Today my baby sis turns 69. Does that mean she’s not a baby anymore? It’s funny how aging doesn’t change the mindset. Our age moves on, but how we see our family often stays the same. Either way, she is fun-fun-fun as well as a real prayer warrior. She is in Indiana to be close to her own kids and grandkids. I love her!

Yesterday was an amazing day for me. I had a meeting on Tuesday with the two counselors that work with me. I had asked them to share a counseling process they’d referenced before, but I was unfamiliar with it. The meeting was long so the one said she’d come early yesterday and let me experience the process. In so doing, I needed to reopen a meeting/conversation with my dad, my mom and then she had me reopen a conversation with my “little Earnie”. All of this brought me very meaningfully back to my own days of counsel. What I hadn’t expected was my response to meeting with my own self. I found myself tenderly talking to little me. I didn’t realize I’d grown to love myself. I use to hate how God made me, but today, I love the person God made me to be.

As I sat through a counseling session I still observe the other counselor doing, I participated in a conversation about “living life” vs “enduring life”. She had asked the counselee when he knew he would live (this question follows a near fatal accident he’d had about 15 years ago). He stumbled with this question a good deal. I finally asked him if there were a difference for him between living life and enduring life? He immediately said, enduring life is what he’s been doing all of these years. He’d lost his youthful hope that he could live life. I truly resonated in his words. When I had gotten to college I had thought I would be free from the bondage of home only to find that now I had to hide this bondage. I couldn’t live life, I had to hide it/endure life.

The experience of meeting with dad, mom and me yesterday showed me how much I live life today. I have no secrets. Living life allows us to walk each day in the freedom from the bondage that suffocates us. This gift of Freedom God gives us is nothing less than a MIRACLE that has taken me a lifetime to accept. I am one grateful man for finally recognizing just how special this gift is!