Will we ever understand life in its full totality? Sometimes it seems so unfair and other times I stand amazed by the whole “reap what you sow” principle.
You reap what you sow,
more than you sow,
and later than you sow
– Charles F. Stanley
Source
Today is the father of tomorrow. Your decisions today affect your tomorrows.
I’ve experienced this truth with a very close friend of mine. He got divorced almost nine years ago. His wife left him for another man. The kids were very young at he time and although he was fighting for joint custody, she got full custody and he only got to see them every second weekend. Holidays had to be split – one part of the holiday with mom and the second part with dad, or vice versa.
It was tough on him. He’d always been a very practical, hands-on dad and lost a lot of time with his boys, a time where kids were still being shaped and formed. He couldn’t help them with their homework, fetch them from school – you know, the usual tasks that seems so ordinary and insignificant to most parents. It was such a difficult time in his life.
With the divorce proceedings, mutual friends were taking sides due to fallacious information shared, so it came to no surprise when some friends turned their backs on him.
It seemed so unfair at the time. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t fighting back?? At times I got so frustrated, I wanted to grab him and force him to catch a wake-up! He insisted that in due time the truth will reveal itself.
The kids also struggled to adapt. Apart from friendships lost, the ex-wife eventually, after getting pregnant, married the man from the affair – a very unpleasant bipolar man. Mentally, he was very unstable and controlling. He verbally abused the kids and they were too scared to tell anyone, let alone their dad. The boys were forced to call him ‘dad’ and had to listen how their dad were criticized and belittled by the ex-wife and angry stepdad.
This went on for years while my friend walked the straight and narrow road. Regardless of the way they treat him, he never stoops to their level. He never once influenced the boys negatively towards their mom and stepdad, although at times he was so tempted to give in!
Turned out several years later that you really DO reap what you sow!
Yesterday my friend got a phone call from his eldest son, a desperate cry for help – he wants to stay with his dad. And so years and years of silence and cries in the dark came to the light, to the open. What a miserable and also joyful day for my friend. It was incredibly hard to hear what the kids had to endure and were exposed to. And at the same time he felt so fortunate that regardless of how his kids were brainwashed against him, that they still had the confidence to cry out to him and trust him to help them.
Years and years of lies and deceit came out in the court case and at long last, father and sons are reunited and as happy as can be.
We reap what we sow…. even if we carry the consequences of our actions only YEARS later. Eventually it catches up on you. We all have to account for the choices we make and the words we choose to speak.