At forty one years old, it honestly feels like God has restored what was lost. I am a college student again, I have financial stability again, I am excited about all the opportunities before me, just like my younger self, before the mistakes that sent my life spiraling downward. I'm here again standing in a very similar place to that of when I was 19 and 20, in my early years of college. I haven't stood in this place since then. There is one difference...........I was not walking with God then, I had not accepted Christ. That leads me to another difference: I'm not trying to do it all by myself. God has provided money for me to be able to go to school as well as opportunities to have 2 streams of income. I am married with kids now. And because I'm married with kids, I really thought it was too late to get those lost years back. They were the "lost years" of my life. I know they were the lost years because there was a very specific point in time, that it all started to go downhill. I remember when it started. I remember the decision it started with. They were lost years because as I thought back to them, I didn't think I could recover anything that I lost. For years, I had a recurring nightmare that took place on my college campus. The nightmare was always the same and it always ended with me in a panic. In the nightmare I'm in the middle of my college semester and for some reason I had not been in attending all of my classes. There were some classes where I had not even been to one lecture. In the nightmare, I panic when I don't even know where those classes are located, on the campus. In my nightmare, I have a locker that I have forgotten the location of and I end up in a panic feeling lost on my college campus.
That one bad decision I made, that led my life in a downward spiral, was made during my early college years. It was a financial decision, involving a guy that I was dating. I would save up, during the summer, for my upcoming semesters in school. But there was a guy in my life that I spoiled in many ways. One day I made the mistake that would put my life on another path, all together. I let him borrow my college money, that I had saved, to put a new stereo system in his car. I told him that I needed it back before school started. He assured me that he would repay. Well he didn't.....................that led to much financial struggle in my life that included credit card debt, bankruptcy, and a string of toxic relationships. And stooping to some very low and sometimes illegal means of making money. I learned from this experience that everything produces after it's own kind. Bad decisions do not produce good decisions, they just produce more bad decisions. It's not until we stop and turn around to go another direction that we can stop a destructive cycle of bad decisions. It literally has to be a point where you put on the brakes and turn around to move in another direction. You have to remember are bodies are made up of energy. We are always in moving, even when we appear to be physically standing still, we are moving. Our thoughts are moving, the cells in our bodies are moving. We cannot stop our movement, but you get to choose the direction of your movement. As you are moving, you are building momentum in whatever direction you are going and it's makes it harder to stop. If you are making bad decision after bad decision than you are building momentum in the direction of those bad decisions. If you start making good decisions, your have turned around and you have come against the momentum that you were creating. When you do this you begin to create resistance towards your previous momentum, slowing down the cycle of bad decisions in your life. When you are faced with decisions where you can do what's right or what you know is not right, remind yourself that if you make a bad decision it will ultimately lead to another one and you have started building that momentum again. Reminding yourself of this, reminds you of the consequences that you don't want. It has helped me alot, to think this way. It has helped me to see the long term consequences before I make decisions. God has given me vision about this. The bible says that a good tree cannot produce bad fruit and a bad tree cannot produce good fruit (Matthew 7:18). The same is true with decisions. Bad decisions don't produce good decisions nor do good decisions produce bad decisions. Everything produces after it's own kind. It's how God designed it.
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