Living Beyond Good

By Arai

Living Beyond Good, is the much anticipated second release from Arai. In this memoir, Arai transparently takes the reader on her journey to find purpose and her maturation in faith. The journey was not without struggles, hardships and many stops at disappoint. Her "Beyond Good" theory, as shared in Pursuing Perfection: Dating Beyond Good, is again touched in this work. As the book progresses, it transitions the reader from an outsider looking in, to a participant in faith discovery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365738647

Book preview

Living Beyond Good

Living B E Y O N D Good

By: Arai

Copyright

©2017 Arai

Cover design ©2017 TRÉ

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion

of brief quotations in review, without permission

in writing from the author/publisher.

ISBN  978-1-365-73864-7

Printed in US by Lulu.com Enterprises Inc.

This book is dedicated to my family.

Daddy, thank you for having a vision

of more for your children that Michigan

could not provide!! Mommy, Tony J,

Tre’Von & Terrell…

This part of the journey is over!

I love you all!!

Prelude

THEY SAY YOU SHOULD NEVER stay focused on what happened in your past, because everything happens for a reason. Focusing on the past, what did and didn’t happen, can be crippling to what can happen in your future. I didn't really grasp or understand the extent of that concept until I was in my mid twenties. I had lived much of my young adult life with one thing in mind… stability. That one notion branched into various areas of my life; financial stability, housing stability, relational stability, etc. I just wanted a consistent, stable, successful, good life. A life similar to what I knew as a child, but unlike the life I had lived throughout my adolescence and much of my young adulthood.

I dealt with one bad situation after another, and I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown at only 22. It was then I realized something was not right. I thought to myself, this can't possibly be the way God wants me to be living, but what am I doing wrong?

All I'd done up until that point in my life was go to school, go to church and work by butt off to save money to have that stability. To have a semblance of the good life I knew as a child. For whatever reason, it just wasn't working out the way I had planned.

Funny how our plans are not always the same as what God plans for us… I'm, now, so appreciative of that. It took me years to accept and realize what God plans for us far exceeds what we could have ever imagined for ourselves. I believe in order to reach the actualization of God’s plans for one’s life, one must align properly with Him, find who we are in His image, seek wholeness within oneself, seek purpose and believe whole heartedly that life can extend beyond being just good.

Self Search

The Basics

I grew up in Michigan. My dad was a Pastor in a city for about ten years. Our church was one of the well-known churches in the city. My dad was known throughout the city and across the nation for his preaching ability and leadership. Our church had no less than 600 plus regular, service-attending, members. Our choir alone had over 100 people in it. My dad would be out of town, what seemed like every other week, preaching at various churches throughout the nation. By the 9th year, our church had outgrown its facility. There was no longer seating to accommodate everyone in the sanctuary at the main service time. We had created an overflow section in the basement where people would watch a live stream of the service. It is safe to say our church was successful, my father was successful and my family wanted for nothing.

We lived in gorgeous homes with swimming pools, private lakes, and had nice vehicles; BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Audi, Range Rover, etc., we had them all, and two or three of some of them. My dad owned a couple of restaurants in our time in Michigan. He had his own city-youth football team that competed in state championships, and won most of them, extending to become regional champions. My parents also owned a women's and children's boutique; so as they ordered clothes from New York and LA for that business, they bought most of my brothers’ and my clothing from there as well. So all we really knew was this lifestyle. This life of luxury and comfort. We were spoiled children, not brats, but as I stated before we wanted for nothing. Even my mother didn't work a job per say. It just wasn't necessary. I don't make mention of any of this to brag or anything of that sort, but rather to paint a clear picture of the kind of life I had grown accustomed to as a child and to set the stage for how drastically life changed.

On March 9th, 2001, my family moved to Ohio. My parents were from Cleveland, but moved to Michigan when I was three. My mother's father and my dad's grandfather were both pastors in the Cleveland area, and well esteemed. Cleveland was home to my parents. My dad's reasoning for moving back to Ohio was that God gave him a vision to not only build a great church, but to also provide opportunities for my brothers and me that our hometown in Michigan could not afford to us. I didn't get it.

I was thirteen and only had 4 weeks left of middle school and was forced to transfer to not only a new school, but a new state and life altogether. I was distraught! All of the friends my brothers and I had grown to know and love were left behind and we were to start new… And if that wasn't bad enough… The area we moved to had maybe three other African American families. We were like outcast. Where we lived in Michigan was diverse. We went to melting pot schools that had people of just about every race/culture/socioeconomic status. The new school was far from diverse. I had no desire to adjust or accept the change.

