 Fender Jazz Bass (with matching painted headstock), which has been sitting in a guitar stand this whole time, had literally a quarter of an inch of dust on it and strings that were deader than Julius Caesar.  I plugged it into my practice amp in my office- a TC Electronics BG250-12- that also had the same amount of dust on it- didn’t tune the bass- put on “Journey From Mariabronn” off the first Kansas album and went for it.  Played the whole thing like I’d never stopped playing, sort of.  And I had a blast doing it.  An hour later, with incredibly sore fingers, I put the bass down.  The fact that I had a blast playing isn’t the surprising thing; neither is the fact that I remembered the Kansas song with all the key and time signature/tempo changes- the surprising fact was that I blew whole passages that I have played for YEARS and didn’t stop, didn’t get mad about it and just kept playing.

Now I know what you’re thinking here- “so what?”

This is REALLY not like me.  I've been playing the bass for 52 years.  I’ve been a relentless perfectionist about my playing.  I am INCREDIBLY hard on myself all the time about how and what I play.  The fact is that while I am most definitely an above-average bass player, I have never felt like I was.  (More of that imposter syndrome....)  Blowing the bridge on “Stop Loving You” by Toto would normally send me into an rage, but I just kept going.  I don’t even know if I ever played the part right as I played that song, but I didn’t stop to figure it out.  And I didn’t even notice that I didn’t stop.  It never occurred to me to stop, and it didn’t occur to me that I hadn’t stopped.  I even played through a handful of tunes from Peter Gabriel’s new album,  “I/O”,  that I have NEVER played thru, lifting them by ear as I played them as best I could. Never once stopped to examine what I was doing. I just kept playing and it was fun. 

When I was done, I came out to our family room where my wife was sitting.  She’s been after me for weeks to start playing again.

“So- how was it?” she asked.  

“Like I never stopped.” I replied, flatly.

“You don’t have your old stamina to play some of that faster stuff.”, she said, smiling.

“I didn’t really notice.”, was my reply.  That was true- I really hadn't noticed it.

WAIT.  WHAT???!?? HUH?!!??  I didn’t really notice?  WITAF is going on here?

This is where these change are.  Even though I have been through the veritable ringer, I’m WAY more ambiguous about my feelings and reactions to these kind of things than I was just a few months ago.  You might chalk that up to me seeing different things as more important now, but I’m telling you, that’s not it.  I’m not slowing down, either.  I’m more determined than ever to get well from all of this, and I know that will take time- my physical therapist can't keep up with me.  But for some strange reason, I'm finding my approach to all these other things in life just a lot more........different. 

Is this brain damage? I tend believe it probably is in some way.  I can’t say I’m comfortable with that thought, and I won’t say that I’m happier as a result of whatever this is, but I’m also not afraid of it.  It’s just a very strange point of view to have, and I’m fairly certain that, whatever it is, I’ve got to learn to live with it in order to keep moving forward.

Moving on...........

Your thoughts?

no more dancing about.....

So, maybe I’ve talked too much about my death on December 13, 2023.  In my mind, I haven’t.  I don’t know too many people who have done what I did that day – oh, I do know one person, but that’s it, honestly, so you’ll permit me the “novelty” of that particular circumstance.

I’ve been dancing around a subject for a long, long time in reference to God and how He fits/didn’t fit into this equation, and I think it’s high time I spelled it out.  So, here we go, and I know I’m gonna catch some serious backlash from some of my more evangelical friends for this, but I have to be honest here.

A few weeks before I got sick, I started have some real, existential kind of issues with regards to God, the world and my place in it.  I’ve been saddened to watch a movement that I was very much a part of fall farther and farther away from the truth, and, was instead, embracing really sketchy ideas like how a rather infamous orange-colored human being was the actual second-coming of Christ and the pushing away of whole classes of people because of what they did or didn’t do in their bedrooms……all of this did nothing more but make the sour people more sour and the already distanced feel even farther away.  Never once did these people who fostered these “Q”uestionable stances (ahem...) realize that this over-indulgence in quasi-militaristic and wholly sociopathic stances on religion, life and politics didn’t bring one single person to a saving knowledge of anything – and even less so in the face of a worldwide pandemic and new, extremely violent wars.  This existential crisis of mine came to a head when one of my best friends, who I’ve known the entire span of his adult life and a good portion of my own, renounced his faith because his world had come crashing down around him of recent, and (I think) his feeling was that a loving God wouldn’t and shouldn’t let that happen in the first place.  I couldn't argue with his point.

