I love it when a plan comes together...Day 8

If this had been my plan, I'd a been really proud of myself. Probably another reason that God worked out the details so well. There is no way I could have ever even thought of a plan so well engineered. Yet for Him it was all just a part of the plan, that could have so easily been accredited to chance. Clearly God has a great sense of humor. Didn't someone once say that God plays with loaded dice? 8)

Now...For a little bit of background information. I was born in a Christian home. I had attended a Christian school(Bethany Lutheran Church, Long Beach) all the way up to the 8th grade. By that time I think I had gotten pretty tired of the little clicks that had so easily formed within the group of about 30 kids that had been together every year since kindergarten, give or take a few different kids that came and went. And then there was a span of about ten years that I was kind of adrift spiritually. Going to church off and on with my parents over the following years, putting on the Christian face when it was convenient or when I was spiritually down and out. I even sat down with someone in about 1989 and said the proverbial, "sinners prayer." Although I still haven't found where that one is in the Bible yet. Maybe it's somewhere in the book of Hezekiah. 8) I even felt pretty encouraged that night, but come Monday morning I was back at school and it was back to business as usual.

After high school I forewent the attending of college for a job working at the Circuit City Road Shop in Lakewood, installing car stereos and all other sorts of mobile electronics. And this would pretty much be my career aspirations for the next twelve years or so. In early 1991 I met Tanya, the mother of my oldest daughter Kylie that was born in 1994. Tanya and I had a...Well...What you could call a stormy kind of relationship. It was also marked by impulsive actions and decisions like...Ohhhh...Running off to get married at the Orange County courthouse in lovely downtown Santa Ana, California on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in late January 1992. We had an on again off again relationship that finally ended in divorce in November 1996.

But divorce wasn't the only emotional baggage that I would strap on my back at this time in my life. Not only had the first long term relationship that I had ever been in come to an end but my grandfather and two uncles that were both very good friends of mine, died within a relatively short period of time. My grandfather(John Loomis) on my dad's side hadn't been so much of a surprise because of failing health. He passed in December of 1995. However, my uncle Jim was a different story. His death was rather sudden and unexpected. He was only 55. And if my memory serves me well, for about a week or so leading up to his death he had been having some bad headaches. That week he had been sleeping in a good friends, trailer, parked in his driveway while his house was being fumigated for termites. So he just thought that he was having headaches from sleeping in a strange bed or the odor from the fumigation. But then early one morning his long time neighbor and friend, Terry got a call asking him to come over(across the street) and take him to the hospital. When Terry arrived he found the front door unlocked. He went inside and found my uncle passed out on the floor in the bathroom. Just a few days later, my uncle Jim died, many years before any of us would have expected. I had lost one of my best friends.

And then there was my uncle Sean. He passed away from cancer, in September of 1997, at only 42 years of age. He had been having some health issues for a number of years. And so his decline gave us the ability to at least in some sense, make our peace before the inevitable. But his loss in some ways was almost more difficult to deal with. You see, Sean in one way or another had kind of picked up where my uncle Jim had left off. Both were always there for me when I needed someone to talk to.

It was these four losses in my life and my beautiful little girl Kylie who was almost three at the time, that made me step back and realize that I needed to re-evaluate the path I was on.