Journey to Fulfillment by Theresa Franklin

Join Author, Theresa Franklin, in her tender and delightful memoir, Journey to Fulfillment, as she shares her life experiences that have molded her character into the woman God intended her to be. Theresa, honestly and brazenly discusses heartaches, tragedies and triumphs from childhood through adulthood. With an open and compassionate heart, the Author lays bare the adversity she has faced through life to include the loss of her first love to marrying and the challenges one can face in being a wife and a mother, and notably her struggles in teaching special needs children. Throughout all, there has been one constant in her life, the unconditional love of her Savior, Jesus Christ.

Gain the proper perspective in regards to your life and glean from Theresa Franklin’s many years of experience as a Director of Special Education to discover your destiny in life and find fulfillment by transforming the adversities and hardships of your life into stepping stones that will lead you to a life well lived through Christ. This book will help you find the fulfillment you are searching for as your reflect on your upbringing and causes one to re-evaluate what is really most important in life, regardless of circumstances. Her desire is to see others find their fulfillment in life through Christ and she writes, “May God show you the stepping stones in your life.”

Find encouragement, guidance and strength for your soul within the pages of Journey to Fulfillment, and turn life’s stumbling blocks into stepping-stones to transform your own journey into a life well lived and a completely fulfilled life in Christ.

Excerpt

The Building Blocks
Forrest Gump’s mother likened life to a box of chocolates. A more appropriate analogy may be life is like a potluck dinner. Everyone brings what they have to the table. No one can be expected to bring something they don’t possess. Likewise, parents bring what they have to give to their children. Most everyone has issues with their parents’ skills and are careful not to repeat the mistakes. The majority of parents feel pretty smug about their parenting skills until their own children are grown. Although they have no children of their own, in their twenties the offspring begin to share their vast knowledge with the parents, careful to point out each parenting mistake made during their childhood. It is not until the cycle of life is complete that these enlightened ones learn that they made just as many mistakes with their children as did their own parents. Being sixteen and nineteen years of age at the time of my birth, my parents had little to bring to the table.

Their ages alone were enough of a stumbling block. My dad’s mother was fond of telling the story of how he rocked me to sleep by moving my cradle back and forth with his foot as he sat reading a comic book. My dad liked to tell the story of my mother getting angry with him and going for a walk. This sounded like a good plan, but she would walk until she was no longer angry and unfortunately too tired to walk back home. She would call the house, and he would go get her. They were typical teenagers trying to survive in an adult world.

My parents were born during the depression and grew up amidst World War II. Both dropped out of school in the tenth grade and both lacked parental guidance as children. They too determined not to make the same mistakes their parents had made. My mother’s parents were alcoholics. Research shows that scars last a lifetime for children of alcoholics. Even as adults, children of alcoholics have difficulty trusting others.

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As a child, my mother remembers being sent to the movies on Saturday morning and returning to find broken beer bottles littering the floor. She knew that her parents had been fighting. When she was about seven years old, her dad left the family, and she did not see or hear from him again until she was forty-one years old. At that time, her youngest sister was working evenings as a telephone operator. When she was not busy, she used the time to search for their dad. He had made no effort to get in touch with the family. My grandmother had raised the five children alone during war times. She worked six days a week. On Sunday, she sent the children to church, cleaned the house, and cooked a large dinner. During the week while she worked, the children did chores around the house after school. As a single mother, my grandmother had little time for reading stories to the children or being involved in their education. It took all her effort just to feed them. Thus my mother and her siblings grew up with little emotional support.

Similarly my father grew up with very little supervision from his parents. His father was employed by the railroad, which required him to work different shifts. His schedule was eight hours on the job, then off for twenty-four hours and this daunting schedule never waivered. The cycle meant that if he worked during the day on Monday, he worked evenings on Tuesday, and the graveyard shift on Wednesday. He was often working when the children were not in school. My grandfather was considerably older than my grandmother. The difference in age led to incompatible value systems.

Even in today’s world, my father’s mother would be considered a wild woman. She liked the bars and saw no problem with leaving the children unattended while she visited her hangouts. Stories are told of her being gone for two or three days at a time. My grandfather would care for the children and work his job. Eventually someone would go by the house and tell him where to find his wife, and he would go get her. The episodes could have been considered the modern day story of Gomer and Hosea from the Bible.