Believe. Believe in your destiny and the star from which it shines. Believe you have been sent from God as an arrow pulled from his own bow.
It is the single universal trait which the great of this earth have all shared, while the shadows are fraught with ghosts who roam the winds with mournful wails of regret on their lips.
Believe as if your life depended upon it. For indeed it does.
THE LOCKET
AT SOME POINT EVERY one of my siblings received a blessing from my grandfather. They were not all healing blessings, as had been my brother’s; rather they were similar to the kind written about in the Old Testament, as when Isaac blessed his son Jacob. Every blessing given to us was unique and spoke to us individually of the journey we would walk on this earth. Most of my grandfather’s blessings were counsels on how to live righteously, though portions were prophetic of the challenges and opportunities that would come to us.
One afternoon, shortly after I had turned twelve, I went with my parents to my grandfather’s house. After talking with me for a short while, my grandfather laid his hands on my head and began to speak. Among the many words of his blessing he told me that someday I would “walk with the royalty of this earth and be known as one who loves God.”
As we left his house I asked my mother, “Does that mean I’m going to be famous?”
I sensed that my mother was not pleased with what I had taken from the blessing. “You must not talk of such things. What Grandpa told you was sacred.”
The blessing had been recorded on my grandfather’s old reel-to-reel tape recorder and was later transcribed by my grandmother and given to me. I pasted it inside the cover of one of my journals.
It was odd to me that I would be given such a promise, and though it had left me with a pervasive sense of destiny, it was, I suppose, without faith. I was too unlikely. I spent most of my childhood alone. Outside of my brothers, I had few close friends. I had chronic acne, severely cowlicked hair and nervous tics that amused or annoyed the other children at school. I struggled constantly with feelings of inadequacy. Such a destiny belonged to someone else. Someone, at least, with clear skin.
