Living in a human body here on earth is always a choice every day

 We choose to be alive every day we choose to get up. We choose to be alive all the time.

Accepting this choice is how we stay alive to old age.

So, what I discovered was that I was okay and living in a fairly okay world until I was about 18 years old.

Then I had to worry about surviving the rest of my life with or without my parents.

I found it hard to go on especially from 21 to 25 like many young people.

I realized that if I didn't do in life what made me happy then I wasn't going to survive my life here on earth.

So, rather than make every one else happy I had to make myself happy first in order to even want to be alive at all here on earth.

So, my early 20s were about discovering what might make me happy enough to want to stay alive ongoing.

I always had girlfriends simply because I was young and handsome and tall. But, this often didn't make me happy for a variety of reasons. First of all I'm a very loyal person to all my friends both female and male. So, I don't lightly make friends because I'm such a loyal person and it is difficult to deal with my own loyalty to people ongoing.

So, having a girlfriend though desirable often was emotionally more than I could manage especially between the ages of 15 and 25. However, when my girlfriend got pregnant I wanted children so I was happy to marry her so we could raise my son.

I had already found that falling in love was both wonderful and terrible at the same time. I had started dating at age 15 and by 16 was dating a girl 21 years old. You can imagine what happened to me in this process. I grew up too fast (even though friends often were married by 16 to 18 years old then in the early 1960s.

But, growing up too fast had many unforeseen consequences in my life including how difficult life is to make any relationship work long term.

You are changing and they are changing in often unpredictable ways.

For example, at 18 I was one person by but age 26 I had become almost a completely different person with different ideas than before. Why?

Life experiences and really shown me a lot and a lot of this was completely overwhelming.

For example, I didn't know that a person could be in love with more than one person at a time.

And I didn't figure this out until I was in my mid to late 20s. This one thing almost was the end of me because I lived in too much of a Disney World where Prince Charming sweeps Snow White off her feet and wasn't deep enough or complicated enough to see the real truths of life.

So, I had to learn that my life was about children and family rather than being married to any one person 

really and in many ways this broke my heart in having to think about things in this way.

But, it also taught me to be a parent and to be kind to my children and to teach them how to live their lives without the suffering I had experienced growing up.

Yes. it's true they are going to suffer in entirely different ways than I did. This is the nature of life.

However, one of the primary things I learned is that living on earth in a human body is a choice we make every single day.

The point is to be happy enough in one's life to continue to want to be alive another day.

By God's Grace