Cathy's Second Chance: Just Moving Forward

By Cathy Conley

Are you stressed out and looking for something? You probably are in this everyday life. You have the book you need in your hands now. Want to see how to get from one point in you life to a much better place and be Happy? It can be done and I can show you how I did it
while thinking there was no where to go but further down. I felt like I was drowning in my own pity party tears, but eventually got tired of not getting what I had been promised in this life and that is happiness. You can find happiness too if you start looking in the right place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jan 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466960800

Book preview

Chapter One

Life started so uncomplicated

* * *(Psalms 34:1 I will bless the Lord at all times: His praise shall continually be in my mouth.)* * *

I have to start by saying that that particular verse didn’t stand true for a big part of my life in the past. Not until I decided to trust in the Lord did things start to change for the better in my life. I am not living a life that is free to trials and hard times but I know I will make it through those tough times by the grace and love of Jesus Christ. I hope my story will help you get through any and all the hard times you may be going through. So here it goes, I am going to share with you the good and not so good times of my life.

How does a woman start to tell how she got from point A to point B when she really can’t even believe she has arrived at point B and when much of it isn’t reality to her. You see, that is pretty much the situation that I am now in at this point of my life. I can feel a pinch and feel the pain. I can see my reflection in the mirror and know that I am sitting here in reality, but the path that I took to get here is just a blurr and I can’t see how I managed to arrive here. There were a lot of long roads with dead end signs at the end of them and there were many wrong turns that had no U-turn signs. I would get there and there would seem to be no way of getting out of the bad spot I had gotten myself cornered into. God was in my life from the very start. He had set a path before me that would have made most everything in my life fairly easy, if I had obeyed His guidance and not thought that I could have done this life thing on my own, the way I really wanted to live it.

* * *(Psalms 25:5 Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.)* * *

When I decided that I knew what was best for me, or at least knew what I thought would be the fun way of doing things, things at those times didn’t seem to go all that well. Life would seem hopeless many times when I didn’t follow God’s guidance. My life was going south really fast. I had no idea how I had gotten there and didn’t know how I was to turn myself around to get back on the right track again. There was one thing I did know, and that was that there was a God who knew everything about me. I had learned that in Sunday School as a very little girl and have never forgotten it. When things would seem to be so far out of control or just didn’t seem to be going my way, then I knew that I really didn’t have to worry because my God could and would handle the situation. I was only human and I had many times where I would sit and fret and worry about it and throw my hands up in the air and not be able to see the light at the end of the dark tunnel. Then I kept being reminded that God was bigger than any bad situation I could get myself in and that He would be there for me. He promised to be with me until the end and said He will guide me.

* * *(Psalms 48:14 For this God is our God forever and ever; he will be our guide even to the end.)* * *

I wish I had held onto that promise that He gave me daily instead of going on my own. Unfortunately, that didn’t keep me from falling away from God and doing my own thing in my life. I would try to do things my way and most of the times I would try and fail. I learned the hard way that I could not run my life on my own, and I paid dearly for my wrong decisions. Luckily, the God who made me to be free-willed also gave out second chances to make things right after I had done wrong the first time.

We aren’t allowed do-overs as we would like to be able to do. It would be nice if we could turn the clock back to before we did something wrong or made that bad decision and do it all over again the way it should have been done in the first place. We all depend on the computer’s delete button to change what we typed after we have thought about it and to go back and type what we really meant to say in the first place. God doesn’t give us the opportunity to use a delete button to do things that we have messed up over again. When we do something wrong, or if we wrong someone that we shouldn’t have, or if we say something off-colored to someone, once that is done, then it is history. We aren’t given the chance to change history, but that is when our God gives us that chance to change our lives and start living it the way that God has intended. So I have to remember we have no do-overs from God, only second chances from Him. I thank God for the second chance He gave me. I would truly be lost and on my way to hell if I hadn’t been given that second chance. Only by the grace of God was I able to change my life and do a complete turn around. Now I know I have a spot waiting for me up in Heaven, as well as all who put their faith and trust in Christ Jesus.

* * *(Psalms 34:14 Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.)* * *

Chapter Two

A fairytale childhood

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My life started like any other little girl who was taken to Sunday School every Sunday. I was brought up in a Christian family with my mom, dad and an older sister, and three younger brothers. My dad worked for a tire company for years, but after an accident on the job in 1970 that left him with no fingers on his left hand and after skin graphs and much recuperation, he went to work for a local lumber yard and made prefabricated homes. Mom worked for a company called Sylvania that made electronic parts for radios, televisions and other electronics. As long as I can remember, she worked very hard on the graveyard shift. She would get us kids to bed and sleep, and then her ride would come by our home to pick her up for work.

