The Eyes of Grace: How to Face the Challenges of Life and Keep Your Sanity! How to Enjoy Life and Build Your Dream.

By Theresa W. Firster

I knew I shouldn’t have left him alone. He didn’t answer my calls. I told him to keep the phone close by and felt something was wrong when he didn’t answer. My heart started beating so fast and my hand was shaking as I fumbled with my house keys. I opened the front door and panicked when I saw him in his recliner, foaming at the mouth.”

“He was the love of my life and I had waited for him for 25 years. “I couldn’t understand why God would take him away from me now. My heart was racing and my head was spinning with the thought of losing him. With tears running down my face I started praying all the way to the hospital begging God not to take him from me.”

“The river was so tempting. I was fearless. At five or six I took a rowboat out into the channel blissfully rowing along by myself when I saw my mother yelling at me from the stone wall. There could have been a huge gray hulk of a ship bearing down on me for all I knew, but I arrived at port safely where my mother promptly took the oars away from me never to be seen again. (The oars that is not my mother). Little did I know! Those were the fearless years.”

When Chuck returned from Vietnam, he was assigned to Fort Bragg, NC. It was while there that our third child, Stacy was diagnosed with Acute Lymphatic Leukemia. Ever since her birth Stacy had unexplained fevers. The doctors never found a cause and eventually the fever passed.

One day while we all were swimming at the post pool, Stacy said her chest hurt and pointed to her sternum. She didn’t want to swim anymore. She was only six years old at the time and had been complaining of chest pains. When the doctor gave us the diagnosis, I felt like I was falling –falling down a deep well, screaming at the top of my lungs. I thought my heart would stop. The hardest thing I ever had to do was to go into her room and pretend everything was fine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982277864

Theresa W. Firster

Theresa Williams Firster has an Associate degree in Mental Health and a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia State University. She was a group DUI instructor with a local Police Department and led courses in stress reduction and attitude assessment for a division of Hew. Theresa was an adjunct professor and consultant at Columbus University in Georgia relating to stress and time management. She also instructed a course at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta on the Brain and Stress. She was a guest instructor for Emory University Employees on stress management. In her spare time, she raised six children and taught Hatha Yoga for 25 years. Theresa is currently retired and focusing on her writing and art.

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Copyright © 2021 Theresa W. Firster.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-7785-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-7786-4 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 12/13/2021

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Calling 911

Chapter 2 The Early Years

Chapter 3 A New Family

Chapter 4 The Runaway

Chapter 5 Our First Assignment

Chapter 6 Hawaii Paradise

Chapter 7 Vietnam Transfer Alone Again

Chapter 8 Heartbreaking Diagnosis

Chapter 9 Challenges of Faith, the Death of a Child

Chapter 10 Deployed to Korea. Alone again for 18 months

Chapter 11 Return from Korea

Chapter 12 New Life Changes, Working for YMCA

Chapter 13 Divorce

Chapter 14 Going Back to College

Chapter 15 Dealing with Abandonment

Chapter 16 Mother’s Reunion

Chapter 17 New Relationship

Chapter 18 Graduation

Chapter 19 Life Changing Choices

Chapter 20 Jean’s Suicide

Chapter 21 Spiritual Growth

Chapter 22 A New Marriage

Chapter 23 Working Dilemma

Chapter 24 Testing my Beliefs

Chapter 25 The Grief Process

Chapter 26 Attitude is Everything

Chapter 27 Facing the Future

Chapter 28 Joy and Pain

Chapter 29 More Lessons Learned

Chapter 30 Karaoke Fun

Chapter 31 Full of Questions

Chapter 32 Family Time

Chapter 33 A Trip to Paris

Chapter 34 The Pandemic Years

Chapter 35 Oh You of Little Faith

Chapter 36 Moving On

Epilogue

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Introduction

The waiting room was sparsely decorated and rather cold, containing only wooden benches and a spattering of stiff-backed chairs. The Springer Opera House was an historic community theatre in our small town of Columbus. I sat restlessly on one of the hard chairs as I waited to audition for their newest production, Brigadoon. When I read the call for auditions, I was ecstatic; it’s my favorite movie starring Cid Charisse and Gene Kelly about a mystical Scottish village that only reemerges from the mists every hundred years. I’d not been in any plays since high school and thought to myself, You’ve got to be kidding. What makes you think you can get on stage at your age? (I was thirty-five.) Well, I threw caution—and fright—to wind and said, Why not?

The Springer Opera House was well known for its professional productions and hired a director from the big city of Atlanta. As I sat waiting, the double doors to the theater snapped open, and the director came rushing through. It was obvious he was in a hurry, but he stopped at the exit door and glanced around the room. As we exchanged looks, he said, You have the eyes of Grace. I was dumfounded as he hurried out the door. What? What did he mean? He didn’t know me!

