GOOD MORNING, FRIENDS

A REMEMBERAMBLE for Monday, 03/09/2026

It is Monday, the day the Lord has made, and we will rejoice and be glad in it. God gives us days, and not one is like the other. Some are hard and troubled days in a fallen world, but many are joyful and dear to us in our memory, I pray this is such a day for you. I had forgotten that Friday, the 6th had been my eighteenth sobriety birthday/anniversary, and failed to mention it until yesterday.

I thank you all for the kind words and well wishes. Judy and I with Josh and Tiffany Waldbart had Sunday dinner at the Rustic Grill today to celebrate. We partook of their wonderful buffet, and as always it was so very good. The fried chicken is so good, the turkey was so tender and flavorful, the dressing, which I am a fool for, was so good.

It was quite a spread with too many good choices...if that is ever truly possible. Hostess Terri Leader is a wonderful friend, and just makes a great place to eat, even greater. Swainsboro has three very good buffet restaurants, the Rustic Grill, and Lynn and Bob's, and the famous Coleman House, a jewel of a Victorian "painted lady," bed and breakfast inn, with a daily buffet that you should experience.

She is a doll baby on the outside, but you must go inside to see the beautiful unpainted warm, golden heart pine walls, floors, ceilings and decorative woodwork inside. Mr. Coleman was a "timber baron" and large sawmill operator, so his house and the homes the other Coleman family members built, were made from choice lumber.

Renee who has the Canoochee Store is a great cook and she has good food all week but her Sunday buffet is another that is top notch, always, and she is a great hostess too. Which is best? All of them are. The chance of rain was 71% today, but the chance of rain here in Garfield turned out to be 000%, maybe next time. I have an appointment with Dr. Brown tomorrow to do follow up on my leg scans he ordered last week.

And as many of you read earlier, when I called to set up a new appointment schedule at Georgia Eye Institute of the South, which I was in hopes of having done very soon, I was told that I had to wait six months from my most recent cardiac catheter and stent placement procedure before having cataract surgery, which means I will have to wait until July.

I will probably be legally blind by then. I thought of something today when going over the past years since my struggle with opiates and alcohol ended with victory on March 6, 2008, a matter that I was aware of but had not really codified in my mind, nor formulated into a cogent statement in a thoughtful way. For all of my life until that dark, cold and terrible night when I tried so hard to die but God would not let me.

As part of my addiction, I had been a deeply troubled in my mind. I knew no other way of life. For my entire life I felt like a wounded animal, crying in the wilderness, alone and without help or comfort. I had tried hard for years to pretend I was okay when I was not at all alright. My mind felt as if blood should have been pouring forth from it, from a gaping wound all could see, but no, it was invisible.

Living life and being like an actor on a stage, portraying life when death was what I felt, was a soul killing way of life. Pills and alcohol lied and offered me help, yessir, the devil's help. They took me down to the grave, and were shoveling the dirt in upon me when God said, "come on out, it will be alright," and I did struggle from those frigid dark waters, and stumbled back into life, believing Him in what he said.

It has been more than recovery from addiction. It has been victory over a troubled mind. Victory over and freedom from a troubled mind is what God gives as part of His healing package, and I have loved living free of a troubled mind but had not really recognized the import of that gift to me. What a mighty God we serve. If you are not serving Him, please begin doing so today.

He will ease your troubled mind and not even mention it to you, He will leave you to recognize that gift in your own time. I have just now done so. Thank you Jesus. Like the line in my favorite Robert Frost poem, "you come too..."

Numbers 6: 24-26, KJV

we boyz three, babee conway, lil merle, & me