getting close...............

In two days we will be presenting our program.  I'm so confident about the material and the creative way we will giving this presentation, that even if I stumble over my words, the program will carry itself and make an impression.  That's the key.  We want people to be impressed with this so that they will remember the important information we will be sharing.  It contains a little bit of everything we learned over the years, which was very challenging.  I honestly don't know how we managed to condense it like we did because, as we added, it kept getting longer and longer. I know we've had some help from the Holy Spirit. In fact, I KNOW it is the HOLY SPIRIT that has been driving me to do this. It's funny because every now and then I think "What the heck am I doing?"  How did this happen?  And to think how much I hate public speaking.  It can't be me. In the past 3 years "we've come a long way baby".  Three years ago this month I joined this site and it's really interesting to look back and reflect on what was going on then, and how naive I was about depression and addiction.  Why would I have known anything?  I was never exposed to it.  I had no clue as to how scary and disruptive these issues can be.  Three years ago this month we were dealing with our middle guy.  It's a very long story but it wasn't an easy time. Little did I know that it was going to be a lot worse with our youngest.  Two years ago T was truant from school and completely out of control. He was then experimenting with coke.  His addiction took over and he was no longer the same awesome boy we once knew.  Parenting him was nearly impossible. Unless you've been there - you really cannot understand it. We had professional, medical friends even giving us the wrong advice. One of our "seasoned" emergency doctor friends suggested we make T in the garage, like a dog.  He almost seemed disgusted with our son.  His brother's adopted 17 year old son, at that time, was an addict and it got to the point that they had to kick him out. They were also planning to move because their son was threatening their lives. I don't know if their son had a mental disease on top of the addiction, or if they lost patience with him and handled it poorly, but our situation wasn't anything like that!  So our friend's experience was with his nephew and that was all he knew. Anyway, I assumed our emergency room doc friend would know all about addiction and how to "manage" it, and I also thought he would have some resources handy. It was very nice of him to contact people and get some faxed to us, but they weren't helpful, at all and very difficult to read.  Perhaps one of my next projects is to get some of these resource packets to some of our area hospitals. It's a thought, anyway.    A year ago was better, at this time, but he was still struggling.  He tested clean but acted, at times, like he did when he was using - called a "dry drunk". So 3 years later - he's clean and I still can't believe it.  Hopefully, he will graduate this month.