PAIN x4

A while back, I wrote an article about my experience with three different pains over the last several years. I was going to update it because of some new developments in my health situation, but I decided to just write a part two. If you haven’t read the other blog post, I called it Pain x3, so I’m calling this one Pain x4.

In the last post, I discussed 3 major pains I’ve suffered from in the last twenty-four years, with each one accelerating in intensity. Starting with terrible back pain from Deteriorating Disc Disease, to toothache pain, and a kidney stone. In my blog post, I said the stone was the worst pain I had ever felt. But, little did I know that the worst pain I have ever experienced in my life was not from that kidney stone as I thought.

I had never had a kidney stone before, so I really didn’t know what kind of pain they caused. All I knew was that other people were saying they were really painful. After about seven weeks, I passed a small stone, but the pain didn’t get any better. In fact, it was getting worse.

I was going to work every day, and doing my best to do a good job, but I was hurting constantly. Even though I was taking the two pain medications prescribed by my doctor, plus some over-the-counter pain medicine, the pain would never completely subside. In fact, on several different occasions, I was in so much pain I was actually bent over, and couldn’t straighten up completely.

Finally, the night before my next doctor’s appointment, I was in the shower and decided to push in on the knot in my lower abdomen, and it popped back inside. That was it. I was convinced it was a hernia. I had been telling the doctors I thought I had one, but I thought it was higher up, around my belt line. Sometimes it felt like butterflies in my stomach and I could feel, and sometimes hear a gurgling in the right side of my abdomen, and the pain was so bad. Then, I started to feel a knot in my front pelvic area. Sometimes it was there, and sometimes, it wasn’t. When I sat and relaxed it was inside, but when I was walking at work, or when I ate something, it would come out, and it would hurt pretty bad there and also in my stomach and abdomen. My doctor visits were always early mornings, after I had been resting, and hadn’t eaten anything for 12- 15 hours, so that’s why my doctor couldn’t find the problem.

One day, I finally convinced her to send me to the hospital for a CT scan. The diagnosis was an Inguinal Hernia. It was actually a Direct Inguinal Hernia. It was not in the Inguinal Canal, but in the connective tissue in my pelvic area; the white stuff that connects the muscle to the pelvic bone. I had to get it fixed. It was so painful, I could barely function anymore.

My doctor contacted a good surgeon she knew and made me a pre-op appointment. It took a few more weeks to actually get the surgery. By then, the pain was so bad that I was actually looking forward to the surgery, but I had no idea what kind of pain I would have to suffer through after the surgery. If I had, I don’t know what I would have done.

After the surgery, I was in so much pain I could barely function. They gave me some very strong pain medicine, but I was still in misery. Initially, the surgeon had said I should be able to go back to work in a week or so, on light duty. He said, Two weeks at the most. When the week was up, the incision was healing very well and I got the stitches out, but I was still in a lot of pain, I was very weak, and the swelling still had not gone down.

The pain in my abdomen was still there, and I was still getting sick almost every time I ate anything. It was a whole month before I was able to go back to work and I still had to be on light duty. I couldn’t pick up anything over ten pounds the first week, then it gradually increased each week.

I finally got over the surgery, but my stomach was still hurting and I was still getting sick almost every time I would eat anything. The pain would radiate all around my stomach from my abdomen up to my lower chest. It was still almost unbearable at times. I was more convinced than ever that I had a hernia in my right lower abdomen, but the doctor thought it was my gallbladder.

She sent me back to the hospital for an ultrasound, which found multiple stones. By then, I was in so much pain that I didn’t hesitate when she said it needed to come out. Again, the time it took to get the pre-op appointment, and the surgery took forever. It was almost another month.

I think it was two weeks after the gallbladder came out before I could go back to work, but guess what. I still had the same symptoms I had been having. It was going on for about a year and a half at that point, and I was getting worse. Somewhere around this time, I got COVID and was down for a while.

