Soon after my wife died I poured out my grief onto my hard drive, then later I posted it to ROK. You can find it here. Thanks to you guys who offered support.

Men commented on that article saying they wished they could have what my wife and I had, but it was too late for them. This is a common thread on ROK; youth following their passions, then having nothing left to attract a good woman. Or they were divorce-raped or cuckolded. Men wrote of cynicism and betrayal, society’s collapse and the rise of feminism.

Men are expected to marry but marriage isn’t easy. A man is expected to love, honor, and cherish a mate with emotional needs which no man can fully meet nor even understand. As for me, there were a few times I wanted to kill that woman and we had discussed drowning the children. But I didn’t. And we didn’t. Then we quit fantasizing and went back to the work of making it work. And it did work. And we fulfilled our vows, loving and staying faithful “til death do us part.” Which happened last month. And now here I am with a lot of other late-middle-aged men wondering what do I do now?

I wanted to wait before writing again, but men asked for more. I mulled this over and recalled those writings on ROK and so… I’m going to be blunt about this. Hang on.

Two Obstacles We Face

There are two obstacles to starting over in life. The first is ourselves. Within our spirits we each hold the accumulation of a lifetime of… life. We have so much dreck in our spirits that it spills out into our speech and all over our actions and settles deep into our hearts. We carry this on our backs while desperately trying to run away from it. We just can’t do it.

Which leads to the second obstacle: We can’t fix ourselves. This is common to all of mankind. (Some call it original sin, but it’s not. Babies aren’t born guilty, they’re born incapable). The damage is deep in our spirits and we don’t even know for sure what or where our spirits really are. Think your spirit as your “heart” but much more.

The First Start

Let your imagination wander back to when you were a newborn baby. Just born. Pure, innocent and helpless. Now think back even further, to your time in your mother’s womb when your soul emerged, your body was still forming and your spirit was clear.

You heard your mother’s heart, her voice. You should have heard your father’s voice, deep and steady. Other sounds gently intruded as you tumbled in your darkened, water-filled world. Your young spirit took all of these in and you were at peace, pure and innocent. God knew you, and all you would later do, and he loved you, deeply.

Then:  LIGHT! COLD! NOISE! SHOCK?

Slap on butt! PAIN! Nurse with needle! OUTRAGE!

“Oh, he’s SO cute!”

Thank God Almighty that our memories weren’t working very well back then. Nevertheless your spirit took it all in and you started becoming you.

You should have gone home to a warm house and a loving family. A lot of men never got this. You don’t remember, but your spirit took it all in.

There are no perfect parents nor perfect homes and you ran into problems well before the age of two, maybe three. You won’t remember them, but those things were absorbed into your spirit and became a part of who you are now. But you couldn’t know it at the time. By the time you were four, your spirit had absorbed it all, the good and the bad. Most of who you are was already formed by then.

You remember kindergarten. You may have had wonderful parents and good friends. Or a single mom, or way too many “parents”, and gangbangers on the couch. If you didn’t grow up in a home with your own father, your chances of growing up to be a strong, stable, competent man were greatly reduced. You had no say in that.

Too Late

You hit puberty and reacted to your mom and the girls in pretty much the same manner as your dad did, or whoever did (or didn’t) fill that role. Your spirit continued to absorb your world into itself as you struggled to become the man you wanted to be.

You began making major decisions then and, as your body grew to adult size, you made some that would affect the rest of your life. Ready or not, you were on your own. Many boys grew up to be adults without achieving manhood at all. I wrote about this here.

So you barreled through your twenties, thirties and beyond, mostly on the momentum of decisions you made as a young man, and now you find yourself in the middle of your life, which may be completely off the tracks. You’re not going anywhere. The best you can do is survive. What do you do now?

The Second Chance

We all made big decisions back then, but who we are was pretty much set in those pre-memory days when our spirits were absorbing everything. And we couldn’t do anything about it. We were born incapable. But you are not incapable any more. You don’t have to stay this way!

Remember that the first obstacle is you and the second is that you can’t do anything about the first. Now remember that God knew you way back before then, and he knew what you would do and what you would become, and he loved you then, and he still does now. Because of this he made provision for you to receive his Spirit and begin again. Same body, same soul, rebuilt spirit. A new man, a new you.

Just go into any Church with a cross on top and ask how to do this. You can start over again. I did, and so have hundreds of millions of other men over the last two thousand years. And just as many women have had their righteousness restored. You can meet them in Church.

As for me, I’m hurting but I’m gonna be okay. Leave a comment. Let me know how you’re doing.

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