And then, about a 6 weeks after my friend told me of his decision to leave the faith, I died.

I’m not being overly dramatic here- I literally ceased to have life.  No blood pressure, no respiration and no meaningful or effective heart beat for 8 minutes.  And all because a surgeon slipped and cut into my lung, nicked an artery along with a nerve in my leg during a completely mundane out-patient procedure.

And, here’s the thing: throughout this ordeal and the days that came after during some really trying recurring medical “fun”, God wasn’t there.

Let me say that again- GOD WASN’T THERE.

To give you some perspective, my entire life I thought I had heard and felt God on a number of occasions.  When my son, Stephen, died in 1991 for instance- He was there.  When my wife landed in the hospital in late December of 1992 all the way to March of 1993 in pre-term labor with my youngest daughter, Sarah (who just turned 31 the other day) He was there.  When my wife and I befriended her first hospital roommate who was pregnant and suffering terminal cervical cancer at the same time, He was there.  Or so I thought....

But, when I died - when I had been separated from the people and places that told me where and who God was by the absence of my life - He wasn’t there.  At all.  In an another incredibly stressful moment a few hours after I had left the ICU, early in the morning of December 15^th, I cried out to Him, literally.  What I got back was utter silence.  Not a word.  I was completely and totally alone. 

It was then that I knew.  The God that I have heard about and told others about during my life was a lie.

For the record, what I mean is that the God that has been pushed on us by a large portion of the Western church, does not in any, shape or form, exist.  Moreover, a lot of the trappings we’ve been taught about Him are equally false.  Specifically I mean the following:

·       The supposed “inerrancy” of Scripture;

·       The idea that we are supposed to be like Him to be a valid and successful believer;

·       The idea that conformance to Scripture is based on beliefs like how you dress, what you eat, who you hang out with (or don’t hang out with), daily Bible readings, participation in small groups, going to church every single week lest you “backslide”, the holidays you celebrate and the political figures you align with and/or vote for;

·       The idea that certain people and/or genders are not equal – or for some strange reason that it's ok to shun some of them altogether;

·       That there is a hell that those who don’t profess exactly what and how others say they need to profess their belief;

·       The trappings of Western theology like Arminianism vs. Calvinism, Pre- or Post-Tribulation viewpoints, Catholicism vs. Protestantism, or that groups like the Mormons and JW's are somehow evil, etc.;

All of these are absolute lies.  Completely and totally unprovable and untrue.

It took me staring right into the face of the Abyss and having it staring right back at me for me to realize how foolish we all have been in spreading and believing this garbage.  I have spent my entire life evangelizing others directly into the things I now rail against. It pains me to realize that I have been basically lying to others the whole time.  I hate the fact that I spent many years, many miles and a lot of time away from my wife and children in order to help spread these falsehoods.  I’ve stood in front of hundreds and even thousands of people on a number of occasions, telling them that God loves them and that He has a plan for their lives if they would just believe……

……and that just isn’t the truth.

So, what is the truth, then?  I mean, like, Marc- "What are we supposed to do, and how dare you have the arrogance to say these things- like you’re the only one to figure this out?" 

That is a very fair question to ask.

First off, God does exist.  I don’t doubt that, even for a pico-second.  Historically, it’s been proven that Jesus did exist, and there are stories from writers of that day that weren’t Christians that also tell of the “resurrection”, so I can accept that, too.  And I find that a God who loves us, wants the best from us and accepts a belief in Him that supersedes our actions (see Ephesians 2:8-9) extremely favorable.

