Today has been a different day for me...In the past week I've had emotions revisited from those quite some time ago, and, from all of this 'thinking' it has made me feel a bit melancholy...guess you could say, has left me feeling thankfulness for the travels in my life and at the same time recognition of important things lost along the way.

Disneyland has been and will always be a most special place for me, my wife and my children. It still is the one place I so want to be the 1st to take my grandchildren.

I miss Mexico. Some of the greatest times in my life have been spent in this country. Puerto Penasco holds volumes of memories from the very earliest years of my kids. It has only been in the last 2 years that all of this has changed...not for the good, with increasing crime and angst over safety of travel across the border. I wish it were not like this...

Downtown Seal Beach, California was always a favorite for my parents and now with my Mother's recent passing I wish we had more time to reminisce over her younger life with my Father...I just always seem to come back to this repeating theme in my life and that was never knowing enough history of their lives...

Finally, and really most important, has been the void of God in my life...a church home. Over the years I have felt great connection to God in my life but it does not feel this way anymore. The humanness of the church, it's own sin, the hypocrisy of the people who attend and the distance from the healing and contact with God's people leaves a great void in my life. Certainly in regards to feeling 'connected' to God, this remains a great emptiness inside me. The word 'faith' and the scriptural meaning within the context of biblical passages truly is all I feel I'm hanging onto... I'm reminded of a friend's words decades ago, "...faith is really faith when it is the only thing that you're hanging onto..."