Oh Brian!, Brian Hardie [ready player one ebook txt] 📗

Well here I am sitting at McDonald’s at what I hope is the end of a season of purging. Of the world, I have nothing, I am nothing and I desire nothing. Of the spirit, I have everything, I am, and I desire fellowship. Not fellowship with men, fellowship with spirit. There’s a tremendous excitement in my spirit for what is in the future, but I am not to take thought of it. I just know that I know that I know there’s something big on the horizon. I press forward to the high calling of Jesus Christ as I take thought for the past to judge myself as a child of God. So many miracles, so many persecutions, so many mistakes, so many lessons, so much pain, so many mountaintops, so many valleys, and through it all I see the glory of God working in my spirit, molding me to completion to prepare me for the next season in this life, if He desires. I am committed to Him for I have been bought by Him, for Him, and now I live in Him. I am a Bondservant of our Lord Jesus Christ. I have peace because He is peace. He is my Master. My trainer and guide is the Holy Spirit, and from the Father comes blessings, chastening and an unconditional love that most of us, sadly, never partake of. How can we, if we are not told, shown, and directed to do so? This is why many are called. But few are chosen. The chosen must rise up and bear witness to the called and the called must tell the world about another kingdom which is within and has come upon the hearts of those who believe in the only begotten son of the Almighty- Jesus Christ. I will now give an honest report of how I got from birth to this day however painful.

I was born in Miami, Florida. My dad was tennis professional and my mother was a homemaker who was a gifted artist. The Dysfunctional nature of our home led to dysfunctional emotions, decisions and lives. It was not my parents fault. There were obvious generational curses, a lack of any spiritual warfare knowledge to break these curses, and no-one that I know of that wanted to help break these curses. My dad’s dad left him at age seven. He overcame this by playing tennis culminating in being one of the top tennis players in the nation at the University of Miami. My dad was raising two children when his wife was killed by a drunk driver. My mother was raising four children when her husband died of a sudden heart attack at age 32. When my parents got together, they had four more children, me being the first. They fought a lot. My dad drank a lot, my mom complained a lot. The marriage ended when I was seven years old. My dad came home drunk one night and kicked me across the room and my mom put him out. My dad left and my mom retreated to the solitude of her room for the rest of my childhood. To their credit I can see they did exactly as they were trained to do. My mother raised us with the bare minimum of resources and my dad never seemed to help. He was abusive to me calling me “stupid”. It’s no wonder I grew up doing stupid things. “Death and life is in the power of the tongue”. I see people speaking death over their own children and then wondering why they turned out the way they did-more death speak! By the way, they are children, not “kids”. A “kid” is a goat and goats go to hell-read God’s word.

As for me, I just never seemed to fit in. I found that the only semblance of perverted love came from outside the home or from masturbation. Today’s children have it even worse. Some people’s only feeling of love is when they go to a doctor and get the attention they need. My sister recently told me, “you were the best little boy”. I don’t see it that way. I was incapable of making any commitment to anything- that was my training. I needed Jesus Christ to heal my heart, but no one was showing me or at least telling me. My religious background was going to the Catholic Church for Saturday “CCD” and Sunday mass. I did feel much better after confession. As I reflect on how ineffective the church is in practice, I cannot recall a single visit from the church members to our house to assist my mother raising ten children. Talk is easy, it’s in the “doing” that God requires and where you will find Him. If you never “do” His will, you will be deceived. You can cover your conscience by giving money or talking about helping, but you will not cover God’s eyes to your hypocrisy. When I was nine, a priest asked the class to tell how they knew there was a God. I answered, “I can look at a tree and know there’s a God.” He laughed at me and said, “Ridiculous”. Forty plus years later I can look at a tree and know there’s a God.

I earned mostly straight “A”s up until fifth grade. Once I received five “A”s and one “B”. My mom said, if you only did a little better in that class, you would have got straight “A”s. I thought the hell with this, I worked hard to get those grades. My mother was never satisfied. “You can always do better”, she’d say. By the time I hit Middle school, I was a mess. I skipped school without remorse, I was in survival mode. Didn’t matter anyway-no one cared, least of all my family. Unfortunately, I started treating people the way I was being treated. I knew it was wrong, but in some foul way, it made me feel better. That is one of satan’s tricks- to perpetuate the curses.

I played a lot of tennis but lacked the commitment to get to greater levels. It was ok to be number 5 or 6 on the team. My dad would tell me how stupid I was when I played and how great all the other children were. Didn’t matter anyway, by seventh grade I was numb. I received some pats on the back for practical jokes and being a “funny guy”, but that was not long lived. One time at a school tennis tournament, I told the opposing team I was French and couldn’t speak English. It threw the other guy off and I won the match. My teammates thought it was cool, but the coach was infuriated. Didn’t matter to me, he was having an affair with one of the girls on the team. It seemed like everyone knew it except his wife. Personally I couldn’t see why he would, his wife was beautiful and the girl was a pig. He had no credibility to tell me anything. That’s the way I saw it. Today I realize people in sin do what they shouldn’t do because that’s what they do. It’s a spirit of disobedience and “do what thou wilt”. Getting things they shouldn’t have even if it’s bad for them. I lived this life.

I just went to school because that’s what there was to do. I got over the skipping part by ninth grade. I never once did homework. I just “got by”. My mom used to tell us she would send us to school in our underwear because our dad didn’t pay child support. Throughout High school, I had two pairs of pants and three shirts. I would space them out during the week. I really never gave a crap what other people thought, I was numb to others. I learned it at home.

There was one friend, Eddie, whose family lived on the next street. They seemed to be the perfect example of a perfect life. They had money, stuff, a pool, and a complete family-dad and mom at home a boy and a girl. I spent a lot of time over there and they were good to me and my family. Eddie is still one of my very best friends and has the most “Christ-like” hearts of anyone I know. He is a true brother in Christ.

One day in High school, a teacher asked me what I was going to do after High school. I said, “What when I grew up?” The whole class laughed at me and yelled, “We are grown up!” I wasn’t and I knew it. It scared me to think of it. In fact emotionally, it was going to take about thirty more years for me to feel “grown up”. By the time I finished High School, I had no direction, no purpose, and nowhere to go. I started at the Community College and thought it would be nice to be an Architect. It was not a direction I truly had in my heart, it just sounded good to say to others who seemed to need to know what I was going to do with my life. Since there was a lack of commitment, you can guess the outcome.

 About this time, I found something that did accept me-Cocaine. Most of my friends were using. It just seemed to provide comfort to an area of my mind that I didn’t like- the real me. Finally, something that made my inner being “feel good”. The problem was and is the same today with drugs is that the “feel good” is short lived and an insatiable appetite begins to grow, one that cannot be quenched which soon leads to crime to support this appetite. Everything changes, what was important is now not important and vice versa. I had a wonderful girlfriend that I drug through the depths of this problem. I became what I hated about my dad. He drank, I became worse, a drug addict. At first, I was functioning fairly well. I worked and made good money, but it was never enough. I began borrowing what I couldn’t pay back and stole to continue doing what I couldn’t afford. The guilt would be so bad in the mornings that I had to cover