New year .. New thoughts

I am not sure where this blog is going to go tonight or even how long it is going to be.  I know I said earlier I wanted to keep up with this blog better than I have in the past.   So, I will now see where the keyboard and my brain take me.

I guess to start off, last night was Joe's 10th Birthday.  It does not seem like ten years already.  Especially this past year 2011 has been a blur.  It was great to celebrate his birthday with the family, and my parents and sister and her family.   My family is so much bigger than I ever imagined growing up.  I guess first of all I married into a large family.  Yvette is used to it I think.  She had 3 siblings, and tons of cousins, aunts, uncles and other relatives around.  Growing up, it was just my parents, sister and myself.  Even when we went and visited family in Oklahoma it was never more than an extra couple of people.  Now though I have four kids of my own, My sister is married and has a child and of course my parents are still around.  It makes for a good sized group of people when we get together.  At the end of 2010 I lost my birth-mother.  It wasn't an easy thing to deal with and I lost a link to my past.  But I was able to make it up somewhat.  In the spring I traveled to San Francisco for a memorial service.  I was able to meet Kathy's sister and brother and have been in contact with them.

I learned a lot about my family and about Kathy on that trip and how much like her I am in many ways.

There is a great deal on my heart and mind that I could write about and I am sure it will take time to put it all down and also what is appropriate to write and share and what I should keep to myself.

I turned 39 and I Guess like many men, and women, turning older and lcosing in on 40 is mkaing me look at my life and realize not only am I not as young any longer, my body is starting to tell me that, but I look at what I have done with my life, where I am, and where I am going and measure that against where I could and should be.  Where I should be is the tougher question and there are times I look back and realize that even with all the blessings God has given my family and I that I know I   do not deserve I have wasted many oppurtunities to follow his will for my life.  I am faced to wonder how much my failures have impacted my family and my wife. I know there are things I have done that have hurt her terribly and the fact that she is still by my side is a gift from The Lord.   There is still the fact that I am not where I need to be as a Christian or a man, and that my failures have had repercussions on the family that God has given me responsibility for.

Marriage as an institution has been on my  mind for some time now, and I feel that much more needs to be done to defend marriage.  Though I am not entirely sure the courts and legislature are the way to defend it.  The best defense would be for Christians to reflect what marriage should be and show the example of Holy marriage and then people would see the difference and crave that kind of relationship themselves.  That by example marriage would become desirable by men and women and not seen as a sort of mutual agreement subject to the whims of fancy, but as the serious covenant commitment it is.  It is sort of cliche to say marriage isn't 50-50 but is 100-100. But even that is not quite true.  A marriage cannot succeed unless husband and wife are First committed to Christ and then each other. Then come kids, jobs, finances and on down the list.

Joe wants me to play Wii so I am going to wrap this up for now.