| Never Surrender your Soul Foreward Brian Good is a self-made man. He has lived a life buffeted by character-altering hurricanes. His life storms began with his birth into a low-income family of eight children overshadowed by a now sober alcoholic mother and a father with a violent bi-polar personality. He has survived childhood verbal and physical abuse, the death of two siblings, the stigma of being homeless not once but six times, bankrupt two times, diagnosed with a six pound cancer that was doubling every two months, his suicide attempt in 2003, the death of his best friend, three divorces and the rejection of his only daughter. Psychics and people of faith say that we all come back, and some of us come back to teach a lesson. The homeless person on the street has sacrificed this life to hopefully teach compassion and tolerance to others. The homeless person, if he or she would know this, might ask, why should I try to improve my life if I came back to suffer to teach this lesson? The answer is that if one is spiritual, the suffering is only part of the lesson. The most important part is to overcome. We must examine our flaws and try to fix them. How can one man encounter so many hurricanes, survive them, learn from them and then strive to make the world around him a better place? Through his experiences Brian has gleaned many pearls of wisdom from his hurricanes. Without these pearls of wisdom, Brian feels his hurricanes would have devastated him. He hopes that you too will find wisdom in these pearls that have washed ashore as a result of his hurricanes and count yourself a survivor.One of Brian's favorite quotes comes from Helen Keller, a woman whose life, like Brian's, taught her the definition of overcoming life's hurricanes. "Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it." -Helen Keller |
