One Blessed Individual

I consider myself one very blessed individual. I have dozens of things going on and all are going well. Yesterday I received word that I at last qualify for a board certification that I have been wanting to take. As many of you may or may not know, I am a recovered addict. I have been clean almost twelve years. The certification I wanted to take is the peer support specialist certification to help others recover from addiction. The problem was that I needed to document a number of hours of specialized training in ethics and advocacy. The board president asked me to send her my transcripts and after looking at them determined that the classes I had in college would cover those! Now I have to send official copies of my transcripts directly to the board and have them evaluated officially and get a testing date. The home I live in has agreed to get me to the testing site, which will likely be in a nearby town.

I am also blessed because the home I live in is going to offer classes to train a few of us as peer recovery coaches. That is one step up from the West Virginia Peer Support Specialist certification. One of the social workers here is a Peer Recovery Coach Instructor and is going to conduct those classes for at least two of us here. Then I will not only be a certified Peer Support Specialist but also a Certified Recovery Coach.

College is also going well. I am now in my fifth week of an eight-week course. All of our courses at Regent University Graduate School are 16-week courses compressed into eight-week courses. It is a lot of work but very rewarding. My current GPA is 3.89 and if I maintain the A plus that I have now in this course I will increase that to 3.92 at the end of this semester. I also have the pleasure of being the encoiurager in my small group. I try to send out emails to spur them on to good grades.

Yesterday was another blessing for me. I had the pleasure of putting on my uniform and going to the Salvation Army Huntington Corps where I am the Community Care Ministries Secretary (a fancy way of saying community chaplain) and working our Thanksgiving Dinner. We had a drive through set up so that we could serve the public through a window and everybody could be socially distanced for take out only. We were supposed to open at five but people began showing up at 2:30. Rather than have a crowd we served them early. We served 750 dinners by 3:30 and ran out of turkey dinners. Still having people coming we heated beef stew and served another 250 dinners. I believe our total was 976 dinners served. COVID is really running amuck in the economy.

I will not be able to respond to any mail for awhile. My three-year old printer gave up the ghost the other day. Until I get one I can do no printing.

Thank you for letting me ramble. God is really terrific. He sent His Son to become a man and die in our place!