... a walk in the park

Today, we decided to go to our local park, to walk the dog and also feed the squirrels, my wife's favorite activity. She's an animal lover and even made a bird feeder, which she hangs at the rear of our apartment building, the the birdies. One day, a peacock showed up and helped himself. There were some squirrels in the area, living in the huge tree that sits in the middle of an empty field behind our place. So, they were raiding the bird feeder.

So, my wife took an old plastic water bottle, cut a big hole and put peanuts into it for the squirrels, so we have a bird feeer and a squirrel feeder.

anyway, so we went to this park, where there are many squirrels. She had a bag of peanuts in the car, slightly aged. So, as we walked through the park, the dog sniffing and digging in the layer of pine needels that covered the ground. She would grab some peanuts and drop them at the base of one or two trees.

The squirrels scurried down and took some. The dog barked. There was a gentle breeze. My hearing aid is broken at the moment, so the volume is very low, but I could hear the sound of sirens as police cars and fire trucks rushed by on the way to somewhere, Code-3, lights and siren blaring.

As we walked around, my wife grew agitated. She told me, there were strange people in the park (all this in sign language), I respondend, "What made them strange?" She did the sign for sick and tapped the side of her head.

Yes, acrooss the street there was a halfway house for those who were mentally ill. At that time of the day, a group of them were in the park. They weren't bothering us, we were quite a distance away.

She signed that one woman, her pants were off. I asked her if she had underwear on, and she shook her head. So, there was a woman running around naked from the waist down. I didn't look, and I couldn't see that well anyway. She wanted to go. Her facial expression was distraught, she shielded her eyes as from a bright light, and looked away. "Let's go now," She said, so we cut our park sojourn short.

There are two types of mentally ill people I've found: those who are obviously ill; the other have managed to keep it covered up, making it through life appearing a little eccentric., they don't readily admit that they have problems, they sometimes deny it. But, they get by.

There is a future, Isaish 33:24 says, where no one will be sick. That is such an amazing hope, that even those who end up homeless because of their mental state, or they're dealing with schizophrenia, multiple personalities, manic depression, mania, psychosis will be cured. it will be a thing of the past. None of that will exist under God's wonderful Kingdom. If you or someone you know and love is dealing with mental illness, there is hope. And it isn't a plethora of drugs, it's true healing by Jesus Christ, our Lord amd King.