THE DUNE BUGGY, THE BICYCLE, AND THE DRILL

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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LEARNING LESSONS FROM A FORD

I've told you about my first, second, and fourth cars. There’s not much to tell about my third one but I’ll share what I remember with you anyway. I was between jobs at the time and didn't have much money, so I was excited when my uncle told me I could get a car for fifty dollars. Fifty dollars! Wow! That may seem like a very small amount of money now but back then you could get a good used car from an individual between three hundred and five hundred dollars.

This car didn’t run, of course, but my uncle worked on cars all the time and he said he would get it running for me. The man who owned the car said he didn’t really know what was wrong with it. It just died one day and wouldn’t start back. I wanted it so bad that I gave him the money before I even looked at it.

I don’t remember a lot about the car. I have a picture in my mind but there’s just not much detail there. I remember my uncle taking me to get it. I remember that it was white, and I think it was a Ford. It had been sitting in an overgrown field for several years, so the paint was faded and the tires were flat.

We figured we might have to tow it to my uncle’s house so he could work on it but he wanted to see if it would start first. He raised the hood and put a battery on and hooked up the wires. After we knocked off a few mud dauber nests, he poured a little gas into the carburetor to prime it. Then I got in the car and put the key in the ignition and turned it over. It started so I kept trying.

Finally, after several tries, my uncle said, “Woah! It ain’t gonna crank, boys. There’s a hole in the motor the size of my fist. Come and look.” With my shoulders drooping from disappointment, I stepped out of the driver’s seat to take a look. Sure enough, there was a big hole in the motor on the driver’s side. It had slung a rod. No wonder it had stopped running with the previous owner. I was disappointed. There was no way to fix it short of replacing the motor, which, back then, could be done for only a few hundred bucks, but I didn’t have the money, so told the guy he could keep the fifty bucks if he would keep the car and I just left it there and went back home.

As I was thinking about the lesson that could be learned from this story, I realized there are several.

1) Sometimes we think we can fix something but find out there’s nothing we can do. In those situations, we just have to give it to God and let it go. There’s no need to get angry or discouraged. That usually only makes things worse, and it’s not good for our health.

2) Many times we want something really badly, but when we get it, we realize it wasn’t what we needed at all. That shouldn’t discourage us from going after something we want later, but we should be more cautious the next time, and not jump into something without thorough investigation. We need the grace of God and the guidance of the Holy Spirit to make good decisions. Always ask God for guidance.

3)We should not give up on others because they may not be able to do what they thought they could do. Sometimes things just happen that no one could have predicted. My uncle couldn’t fix that car for me, but when I had problems with my next car, I called him for help.

4) Just like that hole in the car motor, there is a hole in our hearts that only Jesus can fill. Many times, we try to fill that void with drugs, alcohol, sex, work, dangerous thrills, Social media, and a number of other things. Some people spend a lifetime searching for the perfect thing to fill that empty space, not realizing there’s only one thing that will do it.

A close personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the Messiah, brings peace, calms our fears, and fills the emptiness in our lives. That’s the only thing that will truly do it. Anything else is equivalent to “trying to place a square peg in a round hole.” Impossible.

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LEARNING FROM A GREMLIN

I remember buying what I think was my fourth car. It was a Gremlin. It was yellow with black trim. It was different and unique in shape from most cars on the road at the time, so I guess that’s what attracted me to it. I found out quickly that the fuel gauge was very accurate. Thankfully, I was almost home when it hit E and stopped in the middle of the road. I had to push it the rest of the way. That’s the car I was driving when I almost went off the embankment because a girl fell over on the stirring wheel. If you missed that story, you can read all about it in the post called, *3 Girls, 3 Guys, And A Gremlin.