During rehearsals, we did get to know each other, but he never did explain his statement. Daniel always seemed comfortable in his slightly baggy pants, gray rumpled shirt, and well-worn loafers, and always had tousled gray hair that was rough at the collar. I imagined him to be in his late sixties.

Through the years, that phrase kept coming back to me until I finally checked its meaning. Taken from the dictionary, it means: The freely given, unmerited favor and love of God. The influence or spirit of God operating in humans to regenerate or strengthen them, a virtue or excellence of divine origin: The Christian graces, also called state of grace, the condition of being in God’s favor or one of the elect.

Life, to me, is mystical and fascinating, but the Yin and Yang (the good and bad) of life can be perplexing. How do we balance or understand how to navigate the two? There has to be a balance to traverse them both. Life can be very harsh, and if we’re not careful, we might be tempted to opt out of reality. I began by looking at my beliefs and what is important to me. Often, we grow up accepting the values and beliefs of our parents and our culture, and we don’t fully understand what they mean. This prompted me to delve deeper into my own beliefs and values. Knowing who you are and what you want is a good first step to a creative life Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life. offered me helpful guidelines to begin the journey. The pages that follow recount my journey through life, which has been much like a roller-coaster ride with trying to sort through all my experiences and the choices I had to make, always balancing life’s demands with my need for a spiritual foundation. It was a bumpy ride.

My story began eighty-plus years ago. God help me! I wonder what I was thinking when I decided to be born. Some metaphysicians say that, in spirit, we choose to come back to complete certain obligations. I can’t imagine why I would accept this crazy roller-coaster ride. Too late now.

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Chapter 1

Calling 911

I knew I shouldn’t have left him alone when he didn’t answer my calls. I told him to keep the phone close by and felt that something was wrong when he didn’t answer. My heart was beating fast, and my hand shook as I fumbled with my house keys. I opened the front door and panicked when I saw him in his recliner, foaming at the mouth.

I screamed when I heard the rattle in his throat. No. I thought I had lost him and started pressing his chest, trying to keep him breathing, and called to him. Bob, please don’t leave me. I frantically dialed 911, begging the operator to please hurry the medics. She ordered me to pull him down onto the floor. I tried, but he was six foot three and 195 pounds. I couldn’t move him. She almost yelled at me through the phone and told me I had to get him on the floor. With sheer determination, I struggled until I was able to pull him down.

The medics finally arrived, and since he was diabetic, they began administering glucose. They thought he was having a seizure. He’s going to be all right as soon as the medicine gets into his system, they assured me. His blood sugar was only twenty-five, which is extremely dangerous. He started to come around but was confused and incoherent. He moaned and complained that he couldn’t move his left arm.

The medics immediately transported him to the emergency room.

This man was the love of my life, and I had waited for him for twenty-five years. I couldn’t understand why God would take him away from me now. My heart was racing and my head spun with the thought of losing him. With tears running down my face, I prayed all the way to the hospital, begging God not to take him from me.

Little did I know what a horrific day that would be. Bob had been resting in his recliner as I got ready for church. I had to go early for choir rehearsal. I didn’t want to leave him alone, but he insisted I go. Over the past two years, he had been wrestling with multiple health problems stemming from his diabetes.

When I met Bob, he was rough around the edges. The years showed in his lined, craggy features. Hmm, my kind of man, though. He made me think of Charles Bronson, one of my favorite actors. Bob had blue-green eyes, a cowboy hat, boots, and the swagger of a bull-riding cowboy. He was tall and slender, with long, sexy legs, and he was all muscle. To say the least, I found him most attractive. I say that mildly! My best friend, Julie, and I went to Two-Steps West, one of the few western dance clubs in Atlanta offering free dance lessons. I watched the professionals whirl around that huge dance floor, amazed at all the twists and turns and choreographed steps. Bob stood out from the others not only because of his six-foot-three height but because of the way his body moved. I was intrigued and intimidated at the same time.

I whispered to Julie, He’s so good, I hope he doesn’t ask me to dance. Cowboys hate to dance with beginners. You have to know all the moves.

She smiled at me and said, "It’s too late. Here he comes!" And that’s the beginning of that story.

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Chapter 2

The Early Years

I started out bemused by it all. What am I doing here? I’ve seen pictures of myself as a shy, sweet, plumpish little girl with bouncy Shirley Temple curls. In case you don’t know who Shirley Temple is, she was a dancing, singing, plumpish little girl, and a movie star of the forties. Every girl wanted to have her curls. My mother was always taking me to the beauty parlor, which I hated, to have those big sausage curls baked into my hair. That was back in the day when you had to sit under a big black machine with long black cords hanging down with curlers attached.

I was quiet and shy as a very young child and an obedient, good little girl. I was just curious, watching life pass by and trying to figure out what was going on. Some memories are like snapshots, like me at three years old, visiting my grandfather’s huge gray monolith of a