A Third Thought

As I write, I begin to wonder where this is going.  Like life, even this should have direction, a purpose, a focus.  I think people often get into trouble and lose their way or become depressed with life because they lack purpose.  they simply go through life or they believe life is just there to gain status or possessions .  Even in youth, I never saw this as a focus for life.  I drifted for years, never really knowing what life was about, at least for myself, but I did know what it wasn't.  I quickly dismissed the goals of the rich and the ego, the proud and the mighty.  Even as a child I saw more value in those who were honorable men and women, who cared about others and who lived in a manner that, whether they realized it or not, brought service to other people. 
 
So without conscious intent I drifted into public activity, first in teaching inner-city children and eventually in governmental employment. For much of my life I had always placed my focus on others who meant something to me, my wife, my children, parents, and such.  Eventually religion returned to me and some of that focus shifted.  Now I understand better what that purpose is, what the question is that I must answer: what have I done with the gift You have given me?

Once I began to understand that focus and to work toward answering that qustion, life became much more relaxing.  surely the pitfalls did not disappear and the epp and flow of the years continue on as before , but yet the stress and strain became so much easier to bear.

The continued thought

I have always view life as a series of pitfalls and tragedies with intervening events that bring some relaxation to the soul until the next downfall.  All of these are tests.  Do you fall prey and become depress or bitter or do you rise above it  and carry forth? 
 
In the first seven years of my father's life, his mother, a woman of only 26 years had left home at 16 penniless, fallen in love and married only to lose her husband to illness, forcing her to return to her parents' home.  She was without options and unable to care for her child.  Her father took her and my father in and she lived in the poor coal country in Eastern Kentucky.  Yet just a few short years later, a handgun tore their lives apart again, as my father's grandfather was murdered in the mines, bringing another change.
 
Again without the means to support her child and herself, my father's mother moved on, on to Ashland, Kentucky; there to finally find herself, setting up a small women's shop.  There she met her second husband and married.  But then, when life should be calming down and the childhood my father should be enjoying should all be occurring, the wanderlust in both parents kicks in and the family is uprooted and moves on, on to Kansas, the first on a series of many moves to come. 

Finding Purpose

I have often wondered what it is that drives a person to keep moving along a path in life, and not just stopping and saying enough.  For most of us, life is marked with many minor pitfalls, not major successes.  Yet after years of trials, as you look back, hopefully the path has ascended more than it has descended.

My father, who is 87 as I write this, was born in Southern Ohio in 1917, the son of a poor couple.  His father, a set-up man, a gaffer in a vaudeville show, died when he was only two or three years old.  His mother, the daughter of a coal miner was barely 19 at the time, so she followed her parents to Kentucky to live.  There my father was raised for several years in the Appalachian coal country, shuttled  between three samll towns.  When he was only seven or eight, his grandfather was murdered and his life was torn apart again.  Once again his mother was on the move.  This time she headed for Ashland, Kentucky, where she met and married her second husband.  Life's pitfalls were still coming.