What Do I Do

As soon as I could walk, Mom gave me to the neighbours each Sunday so I could attend church. Interestingly, Mom wouldn't take me to her church, but sent me to another. I guess it was a practical decision, hers was almost a mile away from our house and the other one was in walking distance. Thus began my love to "swim in the world's religious soup".

The next love of my life came in the mid 80's when I purchased a used Commodore 64, followed by a job programming in COBOL on a Toshiba laptop running UNIX! TWENTY FIVE YEARS later I work for the same company. I long for my beloved friends, COBOL and UNIX, who departed, replaced by Windows and Microsoft Visual Studio. I got a bit of joy back. Formatted my work PC with Fedora Linux and installed VMWare. Now I can live in Linux and launch a Window or Mac VM and have the best of all worlds. I am hoping that when the company's fiscal year begins, they will reward me for 25 years of service in a big way.

I took a few years leave from my second love in the early nineties to pursue my first love. After four years of Bible College and a Master's degree in religious studies, I still felt unfulfilled. I had failed in my quest to become a minister and a missionary. I began to step out of my “closed door” mentality with a vision to gather together people from all the major religious groups (Catholic, Mormon, Baptist, Protestant and Pentecostal) to go on a short term mission trip. I quit the Baptist church where I was a member and joined a Protestant group with a woman pastor. But I still didn’t see the light and launched off with that group to redo all my pastoral studies again.

The third love of my life was in play and about to play an even greater part. I always wanted the proverbial "three kids, a dog and a white picket fence" and at this point in life I was seven years into an unfulfilled marriage. I was informed by my wife that she believed it was her holding me back from fulfilling God’s greater potentials for my life, unfortunately I did not receive her advice as noble. She took her own advice and filed for divorce and I did everything I could to hinder her plans, but they proceeded anyway as I made things worse. Looking back, I thank her, she gave up what she had so I could rise to new heights.

The "next forty years" were approaching as the first spiralled down hill at warp speed. I began as just another day, an opportunity to spread discord, a moment to share the painful hand life had dealt me, but this time was different. The listener had her own story, similar, but even more painful. She also had solution, "hook me up with a friend". The plan was for us to travel to the Philippine one year later and connect with her friend. We were from different worlds, but our experiences gave us a reason to explore. The realization that pain and struggles were not unique to my little world opened my mind and as differences revealed themselves as similarities, love grew and blossomed. A new journey began, one that could not be travelled alone, nor by more than one individual, a journey that must be travelled by two hearts beating as one. As she says, "The bridge became the road". A few months later I confessed that I could not live without her and as soon as possible I wanted us to get married. Her feelings were the same and I cant count the times she said "YES".

The next year as we went "home". Yes, I have given up on the western world with its superiority complex. My "new home" is Baguio City, Philippines. I don't live there yet, just waiting here in the West, dreaming of retirement. I was a time to really fall in love with my new family. A time to realize the fruits of our impatience in regards to a lifetime together. A time to see the scope of God's blessings. A new life was on the way! The week before we returned to the West, her husband who had been AWOL for years was declared legally dead. The day before we left, my lawyer called and informed that that the proceeding for my divorce was in a month. Three month later we walked down the aisle and three months later our daughter was born. Seven years and other life changing events have passed and we continue to look forward to the rest of our lives together.
My job title: Senior Technical Support/Programming Analyst. I do ASP.NET, VB.NET Office 2007.. etc....