[42olddude]

mrmustang,

I'm with BigFoot. Break out a Bible and read the story of Job. Life has its pitfalls and we all hit them.

When Southern California Edison forced me to retire in 2001, I thought the world had ended. I didn't know how we would survive. I should have known, God has taken care of me and my family in many ways.

Then, while spending a weekend at camp with a bunch of high school students, we were challenged to meditate on a passage of scripture and something in nature to see if God had anything to say to us. The passage I chose was in the book of John about the vine and the vinedresser.

A vinedresser will prune his vines way back in the winter and spring to make them produce fruit instead of more vine. It is very drastic pruning if you've ever seen a vineyard.

Then I looked at an old Juniper tree in front of the lodge. If you started at the base of the trunk, you noticed no branches for several feet up then old stubs where the branches had been snapped off by winter storms. The farther up you looked, the greener the branches got until you got to the new growth at the top where they could get the most sunlight and moisture. Those branches did the tree the most good and therefore the tree fed them the best to support them.

Our lives are like that. Old things need to be lopped off to make way for new. The old, dead growth does no one any good. It is the fresh growth that does the most good.

You tried something new and it didn't work. Maybe you should look in a new direction or examine what went wrong with this and see if it is correctable. Don't stagnate, keep fresh growth in your mind. Let God show you how to grow.

And, it was in the mid 70s here today with bright sun and I had the top down on the MG. California has some perks. Take a vacation and rejuvinate your mind in some sun.

But most of all, Hang In There.

By the way, Social Security Disability kicked in after a year and a half and with my IRA supliment, I';m doing nearly as well as I was working. I spend my time doing volunteer work, trying to kearn guitar, and hange out with two of my sons that still live at home. It is a great life.

Dick Winn