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LEADER'S SHARE ~ STEP TWO
Dear God,
Well isn't this just cozy, You, me and all those sick people out there in
cyberspace looking for a way to find some serenity and suspecting they
are going to have to make some changes in the way they look at and
react to life as it presents itself on a daily basis. First let me
remember what will not work: Diets, diet pills, diet laxatives, diet
exercise, diet hypnotizing, diet by chemicals, diet by special foods and
diet by starvation. Did You notice, God of mine, that all of the above mentioned diets will enable my fellows to lose weight; however, none of them will ever deliver
the life of extreme serenity. Well the program we follow won't either, deliver
extreme serenity, but plain old serenity from which happiness comes, and
that will just have to do. How then do we get there? By doing what countless others before us have done.
My long journey began in 1975 and although I accomplished some profound
weight loss and was gifted with a modicum of serenity, it was nowhere
near as it is today. I found it next to impossible to believe in
anything more powerful than my willingness to prevail over it. One of
the reasons given by my ex-wife when asked why she chose to marry me,
was that she knew that nothing could harm her as long as I was alive, and in that she found comfort. Although I was never much good at fisticuffs in a ring, I was hell in an alley or bar room. With or without a belly full of booze, there was no fear. Odd that I should say that after admitting my entire life, as much as I am able to remember, was
filled with fear. Fear of rejection which every young man faces each day of his life. Fear
of not being able to measure up to the next guy. Fear of not finding a
girl friend, or of finding one only to have her use me and then dump
me. Fear of growing old and living in some squalled single occupancy
room in a bug and rat infested hole of a building. Fear of people
finding out just how afraid I really was. My favorite piece from the
Bible slightly misquoted was: Yea though I walk in the valley of the
shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a
bitch in the valley. How's that for covering up fear?
Now fast forward from a man who weighed 537 pounds to one weighing 212 pounds and
rewrite the whole story the same way because all that changed was my
weight. All the fear was still with me. Over more dreadful years than I care to remember, the ounces crept back, until the balloon man was back at over 400 pounds. I sat in my car after being told by a doctor that my life would surely end soon, as my body
was slowly shutting down. The blood sugar analysis just done showed much
protein in my urine and a blood sugar level of nearly 500. All of this
as I consumed a quart of ice cream with the tears rolling down my
face. Step two was about to be squarely looked in the face - there was
that, or death. My health is further complicated by having had a left lung
and kidney along with two ribs and a spleen removed in 1947 long before
some of the readers were born. It was at that precise time I was
reminded of Joyce Kilmer, a poet who while hospitalized during WWI, heard
a soldier apologizing to another wounded soldier because he was wounded
while running away in fear and his comrade was in fact a hero. I
remember that the hero took his fellows hand and said "coward, take my
cowards hand." So now I knew it was okay to be frightened, just not okay to do nothing
about it.
Now the truth is out: I'm insane and only my God may heal
me. I'm afraid of being abandoned and rejected but, not by my God, and to
tell the truth nobody else matters. I think of the past only to see how
far I've traveled on our road of happy destiny. Now if you have ever
been sponsored by me or my sponsor you know where to find out all about
the road and how to find it. It would truly warm my heart to hear how
many of you are going to seek that road, and having found it, share it
here and wherever God places you. Tell this grumpy old fat man he is not
alone.
AND WHY NOT......Danny
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