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April 6 – Healing Takes Time · The Daily Ripples Podcast

• 0:04
  Welcome back to the Daily Ripples podcast.
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  And while we don't say this every day or in every episode, it's definitely in the show
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  notes and you can tell why we're here, why we're doing this.
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  But just as a reminder, we're here at the intersection of our recovery and our faith,
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  and specifically our Christian faith in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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  And these daily ripples take a stone of truth from recovery communities, the AA Daily Reflection, and then we expand that into our life of faith.
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  And Corey and I get together every day and we talk about it.
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  So, Corey, we're glad to have you back here with us again today also.
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  And I will launch right back in with our daily ripple for April the 6th, Healing Takes Time.
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  The Stone.
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  Most of our struggles are deeper than the surface issue.
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  Restlessness, strained relationships, fear, and discouragement rarely vanish overnight.
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  Growth is not an event.
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  It is a process.
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  Ripple 1 is practical.
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  Today, I will be patient with my progress.
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  I will not expect instant emotional balance or perfect relationships.
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  I will address what I can, seek help when needed, and take one steady step instead of demanding total transformation.
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  Ripple 2 is spiritual.
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  As I walk in the way of Christ, the Holy Spirit works quietly within me.
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  Fear softens, reactions steady.
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  What once felt tangled begins to straighten.
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  Over time, the Father restores what was fractured,
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  and I find myself more grounded, more useful, and more at peace.
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  And as always, we will save our prayer for the end of the episode.
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  So, Corey, I guess just to give you a softball here,
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  to kind of start this off. The first thing that kind of convicted me on reading this again is that
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  today I will be patient with my progress because I don't know about you, but I can be so impatient.
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  I mean, patience is definitely, or impatience is definitely one of my strongest character defects.
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  Like, I want it fixed today. And if I come up with the solution to a problem, I want everybody
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  to already be on board and pulling along the same direction I am over that problem?
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  And why do you not understand that this is clearly the answer?
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  Because after all, God told me, and now I'm telling you, what do you not get about it, you know?
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  So patience, patience, patience.
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  I don't know.
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  That's what struck me like a slap across the face with this one.
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  But how about you for today, Corey?
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  And I'm going to talk a little bit out of the book of Alcox Anonymous.
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  Obviously, I talk a lot about that.
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  But this is very important. And when someone broke pages 84 in the big book to pages 88, down to me, it became a discipline. And because it says in here, it says growth is not an event, it is a process.
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  It also says here on page 84, it says, we have entered the world of the spirit.
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  Our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness.
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  This is not an overnight matter.
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  It should continue for our lifetime.
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  Then it goes into what to watch for and all this.
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  But then it flips over because 84 or 85 is the 10th step.
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  86 and 87, 88 is the 11th step.
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  So in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous,
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  for you guys who don't have one
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  or don't know what we're talking about,
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  but on page 87, because it says before that,
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  it says we watch, right, for these things.
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  And then on page 87, it says,
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  as we go through the day,
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  we pause when agitated or doubtful
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  and ask for the right thought or action.
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  Well, I wonder what's the thought or action.
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  I wonder if I can just flip back over to 84 and do what it tells me to do on page 84, like bring God into it, talk to somebody, make amends quickly if I've harmed anyone, and resolutely turn my thoughts to someone I can help.
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  So I think when I look at that, hold on, I'm getting a phone call.
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  When I look at that, it's just my whole life has become a meditation, if that makes sense.
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  Because I've got prayers I say throughout my day.
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  I say my base prayer on my knees in the morning.
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  And if I get a little stirred up when I get home or something, I'll get back down on my knees or I'll hit a bathroom.
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  I don't mind getting dirty on my knees and saying a prayer in a bathroom.
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  I don't mind.
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  But the thing is, is throughout my day, I'm saying these reaffirming prayers.
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  and then I get to make it another day.
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  And I just like that whole meditation process of that.
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  Yeah, yeah.
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  And I like that you brought in the word meditation
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  because a lot of times people hear something,
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  and sometimes especially in a church setting or a church community
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  for those that are here from the Christian faith perspective,
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  sometimes people can hear the word meditation
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  and they think, okay, here we go with this hippy-dippy stuff again,
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  this modern thing about meditation.
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  The Bible doesn't talk about meditation.
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  It talks about prayer, blah, blah, blah.
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  You know, people can go down that rabbit hole.
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  I don't ascribe to that thought.
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  I think that meditation is simply the flip side of prayer.
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  Meditation, for me, is that silent state where I'm actively listening for what God has to say to me and what God has to speak into my life.
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  Because I think it's very important that we have this, and we talk about having a relationship with our higher power.
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  You know, and in church, we're talking about having a close personal relationship with Jesus.
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  And when we say Jesus, we're talking about, you know, in my tradition, we kind of use interchangeably,
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  you know, God the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, because we think our God is three in one.
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  And so, if we're speaking to Jesus, we're speaking to God.
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  If the Holy Spirit is speaking to us, it's Christ speaking to us or in us and through us,
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  and it's all the same thing.
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  It's all God talking in our lives.
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  And that state of meditation is something that follows me as well throughout the day,
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  because I can be in the middle of a conversation with someone,
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  and I've got God talking to me in my head about, you know,
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  what I may need to either add or that I don't need to add anything,
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  and I just need to shut up and listen.
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  You know, honestly, that's one of the biggest lessons I have to learn sometimes,
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  is when not to talk.
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  And Christy, if you're listening, just be quiet.
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  You don't have to laugh so loud.
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  That's my wife.
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  But anyway, so that's kind of where my mind initially goes is that, and I had a pastor
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  one time, a very beloved pastor friend of mine, that when it comes to the question of,
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  well, how do you pray?
