4:58AM… that’s what the alarm clock said when I woke up this morning. I had no reason to get up, no work, no appointments, no probation officer to see... yet sleep was also not going to be seen either. So, I lazily got out of bed and went into the living room after my normal morning routine and started watching FOXNews. It was a repeat of last night’s “The O’Reilly Factor” but I watched it again anyway pondering whether I wanted to write another entry in this blog. Someone once told me that “Christianity was for people that are missing something in their lives, and they fill that emptiness with ‘God’”. At first, I started to react in a defensive manner because I was offended, but I immediate bit my tongue and said “You’re right”, because she was right. She wasn’t right about some phony “God”, but she was right that there is an emptiness that needs to be filled and all my life I tried to fill it with women, alcohol, drugs, and sex, you name it I tried it and I tried it to excess, without success! That is until I tried Christ… funny thing is… I never “tried” Him, rather I like to think of it as He drew me toward Him with an unfailing love. Remember me writing in a previous post that God never left me in times when the only thing between me and death was Him... well I never asked Him in my life back then and He protected me anyway. Now, it is very easy to dismiss this away as coincidence but before you do, you would really have to know the details of my life to know that I have brushed deaths door on multiple occasions. Two occasions that immediately come to mind are once when I was 13 and a teenage runaway, I had run away to a drug house where people were shooting up a mixture called t’s and b’s or teddy’s and betty’s. During the early 1980’s heroin and cocaine wasn’t as easy to come by as it is today so this was a poor man’s mixture. At any rate, some people were getting high shooting up and thought it would be "funny" to hold me down and watch me get high… as they held me down I began to cry uncontrollably and although they were laughing and almost had the needle in my arm for some odd reason the guy whose idea it was had a change of heart or a moment of clarity and decided not to do it and he gave the dope to someone else. The second incident involved me overdosing on Xanax and alcohol and going into a drug induced coma. I am not really sure what happened to this day during most of that day or even some previous days but I can tell you this much. My father takes Xanax for some mental health disorder he has and he had giving me some of his pills to help me sleep during the day (I took a graveyard shift job, because I was also in school studying to be a network engineer). Well, I loved the effect the pills produced… remember what I wrote earlier about filling that emptiness…? The pills filled it… temporarily. It should be obvious by now that I wasn’t using them to sleep on but to get high on and it wasn’t long before I was stealing them from my father in mass amounts. Now Xanax has an incredibly long half life and for you folks that don’t know what that means… it means that if you take a pill today and it takes 72 hours for the pill to completely leave your bodies system, and you add a pill every 24 hours then you’ve compounded the pill based on how much of the pill has been depleted over that 72 hour period. So… in saying that, according to the doctors I had taken over 100 of the highest dosage Xanax over a 24 hour period and it had been absorbed by my system and my stomach could not be pumped. I also ingested alcohol making matters gravely worse. The doctor said there was enough Xanax in my body to literally kill a horse. They flew my sister in to the local airport in Syracuse, NY on a red eye flight… they did not expect me to live through the night. When I woke up about 7-8 hours later, I had a tube down my lungs and one down in my nether regions, neither of which was comfortable. The doctor told me that as a scientist he does not use the word miracle but he felt that day he witnessed one. He said there is no logical explanation for me to be walking or talking, that he had every expectation I would be dead by morning. These are only two brushes with death, there have been others. What’s the point here? The point is that there is an emptiness… my friend was right. Where she was wrong was I think we all have this emptiness… to some degree or another. It manifested itself in my life in the form of a rotten childhood, teenage runaway, troubled young adult, and equally troubled adult. By all of societies standards I would be labeled a loser. I am a 40something male, not a homeowner, divorced, have a child out of wedlock (which is not out of the norm anymore), 2x felon, had more jobs because I’ve lost more jobs than I can count and the list goes on and on. Why would God want to save me? Why didn’t he let me die any one of the many times He could have but especially the last time when I was in the coma and almost gone…? But what about the workaholic who is too busy for his family. Isn't he trying to fill that hole with his work? Or how about the shopaholic... the needy/clingy girlfriend that bounces from relationship to relationship because they just don't seem to ever work out but she desperately needs to be loved? The world is full of people and for every person there is a mental disorder that fits them in the DSM IV which is the handbook for mental health professionals. The fact of the matter is we all want to feel fulfilled it is what drives us in life. Yet the things in this life can never quite satisfy our inner most desires, so we push to even higher limits only to find they to dont satisfy. It is why a crack addict will never find satisfaction in one hit of crack and will chase the "high" to his death unless Providence intervenes. In the same way Donald Trump will pursue the art of the deal each and every time knowing that the stakes are high (millions of dollars, jobs, etc), he is never satisfied with his last deal, wanting the next bigger deal... a more extravagant Taj Mahal, Trump Tower, or Trump Plaza. The hole never gets filled... just a little more dirt gets tossed in. And now a word from our sponsor...
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