However, I do not feel that that much of anything beyond the above mentioned items are real or truthful.  These are the things that the Western church has brought to bear on an otherwise simple concept, which is nothing more than love and redemption of others. 

God has no interest in dragging people down, nor does He have any interest in people living their lives one certain way.  To be “conformed to Christ” means for YOU to be like Christ TO OTHERS.  That means loving them and accepting them no matter what.  This is what I had been eluding to in an earlier post about how if you love someone, you have to accept them – and yes, that means you have to accept what they do, how they do it and who they do it with as part of that love, because God’s love is UNCONDITIONAL.  To say “love the sinner, hate the sin” is actually nothing more than a cop-out.  For instance, if and when that sinner fails on any level, your responsibility for love and acceptance is somehow absolved because you can and will blame the sin, say something like "I tried," and walk away.  God says to do the opposite- that’s the time you are supposed to double down and really dig in with them.

I find that the topics of inerrancy in scripture and hell to actually be the same topic.  All Western churches believe that once saved, we are new creations in Christ.  If that’s so, why is the church so concerned with dress, food, church attendance and politics?  You can’t go to hell if you’re saved, and one certainly doesn't go to hell for voting Democrat, despite what some may think. (and, btw- God doesn't give one single, solitary crap about US politics or anyone else's politics......and, no, God is neither Republican nor Democrat......and this country was never founded as Christian country, and the Founding Fathers were absolutely not Christians.......)  All the greatest theologians have agreed that no one has a complete handle on all aspects of Scripture, so who's "non-errancy" of Scripture is correct and should be followed?  Further, I and many others have had a difficult time believing that a loving God would send the majority of humanity to hell (remember- in terms of the entire world’s population, Christianity is a small number of people – in fact, in those terms you could just say that it’s a cult………) because they haven’t read the Bible or heard of Jesus.  John 3:16 says nothing more than Christians have assurance to eternal life- but it doesn't say that others don't, and John 14:6 doesn’t say that the act of coming to the Father through the Son has to happen in a certain timeframe or in a certain way.  In both cases, today's Christians are far too wrapped up in them for the wrong reasons, and honestly, use these two topics as nothing more than a control mechanism.  

Shunning people from your life and from knowing God- that is just wrong on every level. If you think that a certain church follows the correct teachings and knowledge of God regarding this hotbed subject, then you are in the midst of some pretty pharisaical thinking, my friend.  And, if I recall correctly, Jesus wasn’t terribly fond of those who were supposedly “in the know” like the Pharisees and Sadducees.  Instead, He favored and hung out with prostitutes, tax collectors, transgender, LGBTQ+ and the like, rather than the "Supposedly Knowledgeable", who He instead referred to as a bunch of "white-washed sepulchers” or a “brood of vipers”.  It would seem the old adage, "You wouldn't know a snake if he bit you" might apply here.... 

God wants us to be Jesus to others, not tell others how to be Jesus, plain and simple.  There is a tremendous difference between these two concepts.  The reason that God wasn’t there for me at the time of my death was because I was looking for someone who wasn’t there.  When I was finally confronted with my own mortality and in a moment of serious, honest spiritual stress, the comfort and caring I was looking for wasn’t there, because I was leaning on those very things that I now know are untrue.  That entity with those personality traits doesn’t exist, and those things that I have stood on for a very, very long time wouldn’t let me see Him, because in that moment of utter mortality and being human; when all those things were swept away as I passed away- I had to find Him as He really is instead of what I thought and was told He was.

I know that I have probably deeply offended some by what I’ve said here.  I’ll not apologize, and I’ll also not say that you’re stupid for believing the way you do.  People may say things like "you're demon-possessed" or "you were never really a Christian if you believe things like that" or that I'm just "bitter"- go ahead and think and say whatever you like.  I already died once, so nothing anyone says or believes about me comes even close to a slight rise of beans, let alone a whole hill of them.  Live and let live.  For me, I understand now that it's more important than ever to just love and accept others, regardless of my hang-ups or the level of my non-comfort. 

