It was the week before Thanksgiving when my mother died. I had nothing to be thankful for. This year marks 39 years since it happened. I wanted turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, corn, squash and pie. We got ham, ham loaf, ham, another ham, and (you guessed it) more ham.
After the funeral, I tried to cry. I hadn’t cried yet and wasn’t sure why not. My younger brother tried to behave as if nothing was different. But it was very different. I went off into the woods behind our house in the subdivision where we lived to be by myself. I was sure that if I had been a better son and not sinned so much things would have been different. I had dirty thoughts (as most fourteen year old boys do) and that was the reason that God didn’t protect our family. It was my fault. I swore to God that I’d never do it again. Of course, I failed.
Christmas wasn’t any better and the year that followed found me trying to figure out what went wrong and why God, who is supposed to be all powerful, didn’t listen to our prayers like I was taught. If that’s the type of God He is, I wasn’t sure that that was for me. I just wasn’t sure.
One day, the pastor at church was telling a story. It was a new pastor, the old one had finally died. And, it was a new church – at least the building was new. It was the same church congregation. They had just built a new building. This was all just different (again). Anyway, the sermon was about football; and how the game is like our challenge with life. [“WHAT!??? Football? What has that got to do with God or religion or anything?”] At that moment, I consciously turned off the message and decided that from now on, I’d go to church because it made my dad happy.
God? Jesus? Religion? It was all phony to me. I couldn’t stand it and wanted to be rid of it! Well, maybe there was a religion or philosophy that espoused to help one another than I could agree with. Football in the pulpit? No way. How about Buddhism? There are paths to enlightenment I found out. If I worked at it, I might be able to adjust my way of thinking and reach it. But there had to be a faster way; a better way to DO something not just hear something or learn something.
Then, one night two years later, after I came home from a long tiring campout with the Boy Scouts, I fell asleep faster than my brain did. I left my body and went for a visit to some place far away. I heard and felt the thunder of horses hooves on carefully groomed dirt. It was early morning, they were racing, and running clockwise on the track.
I awoke in a sweat with my heart beating hard.
(to be continued)
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