On October 18, 2019, I was sitting in my chair in the living room. I heard my wife get up and, having bought a pregnancy test the previous evening, waited for her reaction. After a few minutes it came, I went into the bathroom, hugged her, and saw the stick laying on the counter with a +, we're pregnant. Needless to say, this was not part of our plan; we had been married less than a month, there were things we wanted to wrap up, things we wanted to do, places we wanted to travel, but now life was forever changed.
In complete honesty, I was excited, being a dad is one of my favorite things, and having been through this before, I adjusted pretty quickly to news. Life is going to be different, priorities have needed to change, and plans get moved, but we're going to have a baby. There is a lot of good in my life. I'm married to an amazing woman, I've got a baby due this summer, and I've got a class starting this week with the Cleveland Clinic to acquire a CPE unit. Yet in spite of all the good, I've been focused on everything that is going wrong.
A lot of my focus since the end of August has been on my daughters and the ongoing legal battle I'm in. Yes, that situation sucks. I'm being punished for something that my ex-wife made up, and I've dealt with the frustration of having no control over my situation or any say in my daughter's lives. It's been rough, and again, the situation sucks, but my attitude hasn't helped.
I've met with a counselor over that past year to help me deal with everything, and last night we talked about detaching. He pointed out that there is a lot of good in my life, something I've known but needed to hear from someone else, and we talked about the power of thoughts. He pointed out that thoughts don't exist anywhere else but in the mind, and that there are people who want to pull us into their chaos, and we can enter their chaos when they aren't present by allowing our thoughts to focus on the chaos they try to pull us into.
For a while, and really intensely over the past four-ish months, I've allowed myself to consumed by the chaos. This has prevented me to seeing the good, seeking, trusting, or believing anything good about God, and has just sucked the life out of me. My wife has been in a similar position, no doubt influenced by my attitude, but yesterday she wrote a post choosing to focus on God and not let Satan win this, because the reality is that he is at the root of this whole thing.
There is nothing I can do about the situation with my daughters, that is in the hands of the magistrate and the guardian ad litem, and as much as I hate not being able to fix it, or seemingly do anything about it, the reality is that it's out of my hands. My choice lies in how I approach life apart from this. I'm always going to be their daddy, nothing will change that, and I'm always going to present and active in their lives, because I'm their daddy. But my life is bigger than them. I have a wife who loves me and wants to do life with me. We have our own family starting soon, and I have a new opportunity to pursue.
I can let myself be consumed by what I can't control, sacrificing everything else as I'm consumed by frustration and anger over the injustice of it all, or I can choose what I allow to have power in my mind. I can fight the lion who seeks to steal, kill, and destroy, or I can become his lunch.
I choose to focus on God. I choose to love and be present with my wife, building our life together, and raising our children, and if/when the situation changes and I get custody of my daughters, inviting them into the safe and healthy environment we've established. I choose to focus on the good, to not allow Satan to have power over what my mind dwells on. I choose to fight the lion.
Fight the lion, 1 Peter 5.1-11
TO GOD ALONE BE THE GLORY!
