An interesting day to be sure. If you are following my story from 2024 and have survived this far to my current roller coaster ride, keep holding on. The ride continues.

My middle daughter suffers from severe social anxiety and complex PTSD from medical trauma. She spent most of her early years in a hospital bed being forced to take breathing treatments to prevent her lungs from filling with liquid. We spent her early years worrying over every surgery, every respiratory illness, keeping her isolated and keeping her happy so she wouldn't cry and produce more phlegm, which would become stuck in her lungs and lead to pneumonia. That was our lives for many years.

When Xigent terminated my employment, I lost the will to live through the events I knew were about to unfold. Statistics exist. I was an immediate suicide risk. The months it took for me to pull through that phase, causing unknown harm to my wife, children, parents, friends. It was nothing specific for our daughter but the terror of watching her father and the rock of her future be split and crumble into the void. It would require several emergency room visits, mandatory holds, and multiple in-patient mental health programs for teens to help her recover a sense of self and a future for herself independent of anyone else. This is a learned resilience mechanism one acquires in therapy.

Today I attended church for the first time in about three years. Our middle daughter began volunteering at the church coffee shop two or three days per week. She seemed comfortable enough to trust the people around her, and insisted on going whenever she could. As she struggled to learn how to build relationships with new people she cared about, she would talk to me about it. I promised I would go with her the next Sunday. Today.

Every volunteer leader I spoke with was very thankful for our daughter's presence. Her need to trust people around her to be safe makes her very easy to hurt by accident. But the welcoming environment of a large modern church with a good volunteer system was indeed the perfect place provided the adults and other teens gave her space to grow and become her own personality. They did better than I could have hoped and protected my innocent, courageous girl while she built a confidence that church leadership compliment her for.

This was my first church experience after my multiyear journey of self discovery. I received a great message about the caring for the marginalized and left-out of our society. After watching my daughter struggle as an emotionally-vulnerable child in a vicious school environment, I’ve watched her work through therapy to assert herself, then learn to accept accountability, and learn the value of discipline and faith.

She is a light shining everywhere she goes, even in bright places.