Choose Joy... Even when it's really, really, really difficult!

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Parenting is fun, but sometimes co-parenting with an ex isn't so much. So my fun-filled summer with my two kids, Jordan and Taylor, is now over. Getting out of my comfort zone and playing single-dad made for one of my most memorable experiences. Erin came back to claim them, so I said my goodbyes and let them be so that they could start their new year at school and walked back into my suddenly quiet house. But before they left Washington, Erin called me with a question about a toy and turned it into a release of hatred she has built up in herself for me. Needless to say, if her objective was to "make me" feel lousy, it worked. At first, I limped away feeling like an inadequate father. On top of that, this happened when there seemed to be confusion between me and my brother which left me a little perplexed and somewhat down.

Here is the problem with human nature - our ways of defining who we are can be all wrong. Circumstances and other people are our primary ways of doing so. We let the good times tell us we're good and the bad times tell us we're bad. We take in what our friends have to say about us and pat ourselves on the back, but then when those who hate us say negative things, we begin to question, whether it's a just claim, or if they might just be right. The problem with this comes when you realize that you have both good and bad times, or that you will always have friends who like you and enemies who hate you. In other words, you are getting a very shaky definition of who you are and can become very confused.

The sad thing is that circumstances hardly have anything to do with what I did or did not do. Most of the time, it has more to do with the community as a whole. Look at our economy for example - we are a career-minded society and a lot of people are having a difficult time getting work. Society is basically saying that those individuals are losers and most of those individuals are believing it. But they never had a say in how the government or the banking industry manipulated our economy into this point and it is not their fault.

It gets even worse with people. The world holds over six billion people and with it are six billion different opinions. Those opinions are formed by their background and way of understanding the world coupled with the information (or lack of information) they have on hand. Of course we flock to those with similar backgrounds and therefore gather the same information they do and call it our community. But the second someone from a different background with a different set of information brings to our community their disagreement, we feel our way of life is being questioned, sometimes even threatened. Now you can do a lot of things with that "question". I usually do one of two things: I either choose to discard the question and hate the dissident or instead choose to digest their perspective a little too much and question who I am. But their perspective is one of over a billion, and guess what... so is mine!

What it all comes down to is choice. We get to choose who we are and the only true definition of that choice is God. And believe it or not, we get to choose how we feel. Pay close attention to how circumstances or what other people say affect you. You may say "it made me feel" or "he made me feel," but that is a lie. What really happens is that we let that circumstance or the other person provide us with a definition of who we are which happens to be contrary to what we want to be defined as and then we choose our feelings based on the conflict of those definitions.

Now I may talk the talk, but to be honest, I struggle greatly with this. My reaction to Erin's loathing words was actually very far from stellar and I quickly realized that. All of last year, being retired from the Navy for bipolar disorder made me feel very incapable for a long time, too. But I recognize this and know that in order to become a better man, I need to overcome this struggle inside myself. This is why I am traveling and challenging myself this next year. I want to put myself in defiant circumstances because it is not the circumstances that tell me who I am; it's how I handle those times. I want to separate myself from the rest of my world so that I can find out who I really am and go back into that world without a doubt! This will help me release any burden of hate I have inside and will help me to choose the peace of joy in everything and with everyone.

(P.S. - 27 days until I take my first step "tramping")

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