The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. (6:26)

My father died a soldier's death overseas before I was even in school. My mother was sick – the cancer came back again, and the doctor's said they didn't know if she had the strength to fight it off a third time. I barely managed to graduate from the Training Center, meaning that I barely managed to become a deputy at all. I had long resigned myself to the fact that there was no way that I was going to get the job that I had always dreamed of having as a little kid – I had wanted to become a Marine, to follow in the footsteps of the deceased father that I couldn't even remember. I wasn't even very good at the job that I had managed to get, although my partner, Adam Mitchell, and the two others that we worked with, Nathan Hayes and David Thomson, never said so.

The point was my life up to that point had pretty much turned out to be one big, major, unfairly hard disappointment. At only nineteen, I, the pretty much pathetic Bobby Shaw, had been ready to give up. And not just in the way that meant I would become sullen and depressed – I was already at that point – but in a big way.

Suicide. I was eighteen the first time the thought crossed my mind – the day the results of my physical told me that there was no way I would be getting into the Marines, or even the army. During the next year, the thought had kept reappearing at the particularly low points of my life. When I failed my first class at the Training Center. When Mom told me the cancer was back – and if I hadn't known that my death would've been the end of her, I really would have done it that time.

But somehow I got the feeling that my life was going to start turning around when I was first introduced to Adam Mitchell. I didn't know how – and I certainly didn't expect it to happen the way it did – but I just had the feeling that life was going to start getting better for me. And it did.

In Adam I found a confidant, a friend, and the father-figure that I had never before had. I told him about my father's death and my mother's cancer. He had prayed for her and for me right then and there and I had bowed my head and went along with him, though at the time I hadn't put much stock in religion of any sort, let alone the thought that there was a caring God somewhere who cared about my problems.

A year later though, after an extended amount of time around the Mitchells, the Hayes, the Martinez's, and the Thomson's, I found myself believing what they said about God and Christianity. That summer I took the LORD Jesus Christ as my Savior. From there on out, my life was so much better.

And it became even greater when I was able to see the day that my mother was saved as well. When she finally lost her ongoing battle with the cancer two months later, I grieved, as anyone would when they lose their parent, but I found a measure of comfort in the fact that I would see her again when I reached Heaven, and in the fact that she was already there with Jesus.

Now, with the LORD and the sheriff's deputies on my side, I was no longer suicidal. I was even at peace when things came my way because I knew that between my God and my friends, I would make it through whatever might come up in my life.

Another person in our four-guys-and-their-families group who has made my life so much better is Jade Hayes. Don't ask me how it happened, or how she lost her very smart mind long enough for it to happen, because I'm not really sure, but she and I began to date when she turned seventeen. And after four years of dating, we got married. She's everything to me now, odd couple that I know we make – Nathan was sure to point out numerous times while we were dating that he had never seen us as a couple coming. But it works, and it works well, if I may say so myself. I've never been happier.

I'm not much for writing, but I decided that I wanted to write this down today for you while I was thinking about it, realizing how far I had come over the past eight years. I think that maybe in ten years or so I'll show it to you. I'll tell you how Jade and I laughed until we cried yesterday when she told me she was expecting you. How much my mother would have loved to meet you. By then I'll be able to tell you how Adam, Victoria, the Hayes, and everyone else reacted when we told them that you were coming. I'll be able to tell you how proud I am that you're like your mother, or how sorry I am that you got my nose. I'll be able to tell you what it felt like to sign the same Resolution that the others in our group have. I'll tell you how impatient I was to meet you as I sat here writing this. I'll tell you how very much I love you already, little child of mine.

Love,

Daddy

Okay, I would like you to know that the last two paragraphs of this story appeared quite on their own somehow, I had no intention of writing them when I sat down to do this story, but, you know, fluffy me, I rather like it. Anyway, this is the only chapter of the story for the book of the Bible "Numbers," and is also the first piece written about Bobby Shaw (although there was that one piece that I wrote a chapter of and then deleted...) Anyway, R&Ring is appreciated; thanks!:)