I loved that car but it was used and I didn’t have it long. I was driving down a two-lane highway one day and the car in front of me was going a bit slower than I wanted to go, so I decided to go around it. I had seen people drop their gear shifter on automatic cars down a gear in order to get up more speed to pass another car. They called it passing gear. Well, I needed some more speed so that’s what I did. I wish I hadn’t, though, because when I did, the car down-shifted hard and started vibrating really bad. I heard a terrible noise like pieces of the motor falling off onto the road. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw those pieces sliding all over the highway behind me.

What a mess. What a disappointment. I only had the thing for a few weeks. I stopped as quickly as I could on a little gravel road. To my surprise, the car was still running so I drove just a bit further to the gas station and went in to call my uncle. He came and looked at it and confirmed that the car had slung a rod. I told him it was still running when I made it to the store, so he told me to start it up and see if it would still run. I did, and it did, so he followed me as I drove it to his house. That was a sad day. I miss that car sometimes and on the rare occasion when I see a yellow Gremlin, I’m reminded of those thrilling days.

I have had so many used cars over the years that I doubt I could remember them all. I do remember at least ten cars and a truck from the time I was sixteen until I was twenty-three, though. Some were used, some were more used than others, and some were really used. Some had been well maintained, but some had not. The ones that had been taken care of were in better shape, of course, and they lasted longer. The ones that had been neglected were in bad shape and didn’t last long at all. I’m sure all of them would have lasted longer if I had taken better care of them myself, but I didn’t. I was a young man with a heavy foot and I drove too fast and was hard on my cars. I didn’t have the oil changed regularly and I didn’t really check it regularly. In short, I neglected them.

I did the same thing with my body for years. I ate what I wanted. I drank what I wanted. I drank alcohol and used drugs. I partied and I stayed out all night. I took drugs to stay awake. I took drugs to help me sleep. I gained weight, then starved myself to lose it. I took laxatives and weight loss drugs. Even after I stopped drinking and doing drugs, I spent lots of late nights playing video games, reading comic books, and organizing baseball cards. All that abuse to my body, plus the wear and tear from several strenuous jobs and two car wrecks have taken a toll on me. Now, my body is worn out and I’m in constant pain.

I’m thankful to God for helping me to give up those bad habits, but the damage is done. What bothers me the most is that a lot of it could have been avoided. If I had been more concerned about my health back then, I would still have a lot more good years left in me. The Bible says our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit who lives inside of us (1 Corinthians 6:19). We need to take care of his temple. Our bodies are like machines. Just like those machines, if our bodies don’t have regular maintenance they don’t last near as long as they will if we take good care of them.

Our bodies can’t live without WATER so that would be a good place to start. We need to drink plenty of water. REST is very important as well, so we need to try to get eight hours of sleep each night. We need to get plenty of fresh AIR, so walking outside and doing other kinds of EXERCISE outdoors is a great way to kill two birds with one stone.

Another very important thing we need is SUNSHINE. Not all, but many living things need sunshine to be healthy. Of course, too much sunlight can be harmful. We need it in moderate amounts. Too much of anything can be bad for you, so we need to practice MODERATION in every area of our lives and we need to avoid putting things into our bodies that will harm them. We need to develop good eating habits and eat only foods that will promote good health. Good NUTRITION is imperative to maintaining both physical and mental health. Both of those are connected to our spiritual health. Usually, if we are lacking in one of these three areas, the other two will be affected. We need to round it all out by TRUSTING GOD to provide for all our needs and following his instructions in the Bible. All these things will help our bodies and minds to feel better and last longer.

Just like regular maintenance on a car can prevent costly repairs or even the death of the car, regular maintenance on our bodies can help keep us from getting sick and dying at an early age. Being healthy is very important, so we need to take care of our bodies so we can be as healthy as possible and enjoy life while we live here on this earth.

*3 Girls, 3 Guys, And A Gremlin

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My Blogs
https://teddylynn.blogspot.com
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© 2018 Teddy Lynn – All Rights Reserved

My books are available in paperback and digital format on Amazon @ 
https://www.amazon.com/Teddy-Lynn/e/B01MZDB6L6