If you’ve read my books or followed my blog, you can agree that there just seems to be no end to the dumb stuff I did growing up, but you may be surprised when you read the latest dumb thing I’ve done as an adult.
When I was younger, I was very impressionable. If I saw somebody do something I thought was amazing, whether it was in person or on TV, I would try it. I guess you could say I was a daredevil. I did many things I should never have done, like climbing on top of our twelve-foot-tall mobile home and jumping off. Of course, it hurt my legs and hips, but not bad enough to keep me from jumping out of the ten-foot loft in the gym at school. I loved climbing trees, too. I would climb as high as I could possibly go until the limbs were too small to go any higher.
Pretending to be Spider-Man, I once climbed up the side to the top of a tall stack of wood at the pallet factory and had a hard time figuring out how to get back down without calling for an adult for help.
I always liked running and jumping over things, so when I got a bicycle, I started building ramps and jumping them. I’ve made some jumps that I thought were amazing at the time, but I’ve also had some serious wrecks. I never broke a bone, but I’ve had some serious scrapes, bruises, and sprained body parts, and I’ve lost a lot of blood.
One time, I made a ramp in our graveled driveway using an old piece of firewood and two flat boards placed side by side. When I hit the ramp, the front wheel went between the two boards, pushing them aside and hitting the log. I flipped over the handlebars and onto the gravel as the bike flipped over on me. The back wheel was bent beyond repair, and the bike was messed up pretty bad. One of my shoes was torn off my foot, and I was in a lot of pain for a while.
Another time, I had built my own bike, piece by piece. I bought an old frame from my uncle. I cleaned it up, and painted it, then Uncle Charles took a 3-speed rear end from a bigger bike and changed the spokes to make it fit my 20-inch wheel. I bought new pedals, a new fancy handlebar holder, and handlebar grips. It was a nice bike and I was proud of it. My cousin Timmy helped me build a nice ramp inside a big metal building where our landlord ran a Coke crate repair shop. It had a concrete floor, but the parking lot was gravel. That’ll be important later in the story.
So we lined up several wooden Coke crates in a row. The ones that held twelve or sixteen bottles. I jumped those with ease, so we kept adding more crates, one at a time. We added another, then another, then another. I successfully jumped over eighteen Coke crates, so we added another. I went outside again to get a good running go as I had done the last twenty or so times. I started paddling as fast as I could down the gravel drive. I hit the ramp and sailed through the air like Evel Knievel, but the back wheel of my bike hit the edge of that nineteenth crate, and I wiped out like Evel Knievel did that time at Madison Square Garden in New York. I slid for what seemed like a mile on the concrete floor which had gravel speckled all over it from the parking lot. It tore up my pants, my leg, my hip, and my thigh. It was awful. It took a good while to recover from that one.
Another time, I was on a dune buggy trying to be funny because my friends were watching me from a distance. I drove up to the top of a steep hill and was going to make them think I was going over. I was planning to put on the brakes and stop just short of the edge. Well, when I was almost to the edge, I pressed the brake, but thanks to the rusty floor of that old Volkswagen that the brake cylinder was attached to, the brake pedal bolts pulled through the thin metal frame. I had no breaks, so off the top of the cliff, I went. When I hit the bottom, my ribs felt like they touched my pelvic bones, and that was some kind of pain.
I learned many lessons growing up. I learned not to do the same dumb things again. It’s easy to learn what not to do after we’ve hurt ourselves doing it, but that doesn’t mean we won’t do a different dumb thing later. Let me give you a good example.
It’s been over 30 years since that bicycle, and the dune buggy incidents, but two months ago, I was having a problem with my van. While I was working on it, I noticed one of the battery cable ends was still the same one that was there when I got the van several years back. I had replaced the other one a year or so ago, but there was a problem that I couldn’t overcome at the time in order to replace both of them.
There was a metal plate with a hole in it attached to the battery cables, and the new battery cable ends have a bolt that goes through the hole to attach the battery cable to the battery cable end which goes onto the battery. Well, the hole in the metal plate on the ground wire was not big enough for the new cable end to fit. I tried to make the hole bigger with a file when I replaced the other one, but it must be some kind of composite metal because it’s really hard and tough. This time, I decided to use a drill with a metal bit to make the hole bigger.
The cable was attached to the starter, so I couldn’t take it off and lay it on a table to drill it out, but it was just long enough to reach the battery, so I got a piece of wood and laid it on my battery, then put the metal plate on the wood and tried to drill it out, but that wasn’t working. I was afraid it might slip off, and drill a hole in my new battery, so I decided I could hold the cable in my hand and slowly drill the hole out. Talk about dumb; I knew that was dangerous I knew it could slip off and maybe hit my finger or something, but I did it anyway, thinking I had it under control. I just wanted to get it done.
As soon as I started to drill, the metal bit grabbed the metal plate and hung in the hole. It twisted the cable around my left hand and pulled the drill bit into the nail of my index finger. It happened so fast before I could even think to let off the trigger, but at the same time, it seemed like slow motion as I watched the end of my finger being twisted, and cut off by the drill bit. The cable wrapped around my hand and fingers so tightly that it bruised my hand and even bent that straight piece of hard metal.
When I got my hand, and finger unwrapped from the wire and the drill bit, I saw the end of my finger twisted and mangled, and hanging off. I took my grease rag and grabbed my fingertip to put it back in place, and then I started running to the house to tell my wife I needed to go to the emergency room. As I ran, I heard myself screaming really loud and long. I screamed so loud that my throat hurt for a few days afterward. Now, two months later, my finger is still healing, and I’m reminded every day not to do anything like that again. But who knows what life has in store for tomorrow.
In the famous words of Forrest Gump, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” We can make plans, and complete them, sometimes, but we never really have full control of our lives. We don’t know what the outcome will really be anytime we set out to do something.
I said all that to say this; We do dumb stuff, and we learn from it, but that doesn’t mean we won’t do a different dumb thing later. We need to use discernment and determine that we won’t do anything dangerous without the proper equipment, and the proper training, and without asking God for wisdom and protection first. So pray. Believe and trust God. One day that could be the difference between life and death for any of us here on earth, and it will be the difference between life and death in eternity.
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