My Story

So many chances; so many bad decisions!

In November, 2006, I decided to take my working career to Florida. Naturally, I made this decision without an organized plan. My thoughts were: WOW, this is great, it is unnecessary for me to swim out to the boat, the boat is coming to me. In the end, this decision became a nightmare, which I believed was beyond repair. Following my unexpected layoff, of which I had no control of, I experienced an overwhelming amount of guilt and depression to the point I COULD NOT get out of bed. My emotions increased with no relief and surely interfered with my daily living. I became uncontrollable. This situation affected my life dramatically. Cecil was already in NJ since it was a necessity to live with our daughter. I praise God every day for her offer. Being alone through this situational depression, God, my neighbors, friends, church family, and my family were a God send. There was no question that I was sinking fast, I was just plan numb. My heaviest thoughts were not having any money to buy groceries, or pay our bills. I knew that eventually we were going to lose everything, and we did. There were times that we counted coins to buy gas for our cars.

Due to the fact that the US Postal Service did not make relocation transfers available, Cecil had no alternative but to retire from his job of 9 years. He had worked hard to turn out to be an assistant manager. He was offered to continue his position in PA however; we had already moved to Florida. To make matters even worse, we purchased a beautiful home in Venice, FL not knowing the economy would take a drastic drop. I had no motivation to set goals or to “Fall Forward.”

Every morning I woke up feeling bewildered. Was this reality or am I just dreaming. I had surmountable thoughts in my head, my heart pounding, scared, confused, and extremely fearful. In my head, Satan would tell me; you will lose everything and at your age, your career is over, you are worthless.” I believed him; WHY, because Satan is alive and well and will distort our lives whenever we ALLOW him to. Everything that Cecil and I had worked hard for would be gone. This frightful twist of fate threw a stressful curve ball between Cecil and me.

As months passed, I sold practically everything we owned. People bought our brand new possessions at a steal; however, you do anything to survive.

I continued to pray however; there were times when my heart would SCREAM out to God: “Where are you?” True story: One day while on my knees in prayer, a voice asked me “Where was I when you made this decision, when you bought a house and furniture, when you purchased a new car?” At that point, I realized that I had failed to pray and asked God for His opinion on any of these decisions. With an agonizing heart, I prayed for His wisdom. Because of this new insight to our situation, my mind totally abandoned the thought of losing all these “material” belongings which I acquired through my own greed. I concluded that my heart was not right with God.

I stared to aggressively seek God. I accepted the responsibility for this mistake and asked God’s, and Cecil’s forgiveness. My most difficult journey was forgiving myself!!! I realized that even though I made this life changing mistake, that God would turn this around and get us back on track. He will make this mistake somehow work out for our good.

With prayer and God’s wisdom, I have started seeing myself in a different way. It is about believing in me again and knowing that God will not fail me or abandoned me.

To be continued…