Innocence, Adversity, and Enlightenment

By Terry B. Simmons

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My early childhood life of innocence began while growing up on a tenant farm in a rural are. The farm work itself was very labor intensive and usually had daylight-to-dark responsibilities.

That early lifestyle was really a time of secure innocence. However, when I was about twelve years old, that security began to change when I began experiencing a life-changing adversity. I began having seizures. Those dark and dreadful episodes periodically occurred for decades. Because of them, I experienced processes of losing my innocence. As a result, my life developed into an ever-growing sense of shame, humiliation, isolation, and a declining sense of self-worth. The emotional pain and adverse events resulting from those seizures continued for many years. I wanted to be like others, but I couldn’t!

After several years of those troubling experiences, I came to the realization that while I couldn’t change the realities of my life, I could attempt to alter myself in other ways. The years of successfully developing those alterations required several processes that resulted in a transformation of enlightenment and fulfillment of my life, which ultimately led to a tremendous professional career. As a result of having experienced those life-changing processes, I now have a spirit of thanksgiving in my heart, along with peace, joy, contentment, and a wonderful sense of self-worth—the most enlightening experience of my life on this earth will further lead to the ultimate fulfillment of eternal life on the New Earth described in the Bible.

Adversity can result from experiencing difficulties related to health, socio-economic disadvantages, addictions, and other personally damaging issues. However, don’t let yourself succumb to any measure of adversity! You don’t have to have a perfect body nor do you have to be born into a life of privilege to develop areas of improvement in your life. Begin anew!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098031602

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Innocence, Adversity, and Enlightenment

Terry B. Simmons

ISBN 978-1-0980-3159-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-0980-3160-2 (digital)

Copyright © 2020 by Terry B. Simmons

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

An Early Lifestyle of Innocence

Raising Tobacco: Reality and Wonder

A Darkening Storm of Life

Learning, Belittlement, and Adapting

From Euphoria to Despair

Dawning of a New Era

A Special Horizon of Enlightenment

A New Beginning: The Practice of Architecture

Born Again: The Ultimate Decision of Enlightenment

Eternal Life

Prologue

Lives of hardship and adversity can often be transformed into lives of peace and everlasting beauty. You really don’t have to have a perfect body, nor do you have to be born into a life of privilege, to achieve a determined improvement in your life. To triumph over adversities, such as physical impairment, addictions and socioeconomic disadvantages, can be some of the most fulfilling and life-changing events we can experience. It is my hope that readers will be encouraged to achieve goals of overcoming obstacles, enhanced perceptions of self-worth, growth through adversity, and the importance of decisions and determination, studied opinions, the joy and peace of salvation, and other horizons of new life experiences.

Some of the challenges I have experienced were often used as a foundation for making life-changing decisions—including an everlasting life decision—and strengthened determinations that grew from those decisions. Those experiences came as a result of crossing over the horizons of life into the fields of opportunities beyond. Remember, when passing over some of life’s difficult horizons that might seem to be a descent into valleys of disappointment, you should always continue your journey with renewed determination to go beyond those valleys and toward the wonderful horizons beyond!

When walking through the valleys of shadows, remember, a shadow is cast by a light.

—Author unknown

The innocence of standing in our yard with one of our farm’s ducks

During the childhood years of innocence experienced during my sharecropping farm-boy life, I had the fulfilling experiences of being nurtured by hardworking parents. Even though today they would be regarded as economically disadvantaged, they provided loving care, sustenance, shelter, the demonstrated necessities of responsibility, and other essentials of a stable lifestyle. At the onset of my teen years, however, I began to experience episodes of seizures—a scourge that remained with me for many decades. For many years thereafter, particularly during my high school and early-adult years, they resulted in disappointment, declining self-value, low self-esteem, shame, a sense of social isolation from some of my peers (but never my family), depression, termination of—and exclusion from—employment, and other adversities. I wanted to be like other people but instead developed a measure of dispiriting self-pity because I felt that I had to endure conditions that others didn’t have to deal with. I wanted to be like them but couldn’t!

When I later came to terms with the realities of my life, I began an ongoing process of putting aside any concerns about what others may have thought of me and focused on the subsequent development (alteration) of my life. I no longer cared about being like others.

That development set me free from a past that I could not otherwise change because it resulted in a new reality of self-directed emphasis by pursuing self-directed goals. (As William Shakespeare once wrote, Sweet are the uses of adversity.) Those goals did not include any considerations about enhancing myself in the eyes of others nor patterning myself in the mold of others nor