Like so many other people today, I am a child of divorce.  My parents split when I was less than three and since then, I have seen my real father maybe five times in my entire life...and I am forty-two.  Of those times, two of them were in the last twenty-five years.  Once in college and most recently back in 1999.  Now, I feel it is only fair to mention that my father did offer to fly me out to see him back in 2002 I think it was; but, I declined due to the fact that I was in drug and alcohol rehabilitation at the time. It isn't easy for me to talk about my father...or the myriad of feelings I have regarding him.  So for a great many years, I did not talk about him.  I am embarrassed to admit that part of me was still waiting for him to come back for me.  Even well into adulthood, I maintained this childish hope...but he never did. He did call though about two or three times a year to tell me he loved me.  These calls would give me just enough hope to continue believing that this was going to be the year that he would realize how desperately I needed him and that he would come back into my world on a more regular basis...but that never happened.  

Both my mother and my father remarried and had children with their new spouses. My step-dad, who has been with me since I was about four, definitely loves me but I was from the beginning always different from the others.  The difference wasn't just physical but spiritual as well.  My step-dad is not a believer and never has been.  I, on the other hand, have had an active relationship with God since I was about four or five. Although I was baptized at age three in the Catholic Church, I do not recall ever going to church with my new family as a child.  I went a few times with my mother, who went on occasion; but mostly my church experiences consisted of my visits to Puerto Rico to see my father where I would attend church with my grandmother, who went to church every single day.  There was one year that my mother allowed me to participate in Sunday School classes at the Catholic Church. That was the year I made my first communion.  

So, my relationship with God wasn't something I developed in the church really...it came through the understanding that I could talk to God wherever I was, privately. So, that is what I did for many, many years. It never occurred to me that other people could not hear the voice of God inside of themselves in the same way that I could.  I thought everybody was like me in that aspect.  Outside circumstances were stacked against me though and by the time I was a teenager, God and I had a pretty major falling out.  Not that He stopped talking...I just came to the point where I stopped listening.  My stance became solidified when I announced as a sophomore in high school that I no longer believed that He existed at all.  That day a wall of separation came down in my life and I lost any and all spiritual protection that I had.   I thought life was tough before then but from that day on, it got exponentially harder and lonelier.   That period lasted until I was in my late twenties.  

In my first year in college, I fell in love for the first time and went off with a boy.  He went to college in Oklahoma and one day, I decided to drive up to go visit him.  My car broke down and I ended up stuck there for a week because my Texas car was not prepared to handle snow.  Although I was in constant communication with my mother before, during and after the trip, when I returned, my parents threw me out of the house claiming I had run off with a boy, was setting a poor example for the younger children and that they were no longer responsible for me...the boy was.  I was in no way, shape or form ready for that outcome. Neither of us were really. We both ended up having to quit college for that year and the boy and I lived in an apartment with no electricity or real furniture for about a month before he decided to join the army.  

His mother never forgave me for either of those decisions and truth be told, I felt very angry with him for a very long time for leaving me in that situation ---even though none of what happened was his fault really.  I had done my very best to push him away because I wrongly blamed him for my parent's rejection.  They took away our only vehicle and closed our only bank account.  We were doomed from day one.  After a particularly nasty fight with my mother, she told me she was glad that I was out of the house because now she could have her family with her second husband and her children with him without me constantly being there.  I was stunned...and with that sentence, I lost my mother.  

I applied for various student loans and in spite of my shaky start, I was able to get back into college.  To say I was a mess would be an understatement.  I began drinking heavily and using marijuana to numb my increasing internal pain.  My body was not able to process that much alcohol and I began to get violently ill on a regular basis so I took to smoking more and more.  It seemed like the perfect solution at the time because my feelings of abandonment and rejection were more than I could bear...and smoking made me blissfully numb. I also became very good at hiding my growing addiction.   

I don't recall how it came about but somehow I ended up on a plane to visit my father in Puerto Rico.  I tried to tell him about my mother but he didn't believe me. I tried to tell him I was having trouble but he said I was exaggerating.  When it came time to leave, I begged him to please let me stay there with him.  He looked at me and very matter-of-factly stated that he couldn't do that because he had already bought the ticket.  He already bought the ticket?   Crushed, I cried all the way home.  How had I gotten to this place in my life?  How was it that both of my parents could turn their backs on me?  What had I done to become so unlovable in their sight? How was it that they could not care?    Slowly I came to realize that I had in essence become an orphan---a spiritual orphan but an orphan just the same.

Now, it is hard to imagine that being abandoned and hiding addictions can lead anyone to anyplace that is good.  It is only in retrospect that I can tell you I arrived at a place in my life that is good...and that is the truth.  Sometimes, I hear people say that they don't believe in God or good things because so much bad has happened to them.  I so understand their position...and if it had not have happened to me, I would be writing for the other side...but when I say God took me in, it is the truth.  The problem was I didn't know it at the time.  I needed help...badly.  

I needed someone to love me in spite of my own self.  I needed someone to save me from my own self.  I didn't realize what was happening at the time because I just seemed to bounce from one bad event to the next in the years that followed -- never understanding why or how to make it stop.  I realize now that God was showing me something.  He was taking me on a journey that was going to go all the way.   I thought I knew what "all the way" meant but that is because I was base. My thoughts were base.  I only knew basement living.  He was going to show Himself out and that was going to take time.  He was going to teach me what it meant to trust God...and honestly, life had taught me by this time not to trust anyone.  So, this was the state of my condition when my journey began...