God
Speaks
During
High School, I attended a Mormon Church with my best friend one
Sunday a month in order to
play
on their basketball team during the fall. We played every Saturday
during the season and I would
attend
their teen dances on some Friday and Saturday nights when they had
them. I also attended
Catholic
services in order to appease the parents of the girl that I was
dating at the time. I was going
through
the strokes of attending Churches for the wrong reasons.
Soon
after High School I joined the Army. I left the MEPS building in
Atlanta, Georgia and
headed
a few miles down I-20 to Anniston, Alabama were I would do basic
training at Fort McClellan.
Basic
training was a piece of cake for me and since I was in great shape
from being active and
playing
sports outside all my life. I could already pass the Army's PT test.
I was a running, sit-up and
push-up
machine. I was Army hardcore from the get go. Plus I was in ROTC for
3 years in high school
and
I had the drill and ceremony down pat.
I
went in under weight and that meant I could eat in the hamburger line
and enjoy some fried
fatty
foods, unlike those who came in over weight and they had to eat from
the salad line.
The
hardest part I must say was the restrictions on candy and sweets.
Every Sunday after
chapel,
they would let us walk up to the PX and Luden cough drops were on top
of everyone’s list and
provided
temporary relieve to everyone's sweet tooth.
If
we attended Chapel, we would get a chance to leave the barracks and
get out of some extra
duty.
Anything to get a break from polishing brass, shoes, cleaning and
waxing the floors. I again
attended
Chapel on Sunday's for the wrong reason.
My
military experience was overall a good one. It put me in historical
places at historical times.
This
is probably were my interest in History comes from.
After
the military, I moved back to my home town and lived again with my
mom for a short
while.
I lived in a mid-sized town.
For
a High School kid and for young twenty somethings, the only thing to
do for entertainment
was
to cruise the town's main strip. Listening to the radio, cassette
tapes and circling around and around
on
the 5 mile main thoroughfare for hours on end and occasionally
stopping at the closed businesses
where
everyone would loiter.
One
Friday I had been riding the county back roads with a friend on a
motorcycle without my
helmet.
It was a beautiful spring day, not a cloud in the sky. That night
when the cruise strip was the
busiest,
I was going to go back through town one last time before I headed
home to see who was there.
Heading
in from the county back into the city limits, I came to the first red
light and decided to
put
my helmet on, just in case law enforcement seen me.
The
next intersection was the beginning of the cruise strip where
everyone would do a U-Turn
and
continue cruising. How would I know this is where God would try to
wake me up.
As
I approached this intersection, halfway from the red light, I noticed
it turned green. I was the
only
traffic approaching from the previous block. I gave the motorcycle a
little more gas and got at a
cruising
speed of around 45 miles per hour.
A
young kid was approaching my direction and decided to turn to his
left, he didn't see me and
we
met head on in the middle of my lane. I hit him dead center and my
motorcycle acted as a catapult
and
launched me over 5 lanes of traffic onto a side walk in front of a
Church.
I
landed on my back and everything happened very quickly.
I
got up without hesitation and there was a small pick-up truck right
beside me with 3 in front
and
a couple of High School kids in back.. They said, “Get in! Get in!
We'll take you to the emergency
room!”.
I got in all dazed and confused from what just happened. They drove
me the 5 or so blocks to
the
hospital.
As
I was there some people who witnessed the wreck came to see how I was
doing and when word got out among the cruise strip, some of my
friends and some strangers came to check on me.
The
Police showed up to take a police report of the accident. They were
amazed that I was
uninjured.
One brought my helmet in for me to see and the back of it was crushed
like an egg shell that
had
been dropped on a concrete floor.
For
the guy who hit me, he didn't fare so well his car looked like he had
hit a telephone pole and
he
had hit his face to the wind shield of his car and required stitches
from between his eyes to just
below
his left cheek. I had won that fight.
For
days that is all people talked about and I really didn't give the
Church that I landed in front
of
a second thought. I knew a few friends from my childhood who attended
there, but I thought that
Church
was for just little rich kids. But the memory of the accident stayed
with me until I got married
and
started having children of my own.
