Lent is over. Easter Monday is here.

I am looking at it this year as the 'first day of the rest of my life.' Lent is a very good thing. I gave up hopelessness for it this year, and I think it took. Truly, God is good.

I say that because of all the wonderful, and wondrous, things He does for us, even when we don't want to admit that we need Him in our lives.

One of the wonderful things He does is to ask us to PLEASE observe certain Holy Days. Now, frankly I think Lent is an invention of guys like the late and greatly UN-lamented Fr. Torquemada. That said, I think that Lent was his answer to the Jewish High Holy Days, which are pretty spectacular as a method of self-examination that leads to real enlightment and the path to self-improvement. So, God is the original self-improvement/self-help guy. I like that.

I observe The High Holy Days, and I highly (no pun intended) recommend them to those sentients who still give a hoot about the world outside of themselves. For those who are Christian, I also suggest the real observance of the Lenten season. It helps. A lot.

I spent part of Easter Sunday 2006 on the putting aside of the grief that my son and grandson are not involved in my life anymore-they were at my house last Easter, and it was a deep sorrow that in my hard copy journal I was so depressed by the day that I failed to even mark that it was Easter Sunday.

Somehow the hard copy got into the box of things I retrieved from my storage unit last week while down in Dothan, and I didn't get around to opening the box until yesterday morning. I flipped through the pages looking for the entry-couldn't find it until I looked up the date for Easter '05. For about an hour after reading what I was doing that day, what I'd been hoping for my grandson's first Easter, and how it actually came home to me that day that my son was too angry to reach and will be for a long time, I mourned the loss of my family. I prayed for my beautiful boy, and his son, and while I did, something happened to me that I cannot articulate. The only thing I can say is that something shifted inside of me, and I felt some strength and some comfort flow into me that opened me to some new insights that I believe will have a profoundly positive effect on my life.

I am FoxsMom. I always will be. But I am ME, too and I have got to reclaim all of the things I liked about myself before all of this insanity happened, and tried to crush my spirit into the dust.

I really believe there exists a nasty little gob out there who has as it's sole purpose to break people. I believe it has declined the invitation to be a person, and so deserves no gender recognition, no proper noun, and frankly, only as much attention as is needed to recognize the lack of worth in it's efforts. I think this nasty little git oozes around the real world looking for the vulnerable-to infliction of pain, and to the participation in the infliction thereof.

People like me, who can be so nearly destroyed by the loss of all that is important (my family)-preyed on by the machinations of this little gob' all too willing minions in the infliction and spreading of hurt. It thrives on the grief it uses people like my my ex and my former employers to inflict.

There is a reason this thing is called the great deciever-Crusty and Mr. and Mrs. Boss think they have some sort of 'get out of jail free' card because they listened to it's blandishments, and thus my efforts to live a clean life were nothing but a reproach to them, although I certainly did not mean to be such to them.

Hey, I really have always been more concerned with the great log jam in my eye than the merest mote in their's or anyone else's eye. But the crude sophistry required for them to justify the wrongness they tried to put on me really is born of their foolish willingness to listen to steer droppings, and it borders on evil to try to continue it by saying that love covers a multitude of sin-"You can't really be a Christian who really loves us if you won't stand there and let us trash your life by cheating and stealing from you, slandering you, and taking advantage of the fact that you are alone in the world! So, that reluctance to put up with us is what makes it OK to knock the stuffing out of you. After all, if God didn't approve of what we are doing to you He would stop, since He hasn't it must be OK."

Um, no. And now that Lent is over, and my sense of hopelessness has been overcome, I am going to work on trying to stop hoping that the sanctuary roof collapses the next time any of them try to so much as look at the lintels of my Father's house!

And so I go forward from here.

I am the sum of all my parts. I've been around a rather long time, and the scars that I have threatened to distort my person, as we used to say. For quite a while, from 1998 until yesterday. This past Lenten season has not only scraped them away, but somehow has healed them.

Yes, I miss my family terribly. But none of them like me anyway, so I am not going to pound my head against their walls. An unwelcome guest? Not me, not ever.

When I was a little girl in this life, a boy whose voice I heard only in my head asked me-"What do you want to be when you grow up?" I told him "A granny." He said, "Oh, I think you have to be a mummy first." I miss him. I always thought he was a ghost. Lately I think not. I told him once that I would marry him when I grew up-he was horrified. I think now that is because he knew he was not the man intended for me by God.

I believe God had a plan for me and the guy he meant for me to marry. I believe that Crusty did everything he could to thwart that plan. I am sorry for Crusty and the damage his choices caused, for one thing because the guy I should have married dropped out of med school 5 weeks before graduation. If I'd been there with him instead of locked in the deep south with a gun to my head, the guy would have graduated, and would be one more doctor in a world facing terrible shortages. Fox would probably have finished school, and would be teaching physics. If I had a grandson, I would be a part of his life.

But I still believe God has a plan for me. And I am ready to hear of it, and get started.

Lead me oh Lord.