I’ve had many scrapes, cuts, and bruises over the years, and they all hurt. Many of them left scars, so it’s not hard to remember them. There were a few incidents that were kind of related, at least to a certain part of my body; A very sensitive part that causes severe pain when damaged. I’ve been hurt there many times over the years, but I’m only going to tell you about three of them today. I’ll say this, and I sincerely mean it; As many times as I’ve been hurt there, I’m surprised I was able to have children.
When I was about 12 years old, we lived directly behind one of the neighborhood stores in the small town of Theo, Mississippi. The store owner’s son was one of my friends. Sometimes he would get off the bus at the store, and stay there with his dad until closing. Many times he would come and stay at my house until just before his dad got ready to lock up. One of those times, as he was leaving, it was just before dark. I was outside talking with him as he walked backward toward the store. For some reason, he decided to throw a rock in my direction. We had been playing with the basketball, and I was about to take it into the house with me. As he threw another rock, I ran to where it was headed and let it bounce off the ball. He threw a few more a bit higher, and I intercepted each of them with the ball to see how far I could bounce them.
Then it happened. I missed the rock, but the rock didn’t miss me. It hit me right in the midsection. I dropped the ball and hobbled into the house crying so hard I could barely see. I crawled onto my grandmother’s bed and curled up in agony. I was in a lot of pain. I lay there for what seemed like forever, then I guess I finally went to sleep. When I woke up, I was a little better, but I was still hurting the next day. For a long time after that, I would have sporadic pains there that would remind me of that day. Needless to say, I never tried that again.
A few years earlier, a girl at school kicked me there for no reason. I guess she had a reason but it was nothing I did. Our teacher saw what happened and asked her why she would do that. She said she meant to kick me on the thigh, but she never said why she wanted to kick me in the first place. The teacher made her apologize, but that didn’t stop the pain.
When I was 23, I was working at a pallet factory. I was running the notcher, which is a machine that puts the holes in the 2x4s for the forklift tines or a pallet jack to slide in and lift the pallet from the side. The process involved placing three 2x4s in the machine, pushing them back into position against the fence, flipping a switch to bring the top part down to clamp the wood, and holding it in the machine while the notching head came down with a million teeth spinning at a very high speed. The operator controls how fast the head moves downward, so the faster you bring the head down, the more 2x4s you can notch, and the more 2x4s you notch, the faster you can finish the job, so I was going as fast as possible.
Then, the cutter head hit a knot and shattered all three 2x4s. the end of one of them flew out and hit me there very hard. It hurt very, very bad, and made a bruise there, and on the inside of my thigh that took more than a week to go away, and there was severe swelling in my privates.
When I was young, my grandmother and my aunt told me that I may not be able to have children if I kept damaging myself there, and I believed them, but God took care of me, and I now have three wonderful children and three grandchildren. I love them all very, much. I’m truly blessed.
In many places in the Bible, we are told that children are a blessing. Psalm 127 says that children are a heritage of the Lord and a reward. They’re like arrows in the hand of a mighty man, and a man who has his quiver full of them is happy.
People don’t always see children as a blessing though. I know I didn’t always. That’s because humans are selfish. Too many children are being neglected and mistreated in our world today. It’s sad that so many people see children as an inconvenience. So much so that they will kill them before they are born and many want to be able to lawfully kill them even after they are born. God has always condemned the nations that killed children and he’s not going to stand by and let our nation keep killing babies without judgment.
I pray that the people of our world will begin to see life as something to be cherished, protected, and preserved instead of something meaningless and worthless. We need to love and protect children and see them as God does. After all, children are the future of our world.
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