Time.......... Why do you punish me?

This post is full of random thoughts swimming in my head......... I apologize for the lack of coherency.......I am sitting here updating my ipod with some older music. I went outside into my pool house and dug out some cds that I used to listen to about 15 years ago..... Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Alanis Morrisette, and Hootie and the Blowfish to name a few.... I am actually sitting here listening to Time by Hootie...... I remember when I used to listen to this song I was in a transition period between being a teenager in high school and facing the grim realities of not being a "teenager" anymore. You know the time period when you know this sheltered, "being taken care of by mama and daddy" life is over and you see the first light of having to really be fully responsible for yourself..... when you know life will never be the same again...... that you will always think of things differently..... I was raised in a small town and attended an all-white academy. I would say at its height, my school had about 500 kids in it. Everyone knew each other in our small town and this fact carried over into the school. In my "sheltered" mind, I believed my world would always be this way, but that was stupid thinking to say the least. Even though I am still living in the county I grew up in and teach at the same school I attended as a child, it is so different. Anyway, back to Time......... the first reality I had that my life was totally not what I expected was when I moved about 250 miles away from home when I was 19 years old........... I seriously went through a depression..... I lived in a town where I did not know a soul and let me just say I do not exactly make friends easily. I spent some days drinking wine in the middle of the day........ and then puking my guts up. It was not happy times......... in fact it's probably the most miserable I have ever been. I never want to go back to that time in my life. December of that same year brought more depression......... 3 young boys that I had attended school with died within 1-2 days of each other. One of them was one of my classmates....... the boy I had a crush on in the 3rd grade........ one of the sweetest people in my class......... everyone loved him..... He was Mr. H.A........ I stop and wonder sometimes Why? and I wonder who he would be now? Who would his wife be? How many children would he have? He was an angel straight from heaven and God called him home because he was that precious. I think of him every Christmas and every May when his birthday rolls around. I have been thinking of him lately..... because one of my Seniors lost his girlfriend earlier this week. She was a Senior at North Sunflower Academy. It is one of the hardest things for a young person to have to go through........ to face the grim realities of this life......... One thing I have learned as I have gotten older is that God does have a purpose in everything and uses everything for His glory. As I rewind my memories, I realize just how screwed up I was sometimes as a teenager and young adult........ there are so many things I wish I had never done and things I wish I had done...... but like I said God uses EVERYTHING..... good and bad........I picture heaven sometimes in my mind........ because the older we get....... there will be more people in heaven (hopefully) that we know than we know on earth....... A perfect place...... No pain....... no divorce..... no broken homes........ no tears...... no sadness.........no potholes........ no dirty houses.......no more anything that brings us sadness in this world......... A perfect place........... PERFECT in every way and I picture all of the people that have gone before me and I picture them happy and PERFECT in every way.

Pray for those who are struggling right now with losing a loved one and those who are in the process of saying "Goodbye" for a short while...........