As long as I can remember, we all loved camping as a family. My parents would get our tents, sleeping bags and, most importantly the poptarts packed and we would go camping. However, when we weren’t at a nearby campground my folks would set the tent up in the back yard for us kids to sleep in during the summer months while there was no school. During those times, when my mom would have to leave for work, putting us to bed was a whole other story. She would make sure we would be in our sleeping bags in our tents and that the tent was zipped down tight and say good-bye to us. We didn’t think she knew at the time, but now looking back on it I think she may have known all along that once her ride would come and pick her up for her long nights work, we would get our glass jars, go outside, and see how many lightning bugs we could catch. Then we would go back inside our tent and let them loose. What a light show they would give us each time! Who needed a flashlight when we could catch so many lightning bugs? We really enjoyed our summers and the fun we had in our backyard.

Now Dad, on the other hand, would be leaving for work in the mornings about the same time we kids would be leaving for school, while it was in session. But he still had to work when we kids were out on school breaks. I especially liked getting up with my dad. I remember getting up this one morning, when I was a Junior in High School and had to get up much earlier to catch the bus. I got up and got ready for school and when it was time for Dad to get up I went in to wake him. I loved to get his lunch box ready in the mornings by making his lunch for him each day that he had to go to work. It was something that helped me show him just how much I loved and appreciated him and the work he did to take care of his family. He was a great dad and I enjoyed spending as much time with him as I possibly could.

Another thing that was one of my favorite things to do in the morning along with making dad his lunch was feeding our pets each day before heading out the door and up the road to meet the school bus with my siblings. It was a chore for me to do, but I didn’t look at it that way because I enjoyed doing it too much. This one morning was no different than most of my school mornings. I got up, woke my dad up, and went on to get his lunch box put together. Then it was time to feed Teddy and Buffy, my most beloved little dogs. I proceeded to get their food and water dishes from outside by their dog pens and filled the water dishes. Then it was time to fill their food dishes. They both ate canned dog food and I needed to open the can. I used the can opener to open the top and tried to shake the wet dog food. There was no way it was going to come out. Thinking as quickly as a teenager would, I thought to myself that if it works on cranberry sauce then it should work on dog food. I found what seemed to be one of my mom’s sharpest knives and then turned the can of dog food upside down. With the knife in my right hand, I proceeded to drive the sharp end into the bottom of the tin can and went on to shake the can, hoping this would help the dogfood slide out of the tin can, but again that wasn’t helping. I decided to give it one more shot before quitting. Once again I went to stab the end of the sharp steak knife into the bottom of the can. This time I missed the can totally and put the whole body of the very sharp knife right through my left hand between my thumb and index finger. I was so surprised that I didn’t even have time to think. My hand swelled up so bad that the first thing I did after pulling the steak knife back out of my hand was to quickly grab for the closest towel. It just happen to by one of my mom’s nice white ones. It wasn’t nice and white after I picked it up. When the knife went into my hand, blood went everywhere. I went down to my dad’s room since I had just awaken him up not too much earlier and told him very calmly that I had just cut my hand. What an understatement that was. Especially when it was followed by the statement that I would just put a band-aid on it because I have a huge exam in school today. He didn’t seem to buy in on that when he saw my hand. He had me call my grandmother, who lived up above us on the hill. Knowing my mom was on her way, my grandmother and I waited on my mom to get home before we headed for the hospital. At first, there wasn’t a whole lot of pain in my hand because it was so swollen from the cut, but as time passed and I was waiting for my mom to get home, the swelling started to go down and the cut start throbbing awful. When we got to the hospital, they knew immediately that they were going to have to surgery. When it was time, they laid me down, draped a cloth around my face, and proceded to inject some numbing solution into my armpit to numb my arm and hand. They then opened the cut wider ahd removed all the dog food that was in there from when the dirty knife went into my hand. The doctors couldn’t believe the fact that I had put that steak knife through my hand and not cut all my tendons and muscles. To this day I can still use my hand quite well, but the scar is still there to remind me once again of God’s goodness in my life, and it should also be a reminder not to try stupid things because of the consequences that come out of doing them. Luckily, we grow up and learn from past mistakes. It may not be as quickly as God would have us, but we eventually grow and put the childish things behind us in our lives.