And, I’m going to do just that.

And, as usual, let me hear your thoughts...

finality

 One thing that has really been impressed upon me over the last 4+ months of never-ending health issues is the finality of it all.  I’m not necessarily talking about mortality – although that certainly has its place in the topic- no, it’s the fact that these issues are now issues that I will have until the day I kick this nasty oxygen habit and assume room temperature.

For most of us, if you think back a bit, any childhood malady like a broken bone of chicken-pox, or even something worse – a broken heart after having broken up with the “love of your life” – at the time they happened, it seemed like they would never end.  And, they were THE most cataclysmic events ever recorded in the history of man, too.  I remember having pneumonia in 4^th grade, and I was out of school for almost 2 weeks, and when I went back it felt like I would never catch up.  When I was 14, my first "real" girlfriend broke up with me, and I was completely and totally devastated for weeks. I literally said aloud, “That’s it.  I’ll never fall in love again.  I won’t let it happen.”

(this October will be my 39^th wedding anniversary, btw)

We always seem to get over these things- and in fact- we even forget them or at least most of the circumstances surrounding them.  If you were to ask me why my girlfriend broke up with me, I know I couldn’t tell you.  I don’t think she could tell you now, either.  Oh- it was vitally important then, but now, not so much……..

Now, normally, I am so delightfully insightful (ahem) that people’s entire lives change when t hey read my posts (the crowd yawns……..) but probably not this time.  If you are my contemporary, you already know how supposedly “important” things when you were 16 are so NOT important now, and things that weren’t important when you were 16 are extremely dire now- yeah, yeah, yeah……..

But I have to ask: do you really know that?  I'd be willing to bet you don't.  I know I didn't.

I, like many others, suffer under the delusion that these kinds of things always happen to someone else.  I mean- yeah- as I’ve gotten older, a lot of values and ideas change.  Some for the better, some for the worse- and just like everyone else I would see those things change within myself and I’d say something like, “Geez.  I sound like my dad now”, and make a joke about kids in the neighborhood getting off my lawn.  I still giggle every time I’m in a grocery store and hear “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath on the Muzak system.  The other day, my wife and I were having dinner at a restaurant and they were playing “Bulls On Parade” by Rage Against the Machine while other couples were having romantic suppers nearby……I’m reminded of the mom in Monster’s University sitting in her car listening to ‘her music’……..

But I digress.

We’ve all done it.  Not only that, but we think that’s the extent of it.  A few minor changes here and there and life marches mercilessly on.   Well, let me tell you…….

In the blink of eye, that can change.  You won’t even see it coming, either.  When you least expect it, it will sneak up on you and bang you over the head like a screen door in a hurricane.  Only quicker and with way more finality than you ever thought possible.  Seemingly small and innocuous things can suddenly have far reaching and even seemingly non sequitur consequences.

8 years ago, a dear, dear friend of mine went out for a jog around the Greenlake area of Seattle.  This was a nightly event for my friend, and he’d done this hundreds of times.  And, as a result of this, even though he is about 4 years my senior, he’s in fantastic shape.  Mentally and physically, he was doing very, very well – until a few minutes into his run, around a particularly desolate corner of the trail he had a massive cardiac event and dropped – dead.  A runner on the same trail found him – no one knows how long my friend had been there – and the passer-by was none other than an off-duty paramedic, who managed to resuscitate my friend, call for help, load him into the ambulance and disappear back into the night.  For several days, my friend lay in a drug-induced coma with his body temperature lowered to prevent further brain damage as his friends and family prayed and hoped he'd wake up...........

My friend survived.  Not only that, but without any brain damage at all.  He bounced back in record time, and to talk to him now, you’d never know that any of this had happened.

That is, until you bring this subject up.

The night after I left the ICU, I had something happen to me in the hospital room that was exactly a“screen door in the hurricane” kind of event.  I shan’t go into it here, because it was way too personal (and the story long), but suffice it to say that it was life-altering.  In some ways more so than my actual death just a few hours before.  It was something that constantly haunted me and  I could not shake it for next week as I waited to leave the hospital.  When I got home on December 23rd, I sill couldn't get it out of my head,  I ended up asking three very trusted friends to come over and talk with me about it.  Among those friends was the one who had died some 8 years ago. 

