The miracle of life, a true hallmark of man and his ability to procreate and fill the earth, continues to inspire those who have an insatiable calling to become parents. At the time the Bible was penned by the omnipotent hand of God the creator through his chosen proximal authors, the demands on society were precluded by a few solid ideals.  These ideals were predicated on survival, religion, legacy, honor, and family.  Today, we don't consider, as a human race,  the vast array of skills that it would take a person to live one day of their lives in the era when Christ walked the earth.  Even 100 years ago, before the invention of adolescence, MTV, ipods, cell phones, and Alexander Felming's creation of penicillin, young adults had depth and substance.  They assumed the roles of grown ups with pride.  


Today, starting from an early age, we do, however, fill our lives with things and people that inevitably cause us discontent and strife, resulting in lives full of stress and anguish.  I am as responsible for this in my own life as much as anyone else.  On a daily basis, I don't have to carry my clothes to a river to wash, make my own bread from grain that I ground myself, weave my own thread to loom together masterful garments to clothe my children.  Nor do I have to worry about dying from a rampant infectious disease, living with minor aches and pains, or dying before I'm 30 years old because I had exceeded my life span.  So the question lives obtusely, why are we (I)so miserable?  


Guilty am I of taking so many things for granted and allowing frustration and disillusionment to be conceived in my heart and mind.  I have a miniscule fraction of the responsibility that my predecessors had, yet I feel that I am drowning because I cannot keep up with all that there is to accomplish.  It is like a self-inflicted head wound that I keep stuffing with cotton balls and telling myself that it is really no worse than a mosquito bite while stopping every few seconds to wipe the stream of blood from my eyes.  Upon reflecting, I have decided that we do not inspire these thoughts for ourselves, because as Pavlovian ideals pervade us, we are conditioned to be the way that we are.  Unfortunately, I see that I have created these exact types of patterns in my own children through blind ignorance and a perpetual vortex of societal expectations to which I have semi-consciously acquiesced. ( I will discuss the parenting paradox of a teenaged mother in the near future.)


How did I get here--the almost forty, divorced mother of two kids in a world gone to hell?  Pardon me for a moment while I gather my tools for introspective thinking. Uh hmm....I got here through choices that I made.  I alone am responsible for the major decisions that have brought me to this precipice on which I feel I am resting.  I also feel that the I bear the weight consequences of decisions that my parents made on my behalf. 


Exodus 20:5 states: " You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me."   


Regardless of  God's grace, love,  and forgiveness for us, we must live out the consequences of decisions, even if we thought that we could renege and regroup.  My children will have to bear some of that burden for my decisions, just as I did with my parents.  


 I have never slowed down long enough to see the beauty and wonder of things. When I contemplate how my journey led me to this vast desolation of animosity, I often neglect the power of that journey and the lessons that lie just under the epidermis.  Now that I am older, I am grieved for those things that I cannot take back.  I want to take ever scourge that world and man has for backs of my children and keep them from the sting, but invariably, they will have to build their own calluses.  Even so, I wouldn't trade those seemingly tragic decisions for anything, for it is only once God has brought you to a place where he can convene with you, then you truly find out that he was there all along.  


There are two pivotal decisions that have changed my life immensely, reaping consequences that were everlasting and far reaching.  One was my decision to not abort my daughter and the other is when I divorced my husband.