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Daily Prompt: “Mountaintops and Valleys” – Describe a time when you quickly switched from feeling at the top of the world to sinking all the way down (or vice versa). Did you learn anything about yourself in the process?

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My wife had left me, with our tiny son
Just three years old, bewildered by it all;
I shaped my life for his security,
To give a pattern to his days. That fall,

The leaves sang everywhere of fading things;
And I was grieved at how my dreams had died:
I lived to give my child all I could,
But I was down and lonely, and my pride

Had lashed me many times for my own faults.
They’re myriad: back then, and frankly, now –
I had a life to lead, a child to raise,
I wasn’t sure then, just exactly how

We’d manage, but I knew it must be so.
A routine, then, we set, not just to roam:
We’d go to church on Sunday mornings now,
We’d find a place where could feel at home.

And when we walked in, there beside the door,
A lovely woman stood I barely knew,
Whose journey with three daughters brought her there
And as we spoke, the moments fairly flew —

For though I could not know it at the time,
I’d walked, within the shadow, to that place
That’d lead me to the mountaintop at last:
The love I’d never known, there, in that face —

So many moments go by unrecalled –
But those that matter? Beyond reckoning,
They shape the very contours of our hearts:
The valley left
The mountains
Beckoning