A Reason To Stand: You can be UNBROKEN

I know what it is like to feel broken and I know what it is like to be UNBROKEN. For me it wasn’t a simple hair-line fracture but an emotional fracture compounded by several events and experiences. When I was eight years old my mother sent my older brother, my younger sister and I to the store to buy a few groceries. We stopped in the park and played for awhile before coming home to find the house empty and my mother gone. No note, no goodbye, nothing! I didn’t see my mother again for more than 40 years. For many years I felt broken, set aside, tossed out, and alone.

Six months later my father remarried to a woman that you all know – she is the one that rides the bicycle in the movie “The Wizard of Oz!” Not literally of course, but for the next 10 years, until I left home the day after I graduated from high school, I was emotionally and verbally abused to the point of questioning whether I was meant to even be on this earth. The brokenness I felt by my mother abandoning me was compounded by the constant emotional battering and abuse.

Years later I married a wonderful woman and began to have a family of my own thinking that perhaps my brokenness was left behind. However, another compound fracture occurred. It happened one summer as I was flying a kite at Huntington Beach, California with my 5-year-old son by my side. It was a perfect ‘father and son’ moment. By accident I fell in to an underwater trench completely submerged. When I surfaced my son was no longer by my side and was no where to be found! I could not find him in the water and he was not on the beach!

With the help of friends, lifeguards, police and others, we searched for my son. As the minutes passed with no sign of my little boy I felt myself breaking. Not the break that happens when something is done to you by someone else, but a break that came through my own neglect. It was difficult to keep my mind from thinking the worst. After an hour and by the power of God I found my son strolling along the beach a long way from where I had last seen him. For several moments it was glorious to have my son back. I wept on his shoulder as I carried him to the car. The wonderful and grateful feeling of having my son back was short lived as I felt broken as a father, a husband, a caretaker and provider. I had failed and because of my own mistakes my son was put in grave danger. I felt completely broken.

My feeling broken was further compounded when I was betrayed by my own body. At the age of 29 I was diagnosed with cancer only to be afflicted with an other form of cancer seven years later. I felt that I had already been through enough and that cancer might just be the thing to break me completely.

Yet my fractures only compounded more. As I approached my 25^th wedding anniversary and was laid off from company I had worked at for 22 years I found myself at the lowest point of my life – I didn’t have the relationship with my wife I thought I should have, I didn’t have the job I thought I should have nor did I make the money that I thought I should. My children were becoming estranged to me and I felt as if I had failed in every aspect of my life. The compounding fractures that I had experienced, and never addressed properly, came crashing down upon me to the point that I felt there wasn’t enough change in me to become who I thought I should be and so why should I try? As I contemplated something drastic a friend helped me see that all of my problems –the intense feeling of being broken – could all be healed from the inside. Just like a broken bone is healed from the inside – I too could be UNBROKEN. For the first time in a long time I listened – he was the one that ‘aligned the break’ and ‘set the bone’ so that I could heal from the inside. In a few short years I was happier than I had every been in my life! Since then I have dedicated my life to helping others heal from the inside out! To help people like you become UNBROKEN!

I am honored to be apart of A Reason to Stand! Please come and hear the many amazing speakers that can help you be happier, healthier and to be UNBROKEN. I will be presenting two sessions: The Happiness Factor: How to be Happy no Matter What! and You Can Be UNBROKEN – the power to heal from within!