Finding Faith -- One Family's Journey

Truly he was as blessed as any man that came before him.

He had a wife that adored him, and she was as attractive as any on earth. His children considered him the best Father on the planet. His cat even found him acceptable. Yet, through the haze of the depression he was in, he could not see it. All things in the world were leading to an eventual death in the murkiest of graves. Maggot infested graves. He saw the similarities of this to life for some reason. He could negotiate the pathways of depression with an adept grace, and hold his own in the world he secretly inhabited. The "sickness" had been inside of him since he was only seventeen years old. Those pathways were familiar, and oddly comfortable. They were not comfortable like his twenty year old easy chair, but he knew where they led and he was resigned to the fate.

As he flipped the remote control absently through another long line of infommercials, his mind was only on the impending problems. It was another familiar refrain, and one in which he had become quite the professional. The rent, the electricity, the health problems, the on again off again telephone service, were all patterns of thought that seemed to cycle one to the other. They poisoned his mind with worry on a continuous basis. No longer were they problems that each were dealt with one by one. They were a constant line of uncertainties in his world of broken dreams and promises to himself. The television stopped randomly as his finger pressed the remote one last frustrating time. There upon the screen was a picture of Jesus Christ with a ray of sunlight bursting behind him as he rode a fluffy white cloud into his living room.