I'd never had an occasion to talk with my friend about his experience – I thought it was too personal a thing to bring up in "Casual Conversations"  (sorry- Supertramp reference) but this was a different scenario.  When I brought it up to him, my normally affable friend turned very, very serious.  I don’t know if my other two friends that were there noticed it like I did, but the room got a lot darker and heavier as he and I talked – at the expense of my other two friends – about the extremely and intensely unique experiences we’d both had.  It was almost as if he and I were speaking a completely foreign language.  To an outside listener, I’m not sure that they would have understood what we were talking about at all, because to talk about one’s death in the past tense is just not a normal topic of conversation.

And this “special language” is really what I’m getting on about.  As we get older, the things that happen to us have much more immediate AND long lasting effects, and it’s very difficult for people who haven’t experienced those things to understand that.  I’ve had conversations about my own medical problems of late, and folk’s reactions have sometimes been pretty comical;

“Wow.  That’s terrible.  Did I tell you about the time that I had to have a hemorrhoid removed?  It got infected and I couldn’t sit down for 4 months.”

“I know a guy who went in for a minor appendectomy and died 4 days later.  They found out he had cancer and didn’t know it.  He left a wife and 2 small kids”

“You must feel pretty lucky to be alive.  You should have bought a lottery ticket.”

“I have a neighbor who told me he’s died about 4 times.  He says it’s no big deal.”

(Yes- these are actual responses I’ve gotten.)

Hypocritically enough, I, too, have made statements like the above.  But not anymore.  What I’ve learned through the particular trauma that I’ve suffered is, that, yes, it’s unique, but more than that, it just can’t be made light of or played as a poker chip in some weird contest of “How Bad Has It Gotten For You?”.  I’m also not saying that what I’ve been through is any worse than what others have been through.  I honestly don’t know what possesses people to go into “comparison mode” about these things, but I suspect that it has something to do with a level of uncomfortability about the subject that people try to equate to their own experiences.  All I do know is that I don’t do it anymore.  Moreover, when I hear other people bringing up their own similar-ish experiences, I just keep my mouth shut entirely – even to the point of waving someone else off that said, “If you think you had it bad, you ought to ask Marc about what’s he’s been through”.

And the finality of it that I spoke of in the beginning of this post- I’ve lost not only time and my health, but my employability, my ability to walk and drive a car, my retirement, my ability to travel – all with the errant wave of a scalpel, near asystole and cessation of my renal system.  It’s difficult to grasp.  I’ve been through it, and I can barely get it.  This has challenged me in ways I never thought possible, right down to the gut level.  The questions are almost endless, and some of the answers will probably elude me until my dying day.  I realize now, that I wouldn’t have ever really “understood” something like this without having gone through it myself, so how can I hope to make others understand it?  

I know that this all sounds super depressing, and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t experienced more than a few dark moments.  I have, and I probably will continue to do that.  But, more importantly, I’ve also had some moments of real understanding about what life is truly about and why we are here in the first place.  I’ve come much closer to understanding my place in the universe and to understanding the nature of and manifestation of God, and I no longer fear my own death.  (hey- I already saw the trailer…..)  I have also learned that as people pass away, the process for them is not scary, and we should all take some comfort in that. 

And most importantly of all – I have learned to stop the comparison of experiences and try and listen to someone who is in pain or distress.  I mean really listen.  Not for the purpose of trying to fix it, necessarily, but to listen and give time to people who are losing time and give them that human connection when all other connections seem lost.  (BTW- that is part of the nature and manifestation of God.  More on that is coming up in future posts.)

It's funny how the viewing of these things change in our lives.  I’ve found that part of this journey pretty fascinating from my own POV, and that it continues to evolve.  And even though the cost of this lesson has been pretty high for me, I look forward to learning more.