"Spiritual Bankruptcy"

I think it might have been in the spring or maybe even in the fall. I thought I could smell the heat coming up from the radiators. It was a fairly old house; you know the kind that still had steam coming up from the sides of the radiator where the silver knob had become one of my brothers or sisters space rockets or something like that. Or shall I say the rockets may have belonged to the previous owners.

I came into the kitchen to find my mother searching for something through her reading specs. She lifted up her head to tell me that a sign had been nailed to the front of the house, which read "FORECLOSURE".

As she sat in the kitchen reading as part of her normal routine she heard a banging at the front of the house. When she went to investigate, she found that someone had come to take her place of residency while she sat

in the very next room. What she told me that day in the kitchen would actually stunt me mentally for what seemed like the rest of my life.

I made it my point to strive to do better at that moment, so that I would not end up in that same predicament. I told myself that I would learn from my parents and not end up in that same situation. The one thing that I have learned since I myself have become a parent; is that those misfortunes we go through as adults can be passed down to our children as learning curves. I thank the lord that he has given me an openness with my children, I am able to apologize with I have done them wrong and teach them that even as parents and adults that we are flesh and we will make mistakes along the way, but we can pass this along to them, so that the next generation does not spend the rest of their life paying for our mistakes. Well, apparently my stepfather had come in shortly after wards and through my mother’s tears she blurted out what had just happened. His initial instinct I believe was to tear it down immediately, obviously in protest that there had been a terrible mistake.

Apparently, their had been just that a terrible miscommunication. Because those very men who had nailed the sign to the front of our house early in the week, had now come and taken it away a few day later. As if nothing had been interrupted they took back the very thing that had turned our lives in that brief moment of time, upside down. This would be the image that would forever play in my mind whenever I fell behind in my own mortgage payments. I would consistently be reminded of the image of my mother sitting at the kitchen table in disbelief. This ordeal unbeknown to me had in fact left me mentally handicapped.

Not uttering a word, I went into the living room to look behind the sofa and there it was. That sign that my father had taken from the front of the house hours earlier. You see the lord had been dealing with me about generation curses for quite some time now. He had been telling me that those events that plagued our forefather’s lives were not what he had in store for the next generation. Isn’t it awesome how the lord will allow you to look back at some of your childhood memories and let them be a lesson for you today. "God is awesome". God wanted to make very sure that those same misfortunes would not darken our doorsteps. God desires that we be a blessed people. He desires us to be the head and not the tail, the lender and not the borrower. The blessings of God make rich and add no sorrow. You see signs and wonders should follow the people of God, these very signs should be the footprints that are left behind. God wanted me to learn from that unfortunate experience and not follow in it. You see we have a habit of looking at these experiences in life as embarrassing or untold events that have darken our doorsteps. When in actually they are aalowd memories that the enemy has black mailed us with for far too long. Instead of seeing that the lord has allowed these very issues in life for stepping stone and learning curves. We should learn to welcome this simply because God has allowed us to be pillars for those coming immediately after us.