Love and Peanut Butter

A huge thank you to many friends here.

4 min readMar 14, 2024

Love and happiness remind me of sticky peanut butter. When you spread them around, you can’t help but get some on yourself.

When my new granddaughter became ill recently, the love through the screen was emotionally strengthening.

I’m simply the grandfather, not the parent, yet everything in my body ached for her to come through and be my happy grandchild again. It made me think about things I’d never thought about. God, for one.

If there’s one thing, I was sure of, it was that God had no plans for me, yet there I was, sitting in the hospital room with this three-month-old child so poorly that what was coming out of her nose and mouth belied belief.

I mean, seriously. I was praying.

I’m the same man outside — overweight, seventy-five, big mouth — but the man inside is different. At a late stage in my life, I thought this life could be empty and without purpose.

Then I met Jenny. I was the same man on the outside, but inside quite a different man. I felt strong — invincible is not too strong a word — no longer desperate. That has been my story for twenty-five years: invincible.

Till recently.

I’ve never said a prayer when I wasn’t at a funeral, and those prayers did nothing to calm my despair with loss. God was a joke. No prayer is going to overcome a man’s despair at losing his family. It’s bullshit.

Till recently.

Though suffering, we may find something we never knew we had, belief, for example. Through suffering, I realized I could not always be there for my first family, and not even close in their darkest hour.

You know, to believe in prayer, you must have some skin in the game. The prayer wasn’t for me, I thought. Then it was. Then, I was asking God for me. My grandchild, storybooks, sleeping on shoulders, hugs, hopes, a life, a life that lasts a long time, for me.

Prayer is like a chat room with God.

It’s true that when a door closes for you, God opens a window. He opened a fucking big window for me, allowing me to be part of so much more than I ever thought imaginable.

I’m not saying God has allowed me to speak for Him to hundreds of people. That would be too ironic because I am not talented in that area.

That prayer and others that have followed have allowed me to recognize the gifts coming to me from my Medium friends when I was upset and despairing.

I’ve learned many valuable lessons through my work with you all. For instance, everyone has problems, but the best thing we can do is forget our troubles and focus on someone else’s struggle. I put every ounce of my life’s power into that prayer in the hospital room. Energy loss was so great I felt weakness like I’ve never felt it before, even after September 94.

I read somewhere that pain is inevitable, but misery is optional. That’s a tough thing to live up to.

Yet, all my friends here on Medium stopped focusing on their troubles for a moment and came to hug me. I needed every one of them.

God is good. No matter how much you give of yourself.

So, I’m here to tell you, my friends, thank you. Evie is a treasure of health a bundle of smiles. I have my granddaughter back.

Love and happiness are like peanut butter. When you spread them around, you can’t help but get some on yourself!

I hope you feel so sticky, you need a fucking good shower!

Thank you with all my heart.

Harry

Image: Author — Evie with brother Camden

Please Read this by Lu Skerdoo 💕

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Friendship

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