I’ve been retired for ten years, now, and it seems that I have just coasted through life, until my retirement. I’ve always been blessed by a wife, children, job, and we always had food on the table. Sure, there were times when things were not rosy, but we always seemed to pull it through. In other words, my life has been very fortunate.
Thank you, Lord. I can’t thank you enough.
I retired because one day, at work, while getting ready to board my train, I was putting on my work boots and couldn’t seem to tie those laces. It was the only symptom I had, but it scared me. I called the superintendent to let him know something was wrong with me, then called my wife, who was at work in the hospital that I went to. Foolish me, I drove myself to the ER, across Nashville, and got the tests started. Turned out I had a silent heart attack, the widow maker kind, plus a problem with my cervical spine. That set me on the road to retirement. Depressing, since I did love that job, but there are reasons for everything. I got my physical heart repaired, had two cardiac stents and a cervical spine repair. Did it slow me down? Nope! But it did change my direction.
I’ve always had a do it yourself mentality. Instead of borrowing money, I bought several wrecks off of Ebay, rebuilt them, and ran them into the ground. Saved a ton of money. My wife put 250,000 miles going back and forth from work in one of my rebuilds, a 99 Lincoln Continental. We went through five or six, without having to go and argue with a car salesman. I thought that was quite an accomplishment.
Thanks again, Lord. You gave me a brain and some hands that could do something productive and good.
It’s always been a learning curve with anything I do, as it is with most of us. The old rebuilt 99 Continental got repurposed for my youngest son, the brain in the family, to take his girl to the prom. Oops! Pretty warm afternoon and the AC quit. Well, I never claimed I was perfect, and thanks to my son for getting through that like a champ. There was an attention to detail I overlooked when I put the stuff under the hood together. I had a few leaky O rings in the AC lines. I’m struggling to get to a point, but you always have to try to get things right, and some things take time. It ended up fixed.
When you get old, a little arthritis, and you still have a lot of energy you need to channel, you just have to do like that old Marine saying about “Improvising, Adapting and Overcoming.” I never was a Marine, but I’ve been pretty good at using that saying in my life. So, I started doing a lot of the things I seemed to have neglected, because life can be crowded, like anything and everything can get in the way of one doing what is needed. Mostly, the tools for cars for are still used, but less than before. I pick up different tools, nowadays, for the lawn, the house and everything under the sun, it seems. Lately, it has been redoing the entire yard. I just got my last dump truck of topsoil, the fifth load. So, I have been busy.
But the one thing I have sorely neglected is reading the Bible, for most of my life. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe, but that I thought I understood everything I needed to. Every morning, while I’m cooking breakfast, I’m reading that Holy Book. Every morning! I hope it isn’t too late, because all these years, a part of my mind has had this place where I seemed to want to ask myself, and God, what He had in mind for me, and I never had a good enough answer. Do you ever ask yourself what purpose you have in life? What troubled me, for all those years, was that it was a question that I shouldn’t have wasted my time on, and instead, just picked up that Holy Book. I think I was trying to serve myself, instead of serving God. I had my priorities all wrong. I forgot something.
There is a problem of sorts, with what I just spilled out, and the journey I’ve taken. I feel like I have cheated God. So, in my own way, I clumsily pray and confess my sins, and there is no day that goes by that I can’t find something I have sinned over, but I find myself just confessing in my own way, to God, and especially wanting to pick that Bible up and keep reading it. Breakfast, the Bible and a sunrise. Just so soothing a way to start the day.
I keep on finding answers to just about everything, in that one Holy Book. Some which I thought I knew and understood, and others that I never imagined. I wonder if I will find them all?
But that’s another article I intend to build off of this one, if I can. Some things that seem political are so much more than just that. They come from that Holy Book, the Bible. I think there are a lot of things I have forgotten, or just never understood, but I’m finally starting to see a plan that God has for me. He has one for you, too. Be patient!
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