“Two and Half Years Later”

            Two and a half years have gone by since I wrote “Yes, I Still Believe.” (https://angelcasiano.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/yes-i-still-believe-part-1/) I forgot that I even wrote those words! As I was looking for something else on my AOL Saved Mail, I ran into this writing. Time surely does not stop for anyone! The fact that I forgot about these words is prophetic because the reality is that the time came shortly after, where I lost my faith. I disconnected from God and everything that had to do with God: Church, fellowship, old friends, the reading of Scripture, Prayer, etc. I felt like a dead man walking. I was still going to work; I was still doing enough to be considered a “good citizen;” you know, the ones who pay their taxes and do all the basic things required in society. Inside, however, I was rotten. I was surely walking as an empty image. It is funny because physically I found myself in one of my best times, probably the best physical shape I have been in the last ten years. I went to work and then to the Gym; the Gym actually became my refuge. I worked so hard on my physical appearance, but my spiritual life, I neglected like never before in my life.

            I embraced walking in the flesh! It was almost like I justifying what I was doing and saying because all that I have gone through. The lost of my first wife to cancer, raising my children alone, facing sexual molestation in my family as I re-married, one of my sons battering homosexuality, the other battering an autistic and psychotic diagnosis and the challenges attached to that, separation from my second wife, trying to care for my daughter as she faces her own normal girl challenges, false accusations, etc. gave me the perfect excuses to go after my flesh and live a life of blaming others, blaming it on circumstances and even putting the blame on God for all of my mess. “I have the right to go crazy!” I told myself many times. I walked full of self-pettiness!

            Two and half years later I am no longer blaming circumstances and people for my mess. I thank God for circumstances and people as they brought the true condition of my heart to the light of my reality. Circumstances and people did not make me do anything; that “nasty stuff” was already in my heart. Circumstances and people just contribute to bringing that mess out…thank God for that!