my careless contagion

  Parker McCollum made a pretty song (with requisite country twang) in Pretty Heart . The last time I heard it, I was getting my hair cut. I have heard it many times, and every time, I think of a particular man and a particular woman, and the things that man should say to that woman. I wished many times he would have turned around, repented of breaking her pretty heart so many ways for so many years, and put their lives back together. I prayed that literally thousands of times. No, that man is not me, though I wish he was because that woman would say yes in an instant if she heard the right words from the right man. I have the words, and he is the man. We just have to put those things together. If I could, I would tear my heart from my chest and replace that man's heart. I would take the words that exist in my mind and put them in his. I would sacrifice myself to put that man and woman back together, if I could. And he would say those precious words and do those necessary things. T...

This post examines the meaning of the word reconcile. I've put the definition I found here. 2019 gave me a lot to reconcile, needless to say. This is how I sorted things out. reconcile ( r ɛ kənsaɪl ) Word forms: reconciles , reconciling , reconciled 1.   transitive verb If you reconcile two beliefs, facts, or demands that seem to be opposed or completely different, you find a way in which they can both be true or both be successful. It's difficult to reconcile the demands of my job and the desire to be a good father. 2.   ergative passive verb If you are reconciled with someone, you become friendly with them again after a quarrel or disagreement. He never believed he and Susan would be reconciled. 3.   transitive verb If you reconcile two people, you make them become friends again after a quarrel or disagreement. ...my attempt to reconcile him with Toby. 4.  transitive verb If you reconcile yourself...

Sunday, Nov. 17, started out well enough. I planned to fast and pray, and that's what I did. The very things I prayed about God answered through His typical overlay of confirmations quickly, so I ended my fast earlier than planned. God likes to use repetition to get our attention sometimes. Whatever works, really. It's possible I could be injecting meaning of my own into Bible verses that seem to stand out to me, but after a while, they pile up and it's hard to ignore. The day ended with quite a  load of information for me to process. I spent a restless night parsing all that information. It feels like I slept only a couple of hours, even though I was exhausted.  The bulk of the information was delivered through text from Cindy about the direction she's headed. While it may not be a surprise to anyone here, she shared that she started dating her ex again a couple of months ago and has gone to counseling with him. I suspected that was happening and even had a drea...

After times of great tumult, what we're left with is the often difficult task of making sense of what happened. How many tomes have been written about the world wars or the Great Depression or other significant upheavals? Well, I may not have been through a war or the Great Depression, but I feel like I've had my own skirmishes and have endured a significant amount of depression the past few years.  Starting about a year ago, I've been chronicling my emotional landscape. The major themes are: the end of a 20-plus-year relationship, falling in love with a different woman, and subsequent heartache as that relationship failed also. I've spent a considerable amount of time on the latter two, mostly because I have already dealt with the former for the last five years. We expect our progression to be linear and oftentimes we are surprised when we go backward or laterally in relation to where we'd like to go. What we may see as a setback, however, is probably just emo...