RUST ON MY SOUL (Last entry)

This is the final entry in the serialization of my novel RUST ON MY SOUL.(Bridge Press)

It began on my other blog Wyrick's Writings ...

In an old loose leaf notebook, Thomas Kettering wrote when there was a cry from his heart. He wrote when his inner longing spilled over into the reality of his days. He did not write every day, only when he felt he must. How often he wrote or when is not important. The journey is what counts, for it is a diary about all of us, to all of us. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” and even a stumble is a step.

If you would like to go back to the beginning of this novel click on the URL below.

http://wyrickswritings.blogspot.com

 

Evening

I drove by the state prison this morning on my way to a new franchise we opened in Johnson City. I knew it was there, I'd just never been by it before.

A place of bars and chain fences and barbed wire.

I watched the inmates walk from nowhere to nowhere. Parole? For some no more than a short future away. And when the gates open, who will walk out? The same man who went in? Ifso, he will soon return, a prisoner never really free. A prisoner without hope.

I thought, "that was I." For so long, I was a prisoner without hope. Never really free. The walls of my ego fenced me in. The walls of my anger against God holding me back. The walls of peer pressure, even at my age, restricting freedom at every turn.

 But not now. Free now to love God. Free to fall and be promptly lifted up, forgiven. Free to run before the winds of higher ethics with God shouting, "Go, my child. Give it your best. Give it your all."

 Evening

The pitting is not gone. The critical etchings, a reminder of my yesterdays, will always be with me, but the corrosion that took the shine from my soul has all but disappeared.

This will be my last entry. My musings have served their purpose. I have cried, shouted, cursed, moaned. Here, in this journal, I found a place to stare at myself with intrepid honesty, to seek to rebuild without illusion.

I may pick up these pages-some day-should my wanderings need a road map again. I cannot say I now completely understand me, or God, or His world, or heaven above. But God understands, and that's enough for me.