I waited fifty years to be truly happy. There was a longing of sorts to enter into the years of jubilee. Before that I carried a great sorrow and sadness that even to myself I could not fully explain. Come to find out, all that stood in the way of real joy and liberation the first 50 years, was myself.

This though I do not regret, nor is it condemning to my youth. For the lessons and experiences of life that I was formerly given were beyond unique and intensely valuable.

With the exception of my wife Colleen, I am as a simpleton and laughable to those I personally know now in this last journey of my life. Much of that result was by my own choice and much needed. Those of my former life, hundreds and maybe more, had joined me along the way in adventures that most people only dream of or dread. Though this latest adventure with Colleen has no appearance of such outwardly robust worldliness… it has actually been the greatest adventure so far for both of us.

We together got to assemble and disassemble our own psyche, mental, emotional and spiritual attitudes, beliefs and realities. It wasn’t anything I could do alone, nor is it a thing any outsider would be able to perceive other than the insanity of its appearance. Our friends are not wrong in that, for much of it has been exactly insane and nonsense, even to the point of loss of ourselves, sometimes together and sometimes one at a time.

Along the way many we loved got hurt, were insecure at what they witnessed in us, or otherwise disconnected from the relationships they once enjoyed with us. It is with great sorrow for us both that those results were inevitable. Just as someone who becomes an addict must rebuild their character and life, the consequences of events and experiences of Colleen’s life and my own life forced us also to deconstruct ourselves and begin anew. It takes years to just become willing to try such a thing. For it means to choose the loss of everything we hold onto for security. It takes years to face and root out and confront and reassign all matters to health that had been wounded by sickness of youth.

In my 49th year, I had finally become willing to be truly free and liberated and happy on this earth. It has taken 3.5 years of complete dedication to that goal of Peace between God and Myself to reach the desire enough, and take the actions required to see clearly all things within that stood in my way. It has been a very real tribulation, with spiritual plagues and famines and deaths. Each and everything shaming and terrible I held inside myself, for they had been my reason and excuse. The pain was what I trusted and relied on to excuse myself from myself, from all others and from God. We humans will fight tooth an nail to keep our pain. I had in essence, denied the very Holy Spirit of life itself. And while doing so I could not be forgiven, for it was I who accursed.

Recently, Colleen and I together spent an entire week with a wonderful Pastor, rooting out every detail of every hurt, sorrow, outrage, abuse and terrible isolation of my childhood and life. I openly admitted every single harm I myself had laid upon the lives of others because of my emotional wounds. I took every name to God. I spent days balling my eyes out in painstaking, detailed and dedicated prayer with others. I opened every area I had concealed or otherwise believed to be unaffected. I stopped guarding my heart with my head, and truly felt the consequences of the abuses others had done to me, and the abuses I had done to others. I accepted the emotional consequences, no longer rationalizing and justifying anything to protect myself from feeling it.

All of these matters had we both mentally and spiritually resolved over the course of our lives. Those who know us well know this is absolutely true. They who don’t believe it of course don’t know us well at all ( or maybe themselves?) But what I could not do before was resolve it emotionally. That door was shut behind intellect and logic and reason via traditions and principles and character and belief. This essentially blocked my heart from emotional self forgiveness and true emotional forgiveness of others. It is extremely vulnerable to go “there” but required in order to be emotionally at peace. How do we know we emotionally haven’t given this stuff to God? When it still hurts, and we still deny that hurt with the Aforementioned programs we adults use to protect the child in us that we were. I had a moment that wiped away the smoky mirror.

So now we are ready for the next adventure of our lives. And to us both, None of this world around us is as it was before. It’s like waking up to an alternate universe. We ourselves are also not as we were. My former self in many ways is as a stranger to me. My friends and family are clearer to me now. I laugh a lot now, but also do not exude false confidence as before. Thanks to the pasts lessons, I have an honest confidences now, but different than the ones before. There is no image I need create of myself. I feel like a whole new Ryan. Still me, still all I knew. But now I feel things I simply could not access before. I Still make mistakes and still say dumb stuff, even more so now because this is a real place where all three major portions of me are functioning at once. The rational, the spiritual and the emotional are all in play. Also the child, the young man and the old man are all accesssble simultaneously now. Who I become now will be a discovery even to me and not a plan or a goal.

My job today is simply to remember and enact that I am never alone, and God is with me in every moment, revealing all things and witness to the real spirit inside, which is Ryan, that I myself denied all along behind the wall I myself built. God is either everything or God is nothing…and I could not know God giving Him only my mind and spirit. I had to also give Him my heart. It was there that I found where I ran from God, and there I found my sorrow was because of it. That which we call emptiness, therein dwells fear, and that is actually the spirit of darkness dwelling in our secret places. There is nothing empty in us. It was in those places, that I had to invite God. God is not a spirit of darkness… God is the spirit of eternal and abundant LIFE.

Because of the failure of self, I choose LIFE. life is the blessing of choice available only to those who abandon themselves wholly to it.

Ryan o0o