ALC - Homeward

For the last year or so Roxanne and I have had a growing concern about one of our sons who has been struggling with anxiety and feeling down.  So we reached out to our friends, family, and neighbors (our \”home team\”) in a confidential letter asking for their support.  This was a humbling experience, but one that I could not avoid, as for years now I\’ve been preaching the value of parents reaching out to others for help in bringing their teens home from treatment.  How could I then, in my own family\’s need, not reach out and do the same? My son needed to know that he was important to others outside of our family.
 
The outpouring of love has been instantaneous, creative and inspiring and it has clearly made a difference to our son.  Now let me share with you just one, very simple but powerful things that have happened in his scout troop where his two scout leaders received the letter.  
 

Sure, bread does, relationships do, and so does your brain if you aren’t constantly feeding it. 

No, this isn’t about the Super Bowl!  This is about a powerful tool for change.

My mother-in-law gave me a book for Christmas that delivers a daily dose of knowledge on topics from art to science to history.  I was fascinated reading about the Black Death (Bubonic Plague) that swept Europe for 5 years in the mid 1300\’s.  Highly contagious, an estimated 25 million people, one third of the population of Europe, succumbed to this quick and fatal disease.  Can you imagine how devastating that must have been?  They call it a natural holocaust.

If you haven’t, don’t feel bad, I just learned of it last year and since then I’ve heard it everywhere. It’s basically this…

It was a blinding blizzard a little over six years ago, temperatures just above freezing with wind chill below zero, when I made my way to into the desert mountains of Utah on December 26th.  I was there to see the boys in my therapy group at our wilderness treatment program.  

A few weeks ago I witnessed something that made me smile and also verified that at least one of our children feels lucky to be in our home.  Whether our children are really lucky or not… perception is reality, right? 🙂