Throughout our lives we seek endlessly to be confident in our futures. If you have goals and follow a set plan, you should be able to reach them. What happens when you follow every well planned out step, focus on all the details, making sure there are no mistakes, and Something happens? The Somethings in life are never small. You can never plan for them or even so much as imagine they will happen. They just do...
This is not a self-centered conceit, this particular blog entry. It is my ponderings of how these things seem to happen whenever you finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. My father may be having a Something happening to him. He has struggled his entire life with adversity. Poverty, abuse, betrayal from his family and friends, homelessness, illness... Yet, he never has given up. In his own words, "What would be the point of quitting? It would just mean you failed again. The whole point is to NOT fail, if you can help it." His first thoughts have always been for others. He just wants to help people and follow God's wishes.
He is a preacher. A nurse. A scholar. A Marine. A police officer. A councilor. A teacher. He is all of these things and more. Not just in the figurative sense, but the literal. Nearly every job he has performed has placed him in a position to help others. He doesn't do these things for notoriety or to increase his bank account. He takes on these duties because he believes with all his being that helping people is what God wants him to do. He has given away his only vehicle, in the past, to provide a family a means of transportation. Nearly to the detriment of his marriage. Yet, God provides. The next day a man stopped by the house and gave him a car. No explanation. Just a signed title, keys and a car.
His current endeavor is training people to be chaplains and teaching them to counsel traumatized individuals immediately after a crisis. His organization in recognized by many universities, all government agencies and most religious bodies. He has put every single penny he has not required to survive back into the organization to help it grow, so more people can be helped when they need it most. He has been awarded grants to finally give him the financing hes needed to create facilities so he is no longer required to travel all over the United States. Often not sleeping in his own bed for weeks at a time, until he is so exhausted he becomes bedridden. My father is nearly 70 years old. He suffers from heart problems, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, asthma, and diabetes.
Now, within sight of being able to stay in one place and train others to take his place in the organization he has given so very much of himself to, Something happened. He was bed ridden with what he thought was the typical exhaustion he deals with after 5 weeks of continual traveling, hotel rooms, and seminars. He went to a doctor because he was having dizzy spells, headaches, confusion. The doctor performed an emergency MRI and says they "found something". They are waiting until a specialist can look the results over and then talk to my father. We all hope and pray this Something is fixable, but it is terrifying, none-the-less.
We are expecting the grant money to be released to the organization any day. After years of training people all over the country, finally being able to have a place to teach without becoming ill from all the travelling... Then Something happens.
I admit to a certain seriousness. A seeming melancholy in my disposition. I have always had it. People have wrongly accused me of being a pessimist. I am not. I have simply had many life experiences similar to my fathers. It is the pain of knowing that Something will most likely happen, just when things seem to be going in the direction you planned and hoped for. That is not pessimism when you have had it happen repeatedly throughout your life.
That is the pain of knowing.