As my father tried to build a church, he was starting from scratch. Given it was a start up church, it was a church that in essence had no resources. If the church itself had no money, how do you think it was funded? That's right, my father's money. My dad gave his best to try to make it work. That was inclusive of all of his time, his energy, and his resources. For whatever reason, it just wasn't happening the way it was planned.

My brothers and I watched my dad give his all and not get that in return. I noticed how these various preacher friends of my dad, while we were in Michigan, slowly became fewer and fewer. It's as if because he was no longer the pastor of this major church, he was no longer the same person to them. I watched how yet and still when people were in trouble or in need, they surfaced and who did they run to? My dad. But where were they when they were doing well?

The more my dad gave the more our family struggled. He believed he just needed to keep pursuing the vision God gave him no matter how things looked. He had faith things would change. I thought he was crazy because things just became worse and worse for my family.

We started losing vehicles because we could no longer afford them, and moving around because we could no longer afford the places we were living in. My brothers and I spent ninety percent of our time together. We didn't hang with anyone really because we felt bad asking our parents for money to do things. Money was extremely tight and times became hard quickly.

We learned at a young age, don't answer the door or answer the phone unless you're told because you didn't know who was calling. Most of the time the phones just went unanswered. We were home alone most days as we lived nearly an hour away from civilization, and that civilization is where my mother worked and my father handled business. It was always the four of us. When our cable and internet were disconnected for nearly a year, it was really just us. Keeping each other entertained, keeping each other occupied.

I hated life. I mean absolutely hated it. I hated going to church because I felt it was the reason we were struggling. I hated being around pretentious people. I hated going to school with people who weren't real either. It was all so pointless to me. I hated people. I hated our situation. I hated what we suffering for. I hated our adolescence was being taken away from us. I hated everything. I was so angry, all the time.

I was so angry with God for so much. We were losing so much, and the only people who knew of our situation…were us. It started to affect me in school. I couldn’t really focus like I once did. I had no interest in anything anymore. I didn’t care about learning useless things like the formula for a hyperbola in math, or the effects of smoking marijuana in health. One day I just didn’t go to class. It felt good to not be confined and to have freedom to do what I chose. What I chose to do was go to the library and sit on the internet, as we didn't have the internet at home anymore. This went on and off for about a month.

I don’t know why I didn’t want to go to class, but I was satisfied not going. My math teacher sent a letter home to my parents, but because they were hardly ever home during the day, when I got the mail, I noticed it and I intercepted it. I opened it and it read:

It is not recommended that your daughter move on to Pre-Calc next year. She is at risk of failing this course. She lacks motivation. She is an excellent student when she is in attendance. She understands the material and grasps the concepts with ease, but the problem is she chooses not to attend class. Due to her absences she has missed two quizzes and a test, which cannot be made up because these are unexcused absences. It is my hope for her that she finds the motivation to complete this course.

I folded the paper up and hid it in an unused purse in my closet. I didn’t want my parents to know I had skipped classes and was at risk for failing. After that, I decided not to skip any more classes. Unfortunately, I did end up failing that class. After seeing not one but two F’s on my report card, I made up in my mind I would never be so careless with my education. Also, that would not only be the first time that happened, but the last and only time. I thought to myself, my education was the one thing that could be my ticket away from there. All I had to do was do my best in school and excel, and I could go off to college somewhere far far far away. So that’s just what I attempted to do. My junior year I worked my butt off to pull my GPA back up, my goal was no longer to be satisfied with A’s and B’s, I wanted only A’s. I was able to achieve that the majority of the school year. I ended the school year with all A’s and one B. My senior year I had straight A's and ended having high honors and a 3.9 GPA.

Back tracking… We moved, again, the end of my Junior year. So my senior year of high school, supposedly the most memorable year of your high school career, was to be with more total strangers and in yet another unfamiliar place. It only added to feelings I accumulated from the move to Ohio in general.

As the year moved forward, I realized I had no idea what I wanted to go to college for. I had all these ideas from when I was a child of how I saw my life and things I wanted, but I didn't know how to make them reality or to even try. So I put them all away. I decided I should wait before wasting money my parents didn't have, to go to college not even sure what I would study. I decided I wanted to take a semester or maybe a year off. That idea didn't go over too well my mother.

I told my mom about my plans, and she quickly dismissed them. Her logic was that I would take the time off, and I would not