Greetings.

     Welcome to my blog, which I decided to call "the inevitable path" because my life has begun to go down a path that many years ago I believed it would never follow, yet now as I'm coming to grips with getting older it seems so.......well, inevitable.

     When I was much younger, I only had the vaguest notion of this thing called "mid-life crisis".  I would read about it and hear people talk about it, especially when someone they knew seemed to be suffering just such a crisis.  All I gathered was that it had something generally to do with a combination of the grim realization of mortality combined with growing dismay over failed ambitions and unrealized expectations.  It wasn't until I approached middle age myself that I realized that these crises were the result not of disappointment at not reaching certain goals or attaining certain things. It was the realization that those things don't provide the life-fulfilling rewards many people thought they would, combined with the realization that they didn't have the foggiest notion what would.

     It then dawned on me what gave rise to the stereotype of the formerly conservative guy who suddenly colored the grey out of his hair, started wearing gold chains and hipster clothing and bought a sports car.  There are two paths one can take when faced with a problem, either confrontation or avoidance, and some choose avoidance.  They mentally revert back to a time in their lives when spiritual longings and a sense of cosmic purpose were the last things on their minds.  And when the tactic eventually fails, they adopt a grim resignation to simply wait out the rest of their lives, having come to the conclusion that it's all really just an exercise in day-to-day existence.

     Fortunately for me, God in His mercy first set me on a path to spiritual fulfillment almost exactly twenty-one years ago.  It was an excruciatingly painful ordeal resulting from unspeakable tragedy, by far the worst time of my life I will ever have.  And an odd revisit to that tragedy in September of 2011 forced a drastic change in my perspective and a refocus of my path that is still playing out now.

     In the posts that follow I hope to chart my progress along this path, wherever it may lead....