December 4, 2022

Dear God, good morning. Today’s reading from God Promises for every day writes: ” Truth from the Bible about Forgiving Others” Lately, this topic of forgiveness keeps popping up. I know my biological parents were very sick, and I forgave my father before he passed away.
My dad was in the Morton Hospital in Taunton, Massachusetts June of two thousand and one. The nurse said they would implement hospice so my father could go home, and that’s what he wanted to do.
At the hospital, I could forgive and felt compassion flowing through my heart to forgive my dad. I told him I was sorry for hating him for all those years. At that moment, my father’s eyes swelled up with tears, and I started to cry, and Tina did too. It was an emotional day.
My father wrote on paper, “I want to go home.” I stood near my father’s bedside and tried to understand what was happening to my father. The nurse told Tina and me that my father had Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease COPD, which is uncurable. The doctor gave the okay for my father to go home. They kept my father on morphine so he would not suffer. When I arrived at my father’s house that afternoon, my brother Willy, his girlfriend Tina, and her mother were surrounded by my father’s bedside. We gathered together in my father’s bedroom. I feed my father tomato soup for dinner. Little did I know it would be his last dinner. We were there to make my father comfortable. I was unaware of the possibility that my father was dying.
Years ago, my dad used to go to the hospital for pneumonia treatments and breathing medication for his COPD. My father would say, “I’m dying, “so all four of us would visit our father in the hospital years ago. My dad smoked four packs of menthol cigarettes a day. He finally quit smoking and was put on an oxygen tank to help control his breathing. But it was too late. He kept getting sicker from smoking menthol cigarettes, the worst ones to smoke.
My father used to drink his Old Thompson every morning with black coffee. The doctors told him he needed to quit drinking alcohol. I sent some old timers from our fellowship to my father’s house to help him get sohba. And a miracle happened. My father did get sobha.
My sister Denise told me that my father went to confession at his church as he stayed sohba. My dad belonged to the Everett Tuesday night meeting at Saint Teresa in Everett Masschuttes. There were at least fifty people in the fellowship at that meeting. I was proud of my father, but the wounds of his sexually abusing me had not healed yet. I had great hatred for him, and I never visited him until I got the call from Tina that my father may not live much longer.
I jumped in my car and drove to Morton Hospital. I felt a sense of great sadness for my father. Driving to the hospital, I heard on the radio that Jeffery Dahmer was being punished for kidnapping children and freezing their bodies so he could eat them.
While driving to Morton Hospital, I was listening to the news and felt sadness for my father. I had questions about his medical condition and what if he died before I arrived at the hospital. I asked Tina to meet me at the hospital, and she did.
After I forgave my father, I felt empathy. If he dies, will he enter Heaven? Will God forgive my father? Will Jesus take my father into his house in Heaven? My father’s confession to the priest about the sexual abuse against Denise and myself. These questions haunted me, was he going to hell for abusing my mother and controlling her too? Then he started to sexually abuse me when I was five years old. And Denise was being sexually abused by my father too.
I’m grateful to you, Jesus, for bringing me closer to you when I write about my childhood and the abuse my siblings and I went through. I only write to you because you help me to be humble and have self-control. The fruits of love, peace, faith, hope, joy, kindness, goodness, and self-control have entered my heart with great love for you, sweet Jesus. Thank you for everything I need, a new car and possibly working with a new family in Andover Masschuttes. They sound lovely and kind. They have a two-years and a six-month-old bouncing boy. Fun age group. I’m excited because they are only seven miles away, and I love two-year-olds. They are so much fun. Thank you, Jesus, for loving me the way I am.