* * *(1 Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I talked like a child,I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.)* * *

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When we were younger, we would get to see our mom coming home from work in the mornings before we got on the bus; but when we got older and our bus arrived earlier, our mom would get home from work after we had left for school. We may not have gotten to see her in the morning, but it was always nice to go home after school to see her after she had gotten some sleep during the day in our absence. She was usually cooking something or we would find her planning supper for that evening.

Growing up in a small town in Maine was a pleasant experience and I wouldn’t change anything about it. I was born while my folks were living in a small house in Windham Maine. My little sister was only one and a half at the time. When I was two years old and after my first brother was born, my parents decided to move to Standish and build a home there. It wasn’t finished over night by no means—it took many years of hard work on my dad’s part. He kept working on it whenever he could as the money became available to them. Even though there were times we needed to hang thick blankets where doors should have been, it didn’t take the sense of being at home away from us. It was a long and hard journey from start to finish. I can remember when the house was originally built there was no cellar underneath it and it was close to the road. The time came when my dad decided to have a cellar dug and move the house back away from the road and placed on the new cellar. We kids thought that was the neatest thing because when it came time to fill the dirt in and around the cement blocks of the cellar we got to use our feet to push the dirt in. It probably wasn’t the safest thing to do looking back on it now, but it was fun.

As kids growing up in the country we had lots of crazy things that made our life enjoyable, like the many Maine thunder storms we lived through. I loved to put the end of my bed up to where the window was and during a thunder storm, I would lay at the foot of my bed and enjoy the wonderful fireworks show God was putting on for me through his powerful lightning. I would be so antsy waiting for the thunder and lightning to stop so I could go outside barefoot and run around in the nasty mud puddles; it didn’t matter if it was still down pouring rain as long as the lightning had stopped. We loved playing in the puddles.

When we weren’t playing in the puddles at home we always found other exciting things to do like spending time on the animal game preserve. This was a safe place for us kids to play because mom knew there were no hunters allowed on it, so she felt at ease at letting us go and enjoy our day there. That is just what we did every chance we got. We spent many hours of our summer on the preserve and then when school started up again, we spent our weekends and after-school hours there, for as long as mom would allow us. But in the summer was when we spent the most time and had the most fun running wild on the preserve. We got up in the morning and, with my sister and I being the oldest, we would pack a lunch for our three brothers and us and off we would go from early in the morning until our mom would call us home in the evening in time for our supper. This was a daily thing as soon as school got out for the summer. We shared the game preserve and our fun times with our cousins who lived up over the hill from us next to our grandparents’ home. While on the game preserve we let our imaginations run wild, wild as cowboys and Indians. We made more tepees and bow and arrows than you could count. We ran through the woods chasing imaginary deer and bears. We would pick wild strawberries and blueberries. As we would arrive to where the game preserve began there was a very large field that had an incline before it went to the edge of the woods. The owner of this land had a farm and used to hay the field to sell the baled hay to folk who owned horses and cows. During the summer months we had so much fun in the tall grass as it grew to the right height in order to cut in the fall. While the grass was growing, we used to lay down on our backs at the top of the hill, close our eyes and begin to roll. We never knew where in the field we would end up. We hardly ever went in a straight line from the top of the hill to the bottom. When we got crazy, we would leave our eyes open and look to the sky and we would end up being some dizzy when we got to our stopping point. Another memory of this play spot was lying there on my back on a nice sunny day, letting the warmth of the sun beat down on my face, and watching the clouds while fighting not to fall asleep. I would lay there for the longest time making the strangest shapes out of the white puffy clouds. They used to be so interesting, and my huge imagination would come up with some fine and at times weird pictures.

The field was so much fun in the summer but it was that much more fun in the winter when we would go sliding. The only bad thing was that as many times as we went down the hill, we would have to walk back up to the top for another slide. Living here in Maine, we got a lot of snow in the winter months. When that snow melted, we had a very nice pond at the bottom of that field. One of the most extraordinary ideas we came up with was to make a raft one spring. We decided to get some nice size trees and some rope and make ourselves a raft. We were Indians, of course, while we were at the game preserve and while our imaginations were running free. We thought we had done a fairly good job at constructing this raft, but our efforts soon came to be failure. We pushed the raft out into the middle of the water where the winter snow had melted to see it slowly come apart before our eyes. Well, one little failure didn’t keep us from having fun, we just went on to our next adventure of the day.

When I wasn’t on the game preserve with my siblings, I had my own little escape spot. I love and have always loved animals (I can’t understand how my folks let me have so many), but I had at one time nine pet rabbits that I took care of on my own. I had a spot on the edge of the woods by our house where I kept their cages and spent many hours out there with them. I also spent a lot of time with our two dogs, Teddy & Buffy. You can talk to your animals, even when no one else wants to listen to you. They aren’t as judgmental as people are toward you either. Even if you feel like you let them down or failed them somehow, they still come back to you and love you unconditionally no matter what. Just like Jesus.

