“Time is the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions.”   John Randolph of Roanoke

     “For everything there is a season, A time for everything under Heaven.”  Ecclesiastes  3:1  NLT

       April 1 marked the passage of my second year paying the price for my own personal instance of freedom not used well. I feel that I have used these two years of freedom denied better than many of the preceding years of freedom itself.

      It has been two years of discovery, growth, and spiritual transformation that I am thankful to God for and that no one can take away from me. I have peered deep into myself, cleaned out all of my inner closets and, while I am far from perfect, I at least can say that I am a happier, nicer, better version of the man I was when I walked through the gates of this prison. I am humbly grateful to God for the spiritual cleansing He has provided and for the faith and hope He has firmly planted in the very core of my being for a future of His choosing.

      The future will not be easy, of course, but it cannot be harder than the past, which I made unnecessarily difficult through a decades-long search for myself wrought with myriad wrong turns and hard lessons that didn’t need to be. If I had opened my eyes, my heart, and my mind and accepted the direction of God a long time ago…….if only……if only…..if only……

      But I did not, and I am not sad; I am not full of regret; for the past is the past and it shall not be repeated in my future. There is still plenty of time to plant, to harvest, to heal, to laugh, to embrace, and to love – and perhaps all of these things can now be engaged in with honesty, integrity, and a freshness of spirit, mind, and heart.

      I may have a lot of baggage, but I have dumped out most of the contents and left them behind, so it doesn’t weigh much.

      I have God on my side and, even at this late stage in my life, I have to agree with Mick Jagger and say, “Time is on my side.”

      Oh yes. It most certainly is.