Within
a few months of that accident, I met my wife. We had four children.
God started talking to me!
When
my youngest daughter was a toddler around the age of three, she would
play in her room.
She
would often run into the living room or the bedroom where my wife or
myself would be and be all
excited
about the “Bird Man”. She would say the “Bird Man! The Bird
Man!”, all excited and pointing
to
her room. We would go and check her room and never saw anything and
passed it off as the vivid
imagination
of a child and really never gave a second thought about it.
Her
room she shared with her brother at the time and had a bunk bed, TV,
Book shelf and a toy
box.
One evening while everyone was gathered in the bedroom and sitting on
the bottom bunk
watching
some kids show on TV. My daughter got all excited and started
pointing to the top bunk
screaming,
“The Bird Man! The Bird Man!” No one else seen The Bird Man
except for her. But at that
moment
I thought, “This must be her guardian angel”. How else would a
toddler describe an Angel. A
man
with wings.
My
daughter does not remember that time but it's something that I
remember like it was
yesterday
and probably will never forget.
When
the time came to put our children in kindergarten, I didn't forget
the Church were I had
landed
and enrolled them there. My wife and I along with our children
started to attend services on
Sunday's
and Wednesday’s. After a short while I accepted The Christ Jesus
and was Baptized.
A
few weeks after my Baptism, I was getting ready for bed, my wife had
already fallen asleep.
As
I was getting into bed, I had a vision of Christ Jesus. I was fixated
on His face and His garment was
the
most amazing white and through my peripheral vision I saw Angels
swirling all around. As I was
looking
at His face, He placed His right hand out and I put my right hand
into His and immediately
went
back to be fixated on His face. I did not notice any of His wounds.
As
I was holding His right hand, He began to speak. But not with His
mouth. He told me,
“Whatever
happens, Everything is going to be alright”. Then as fast as He
appeared, He was gone
again.
Immediately
after it had happened, I tried to wake my wife and tell her my
experience and she
would
not wake, she would grumble and moan as to leave me alone I'm asleep.
I tried to put meaning
to
it. Was it real? What did He mean? Why me? Should I tell someone? Am
I crazy?
After
a few weeks I decided to tell someone in my Church. The first person
gave me a crazy
look.
The second was my Pastor's wife and she thought it was amazing. But
deep down I thought she
thought
I was crazy too. So, I went years without telling anyone.
I
think of the experience with Christ Jesus every day of my life since
then. I've often wondered
if
it was a trick of the mind. But the experience was all too real.
Before
the experience I had trouble understanding the Bible and after my
experience, when I
read
the Bible it seemed to come alive. I went on to teach Childrens
Sunday School mostly older
elementary
kids from the grades 4th -6th. I wanted to
teach that age because I wanted to know about the
Bible
and that was the perfect opportunity to learn and teach from the over
flow.
But
believe it not, that's not the end of God's hand in my life. When my
wife and I lived in
Georgia
and her family lived in Alabama about 3 hours away. As every year,
the week before
Christmas,
Her family would have their Christmas party.
As
they do every year, they would gather all the children and some of
the females would read
the
story about the Birth of Jesus, while the men gather and talked about
work, hunting and other things
guys
talk about. (This particular year I was unable to attend because I
worked nights and weekends).
Soon
as the Story of Jesus' Birth had gotten over with, the tornado sirens
went off. They gathered
everyone
into the basement. They did not know that they were in the tornado's
path.
I
was in Georgia and had no idea what was going on until I got a call
from My sister-in-law who
said,
“Everyone is O'kay!”. I said, “What happened?”. She said, “We
were in a tornado!”. She seemed
frantic
and out of breath.
As
everything became more clearer, the tornado had destroyed the house
behind them and
momentarily
lifted as it past over the house with around thirty to forty members
of the family and set
down
again and destroyed the house across the street.
It
overwhelmed me and I began to cry and gave thanks to God for
protecting my family.
Coincidence? I do
not think so.
No comments:
Post a Comment