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  You know, his perspective of it was that as you grow in this life of faith and as you are
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  open to allowing the Holy Spirit to work in you, and as you follow the teachings and the
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  guidance of Jesus that you enter into this state. The book calls it that we're rocketed into the
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  fourth dimension, but by his way of teaching and thinking, you enter into this state of what he
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  calls constant prayer, where you are always in a state of prayer. You are always either when the
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  opportunity presents itself, you're thanking God, or you're always in a state ready to listen to God.
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  And I'm not quite there to that 100% state of prayer thing at all times. I still can
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  can get out of pocket and even, you know, use my language as a weapon at times.
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  But it's what I ascribe to and to be in that state of prayer.
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  And at the risk of going a little bit too long, you, Corey, have actually been a bit more of
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  an inspiration to me recently because you have, you talk so much about following to the letter,
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  kind of those pages that you just referenced, you know, 84 to 88 or 89.
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  And where it says, you know, we upon awakening, we get on our knees and you physically get on your knees and all that kind of thing.
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  And that's not, you know, in terms of our prayer life, that's not a specific requirement of Scripture, obviously.
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  But it's for you getting into that physical state of humility and having that time of prayer is extremely important.
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  And I know it is for many who are listening as well.
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  And it's inspired me such that the past few days, and especially over the past week, I would say, when I wake up in the morning and I immediately, because of some of my mental health concerns that I'm dealing with that we've talked about a little bit, going to that state of anxiety or dread, I can specifically remember the other day, I just started repeating over and over the serenity prayer.
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  And before I knew it, I was hopped up out of bed.
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  I was going about my day.
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  I was knocking out all the things that I needed to do that day.
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  And I was not doing it out of a place of dread, but I was doing it out of a place of just joy
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  and enjoying what I had to do next.
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  And that is starting to help infirm me.
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  So even pastors, even clergy, we all have things to learn.
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  That's part of me setting that ego aside and learning from whatever teacher the Lord puts
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  in front of me, for sure.
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  even a guy who is bald and muscled and used to be in prison.
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  Jail, not prison.
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  Two differences.
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  Jail.
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  Okay, sorry.
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  Yeah, two different things, yes.
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  But I don't want to go too far over, but I want to kind of bring up a couple things.
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  On page 52 in the 12 steps and 12 tradition books, because it aligns with what you put
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  right here, it says, most of our struggles are deeper than the surface issue.
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  And here it says the most common symptoms of emotional insecurity are worry, anger, self-pity, and depression.
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  I think of babies as a baby kind of, we might have talked about this before, we're kind of perfect.
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  And we have these things that happen to us that kind of mold us into these things that we are today.
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  Different little, you know, we've hit different speed bumps.
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  As I got older, I found I had a bunch of roadblocks, you know, bigger speed bumps.
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  But it kind of just forms us into this way, kind of to fit ourselves into this person.
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  And so what I was thinking about was, so my birth, this prayer I said every night before we went to bed,
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  because I grew up in a Christian family, and my mom would tell me to pray for people.
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  And I would pray for all these people, like, you know, just throwing out random names left and right.
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  But under my breath, what I wouldn't say aloud was I hope to meet my birth parents before they die.
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  And seven years ago, Michael, Alcoholics Anonymous gave me the gift of, so I was coming home to meet my son, not meet my son, did you come visit my son?
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  Because at the time, maybe six years ago, I was coming to visit my son because I was living up in Ohio.
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  And so I've had two different stints in this deal, and I didn't mean to reference the whole name of what, but anyways, it doesn't matter. We're already past it. But so I come to Memphis and I get a call from my sister that I've never met, and it said, mom's in the hospital.
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  And I've never met this lady in my life.
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  And so I go to the hospital, and I see this lady that was 52 years old.
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  And, man, I had this spectrum of what my birth mother was going to be like.
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  Either she was going to be dead in a trailer park or Martha Stewart.
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  That's the spectrum, right?
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  And there's no in between either.
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  There's no in between.
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  It's got to be that.
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  But my birth mother was an alcoholic just like I am.
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  And she happened to be in the trailer park.
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  I'm not trying to badmouth her, but being just like me, she was married to 10 different men in the same trailer park.
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  That's wild.
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  That is wild, yeah.
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  But anyways.
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  At the same time?
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  No, I'm kidding.
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  So she was in there, and she was 52 years old, and she looked like she was 85.
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  Wow.
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  But the cool thing is I got to meet her.
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  And I got to see her.
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  And so after I left there, we talked for a little while and I left.
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  And three days later, I got a phone call that said, Mom died.
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  And, but, you know, I go back to that prayer I said when I was a little kid.
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  And I just happened to be in town from Ohio for three days.
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  And I got to meet her.
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  And I think about how important that is.
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  And, you know, but how it affected, because most of our struggles are deeper than the surface issue.
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  and I did some, after my father passed away, I did some grief counseling.
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  And I found out that I wasn't even grieving my father.
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  I was grieving my birth mother's death that I never dealt with.
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  Right, right.
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  And I got to deal with it by going up to that same hospital I met her at
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  and making an amends to her after the fact, and I got free of that.
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  But anyways, I don't know why all that came into my mind, but I thought—
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  Oh, that was beautiful.
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  I'm glad you shared that.
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  Yeah, I think this growth is not an event.
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  It's a process.
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  And those process I get to go through, and by the gifts of this recovery, it shows me how to go through that.
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  And I get peace and freedom from that.
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  That was a beautiful story about your birth mother, and I'm glad that you shared that with us.
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  And I think there's nothing else for us to do for today except to close out with our prayer.
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  Father, give me patience in the work you are doing in me.
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  Through your spirit, continue shaping my heart and help me trust the slow, steady process of becoming whole.
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  Amen.
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  Amen.