There was this big tree that sat right in the midst of where my pet rabbit cages were. I remember climbing nearly to the top of that tree more than once. I had at one time made myself a little spot up in the tree where I could sit and think. Everyone needs a place to reflect and to get away from reality. I found myself doing that even as a young child. This very place where I spent much time by myself I also spent time there with my older sister. She and I would hold a Sunday School/ Bible study there for the neighborhood kids to come to. We had our Bibles and different Sunday School papers we would hand out. Who knows except for God if the time we spent out there teaching our neighborhood friends about God was any help to them. As adults now, we can only know that they have heard as well as we could teach them, and we could only teach them as much as we understood as children at our ages. But the Bible teaches that we are to come to God as little children, and if a child is taught at a young age, then they will not turn from the word that they have heard when they grow old. I’m thinking that my sister and I did all we could do by trying to lead them to find Christ as young children and now the rest is up to them. I look back and see us trying to be little fishers of men at such a young age and wonder if we are doing as much as we could be doing as grown adults now. At what age do we lose that love for people and the need to get them into Heaven? Why can’t it grow along with us when we grow up? Why can’t we still have that love for people and want to see them get into Heaven? We get to a point when we as adults feel that it is their decision and that someone somewhere will share the word of God with them and give them that opportunity to accept Christ as their Savior. We as adults tend to get hard-hearted and grow cold to the world’s need to know Christ. We need to have a heart like Jesus for everyone who isn’t living for Him or who hasn’t made that choice to serve Him. Mission work is very much needed not only in third world countries, but right in our own back yards and neighborhoods. I have to ask the question, who are we to decide who does and who doesn’t get into heaven? If we decide not to share the word of God to a certain person that is like saying that that person isn’t worthy of getting into Heaven and we are basically saying that they can go to hell. Has God given us that much authority on who we pick and chose to witness to? I believe not. He says to go out into all of the world and spread the gospel, and that is what we are supposed to be doing even to our dying day.

* * *(Mark 1:17 Come, follow me, Jesus said, and I will make you fishers of men.)* * *

We do need to become fishers of men even as small children and that reminds me of yet another pastime favorite of mine. Besides my love of animals, I also shared a love for fishing with my dad, and some of my fondest memories are of when I would get to go fishing with him. We had a nice fishing spot just down the road from our home and we spent a lot of time down there with our fishing poles in our hands. There was this other location my dad liked to fish and we went there one day and parked the car along side of the road. Here at this fishing hole, you had to fish from the bridge. I was fishing right beside my dad and there was this one cast of my fishing pole that landed me right in the brook. I swung my pole behind me and went to cast the line hook and sinker into the water. Before you knew it, over the bridge rail I went, head over heels into the water. I only ended up in knee deep water so my dad wasn’t alarmed at all; he actually thought it was rather funny. He was there at the top of the embankment, with a big grin on his face, when I had climbed my way back up. He looked at me, wet with weeds all over my clothes, and asked me how I thought I was going to get back home. I so childishly told him in his car and he went on to tell me that I couldn’t get in his car with all my wet clothes on. My dad has always had a sense of humor and it has taken me even up to my adult years to learn when he was kidding or when he was really serious. Luckily, this was one of the times he was just pulling his little girl’s leg a bit.

So my childhood was a very good one and I enjoy reminiscing about it. It puts me in a happy place when I think back at those nice days. When I got older and the imaginary cowboy and Indians were behind me, I, along with my sister Cheryl, started going to a 4-H group. It was our Sunday School teacher who was also our 4-H leader and we spent a lot of time at her home. We were also good friends with her children, and were all the way through school. During our 4-H days, my sister had a unique talent that she found by chance. She came to find out that she was a ventriloquist, and she was pretty good at it for her age. She got started by just practicing talking without moving her lips and then she started putting her skills to the test in front of people. It got to where she would have me sit beside her at our vanity in our bedroom and she would let me know what she was going to say and I would then move my lips as she mouthed the words. The two of us made a pretty good team and we began fooling a lot of people. This one night while we were attending one of our 4-H meetings, she decided to show the rest of the group what she could do. After doing this one of our leader’s oldest sons just happened to have a small dummy that he gave to Cheryl to practice with. Cheryl named him Alex and he was the first of three puppets that she ended up getting as she got better at her new talent. I am glad to say I had the