Lozza, I am sorry to hear about your brother. My grandfather died in 2000 amidst mental turmoil and confusion. The year before I had visited a oneness pentecostal church which sent me over the edge. After the oneness episode I decided that something was seriously wrong and stayed away from all churches for five years until I started dating my wife in early 2005. Her church is what I consider "quasi-pentecostal". There is no fixation on "standards" or baptisms in water or the Holy Spirit and nobody sticks their noses in your personal life. For the most part, the members seem level-headed. They do that irritating style of preaching-aaah sometimes but it's never about hell fire and damnation. Personally, I go for the community because I am a home-body. Its the only other place I mingle with people besides work.

I was never a person to relax at a bar (or even drink alcohol) because I don't like that type of atmosphere -- though banned smoking probably makes it more endurable. The tendency for them to become "meat markets", to play loud music, and the general way drunk people act is enough to keep me far away. I would rather a quiet weekend with the wife either watching a movie, reading a book, or eating at a restaurant. Before being married, my two older brothers (I am the third of four kids and was the youngest for eight years until my sister came along) liked the club/drinking scene but I never did. I'm not quite sure why that is.

Yours,




"...above all things, lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful, to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, courageous, &c. Consider every act of this kind, as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties & increase your worth." 

Thomas Jefferson