Good morning to you. This is the day the Lord has made and I will rejoice in it. My feet touched the floor and I stood up and walked in health first thing at four o’clock.

Any day my wife works (I’m retired), I get up at four and prepare a breakfast of scrambled eggs as the starting point of what I know she likes. She either wants them plain and adds salsa to them. Or, she’ll tell me to make them with bacon bits and cheese Either way she’ll get a sausage patty with it. She’s working on the keto diet. No toast.

I make my breakfast, too of a fried egg (softly done) with cheese and sausage patty on toast. Of course we have coffee. I make a 12 cup pot, which equals about six in reality. I drink one and she takes the rest to work for her morning.

Now too get to the point of the subject line. I take several meds a day to function. I’ll be sixty nine in a couple months and years has taken it’s toll on my physical body. Family genes and other issues ensued in the need for my taking care of myself. This, to me is delaying the inevitable by several years. Some of you know from past posts that my family (especially the men) weren’t known for long healthy lives. None made it past sixty.

During my missionary trip to Kentucky I had time to reflect on where I am heading in the remaining years of my life. God woke me up a couple of mornings to talk to me. They were good talks. He reminded me we have “this treasure” in earthen vessels. That being Him, that His power will shine as Him, not of us. In order for Him to be seen we need to be the magnifying glass that projects Him.

The second morning God and I talked about the mission of all Christians to go into all the world and deliver the gospel to every creature. I got stuck on that word “creature”. Upon looking up that word I found it was alluding to everything created. The word creature here is a feminine noun. Most all of nature is creative via reproduction of its own kind. We are sent to redeem creation. All of it. Not just mankind. That just opened up a wider, broader range of thought. After all, the first Adam was given dominion over all things to name them and tend to them, both animal and plant. In doing so he was propagating the life of God as He had given to Adam in the garden. The first Adam was a powerful man, given he was created to begin with in God’s image. Then he fell and lost those powers.

But through the life of Jesus Christ and his fulfillment of the law of sin and death, He brought back that power to mankind. Hence comes the commission to us in Mark 16:15-16. Go read those verses again with a renewed approach to what is said.

Then comes my reason for the title of this post. Ten years ago I fell deeply into mental exhaustion being diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety attacks. The first psychologist I went to said I needed long term care, but he was moving his practice and I would need to seek help elsewhere. This advice I took and ended up in care for a few months. I was prescribed Zoloft. It’s side effects and small but effectively flattens the emotional response to most any situation. This side effect is the one that has followed me for the majority of the last ten years.

While on this missionary trip God talked to me about putting this drug behind me, so I could regain my emotional side. There has been many times in the past that I should or could have felt sadness to the point of crying or joy to the point of a boundless response. I had gotten to where I had trained myself to accept situations simply based on the merits of what it was without an emotional response to it.

I’ve been home for a couple of weeks now and since coming home I stopped taking Sertraline (generic version of Zoloft). Yesterday was my wife’s and my fourth wedding anniversary. We didn’t do much of anything special other than the most important thing we could do. That one thing was to be with each other for the day in whatever we did. We did ride into town and had lunch early and picked up a few groceries. No biggie stuff. We came back by the home and dropped off our stuff and road to another county and scouted an RV camp site. We were very encouraged about what we saw both by the way the place is maintained and price, so we determined we will take a weekend soon and go there.

What let me know I’m passed the side effects of the drug came after we got back. We grilled a couple of steaks, cooked some squash and sliced up a cucumber for each other and had a wonderful anniversary dinner while we watched “Until Forever”. My wife and I had a good cry at the end. It was a sad ending, but the movie is an excellent Christian production of a real-life situation a young man and his girl went through while he battled leukemia. I cried, deeply affected by knowing this was a true story and the events were real as it was shown by home movies of them at the end during closing credits.

I stopped my med. Now I trust God to help me maintain this stoppage for the last time. It’s not my first attempt to wean off it. Hopefully it’s my last attempt. I can now feel and not just make mental note of an event.