a lot of pain just comes in life

Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, “I find no pleasure in them” (Ecclesiastes 12:1)

I was just reading a western in which the main character had escaped as a boy from an abusive orphans’ home. He made something of himself and came back several years later to the town he had come from to see what it was like.

He met a girl who was a prostitute and found out that she had been one of the girls from the home. Even though he had changed considerably, she recognized him.

He found out from her that all of the girls who had not been sold to older mean s wives became prostitutes. All of the young girls he had known were now prostitutes.

It made him sad to know that, although the young men could escape to do something else, the girls were trapped. The old west, of course, as was American in general, was a culture in which women had little or no voice. So if the headmaster of this school sold his girls to brothels, that was too bad.

I thought about finding people again after a long time. It has been 43 years now since I graduated high school in Texas City. I have only recently found some of those people again.

When I read their stories, when we talk about what has happened since the beginning of our lives, almost each person has had such pain.

A lot of that pain just comes in life. In living there is pain. In growing, in learning, in enduring – all those things bring pain.

Yes, there is joy, but sometimes that joy comes afterwards when one has become able to deal with the pain.

In some ways, it would have been good not to know all this, to keep the pictures of these people in my mind like they were.

There were girls I had a crush on who had so many bad things happen, yet have come into a good life now. There are guys I knew who died in the Vietnam conflict or got in trouble with the law or just flopped along in life. Some are happy now, some are not.

But we all stand at about the same place as we did in high school, only on the other end. All of us probably have no more than 20-30 years left in this life.

I know that in my life, I made so many mistakes that sometimes I would give an arm to change them. But I can’t. All I can do is go on from here.

All any of us can do is go on from here. Whether our lives have been good or bad, happy or sad, doesn’t really matter now. We can live in the memories or the regrets.

But the rest of our lives, that short time left until we go to meet out Maker, that is what counts.

I don’t know what the point of this post is, but I was thinking about it.