Let's Have Church Now: For This Very Reason I've Thankful

For all of these reasons... today and everyday I am so very thankful for the roof over my head, my lovely home, my car, my cat, my kids, my friends, my family, my siblings, my business, my books, my education, my breath, my life, the church body as a whole, I'm thankful for TBN, for this great country we live in, for our troops and for God's justice working throughout the earth to establish HIS Kingdom!

Don't be jealous of me because you don't know what I've been through! You can't tell by looking at me that between December 24th of 1994 through June of 1996 that there were a few times that I had to dress like a man with basketball shoes on and a baseball cap so that I could feel safer while I slept all night in the front seat of my 1967 Barracuda that was missing the front driver side window while I parked in the First Baptist Church parking lot on State Street in Jackson, MS. a few times.

When I woke up one morning around 5:30 AM needing to use the restroom so I sat up and saw two strange men walking towards my car. Or the time in October of 1995 the ER doctor as St. Dominic's Hospital Jackson, MS. told me that If I didn't get the real expensive antibiotic for my inner ear infection that it could develop into abscess brain.

That infection never went away but kept recurring until the following summer I had no where to go with a fever over 100 degrees except to the front seat of the old Baracuda in the middle of Mississippi dead heat while I lay crying as sweat poured down inside my infected left eardrum.
Or the time in winter of 1995 when I had no where to go but an old abandoned apartment wrapped up in my coat and a real thick blanket but the cold air would come right through that apartment like frozen nails piercing my soul and body. In 2007 Dr. Stringer took a CAT scan of that ear and found that the ear drum has collapsed.

There are many other untold stories of things I survived like sleeping on the church Sunday school floor for almost a year, sleeping on some Burmese Missionaries floor of their living room for 4 months and living in an abandoned apartment for a long time. Altogether I survived homelessness from Dec. 1994 through May 1996.

Then I lost my home of eight years in Tarpon Springs, Florida in Oct. of 2005 right after Katrina hit so there were thousands of homeless people at the same time all over the Southern Coastal areas in Mississippi, Alabama, New Orleans, and Florida.

I didn't get back in housing until January of 2008. You weren't there when I got robbed within the first two weeks I was in San Diego in March of 2013 or a few weeks later when the doctors told me to get off my feet in April of 2013 in San Diego because of my legs and feet being so swollen but I had no where to go.

You don't know what I've survived and you don't know what I've been through.. You don't know!!! You don't know what we have been through. You don't know!!! I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen. I survived it and for that I'm thankful!!!

It may have been the emergency hernia surgery that I had when I was 18 mos old that caused PTSD. Or maybe It was the time when I was almost five years old and I walked through the water in the basement next to the washer that drained into the floor drain then I got on top of my mom's freezer to try and reach my sister's prom dresses and her bride's maid dresses but I got electrocuted almost to death instead. Somehow my mother found out something was happening and she ran downstairs and grabbed a broom and knocked me off. But it wasn't until I had already peed my pants and that made the electrocution even worse and it grounded me even more stuck.

Or maybe the Chicken Pox that I had as a baby caused PTSD. There are multitudes of adults who have never been diagnosed with autism too? But when you someone in need don't cast stones of judgement. You never know if that person cries themselves to sleep each night. You don't know what that person has survived.