After I recovered from that, I asked my regular doctor to send me back for another scan and focus on the area where I thought the problem was. I was afraid it was colon cancer because my dad had that several years back. She didn’t find anything on the scans, so in my desperation, I made an appointment with the surgeon who had fixed my hernia. This time, I ate breakfast before I went to the appointment so I would be affected when the doctor saw me. He examined me and immediately said, “Yep, it’s a hernia. We need to get some fresh scans to see exactly what’s going on, then we can fix you up.”

Finally, after more than two years, I got some relief. I was back to work in 2 weeks, on light duty, of course, but I was feeling so much better very quickly. Praise the Lord. That was over two years of CRAZY!!!

So, in conclusion, I have suffered severe back pain, terrible pain from a toothache, gallstones, and a kidney stone. I have pain from deteriorating disc disease, a deteriorating hip, and Arthritis. I’ve had two bad car wrecks, and 5 surgeries, but none of those things have given me nearly as much pain as that hernia in the lower right part of my abdomen. That was some kind of pain and I hope, and pray that I never, ever have to suffer that kind of pain again.

I’m so thankful to God for giving me the strength to make it through those two years of terrible pain and frustration, and I’m so thankful for my wife, Linda, and for her prayers and patience, and all she had to do for me. I love her so much. She’s a true blessing from God.

So, whatever you’re going through, whatever you face, and whatever pain you have to suffer, just remember that “God is with you if you’re with him” (2 Chronicles 15:2). Stick with him, love him, praise him, and trust him. Things are not always good, and we will suffer at times, but God has promised to be with us in whatever we go through, and remember that the pain won’t be forever. So have faith, and hope. Never give up. Keep looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, and for Joy in the Morning.

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ASLEEP ON THE JOB AGAIN

I once heard about a man who was resting on his forklift at work and unintentionally fell asleep. As he was waking up, he realized someone was standing beside him. It was his supervisor. So before he opened his eyes, he took a deep breath, and said, Amen.

That was told to me as a true story, but I don’t know if it is or just a joke. I thought it was funny. It made me laugh. It does sound like something that could have really happened because I’ve fallen asleep on the job a few times. All during lunch except the time I’m telling you about now.

One of my first full-time jobs was making vinyl siding. We worked three 12-hour shifts, and one 6-hour shift each week. There were 4 shifts. Days and nights at the first part of the week, and days and nights at the second part of the week. I was on the 4th shift which was nights, from Wednesday night through Saturday night. I would get off work on Sunday and be off until Wednesday night.

Those were weird hours, and they seemed so long. I couldn’t get much sleep in the daytime, mainly because I was used to sleeping at night, but a few of my friends and family were not as considerate as they could have been. One of my young cousins actually set the woods on fire behind my house one day while I was trying to sleep.

Being tired and sleepy at work is bad enough for eight hours, but it’s worse for a 12-hour shift, and it didn’t help that the job was boring.

I was packing vinyl siding into boxes as it came off a conveyor belt just after going through the mold to form it into its unique shape. When it came out at the end of the machine, it traveled through another mold just to keep it straight and in the same shape while it quickly cooled down. It was fenced-in with rollers and presses to aid in this process and to keep anyone from getting hurt. By the time it reached the end of the track and dropped onto the rollers, it was pretty much cooled off and in the shape it would be in for the next twenty-plus years.

Sometimes a piece of trash or something would get in the mix somewhere along the way and it would cause a hole to appear in the piece of siding. As it was pushed and pulled along the track it would usually become solid again when the piece of trash moved on, but sometimes it wouldn’t. When the hole remained for more than a few seconds we would have to quickly cut the piece of siding off behind the hole with a hacksaw and quickly put it back into the precisely formed track.

It was bound to happen, and one night it did. A huge hole formed in the piece of vinyl, and I knew it wasn’t about to work itself out. I grabbed the hacksaw and cut as fast as I could, but I wasn’t fast enough to get the siding back into the form in time. I had to try it again. I grabbed the quick-moving siding with my left hand and the saw with my right hand and began to cut it again. After only two strokes, I stopped. I knew what I had done. The second stroke had cut my thumb almost completely off.

I grabbed my bloody hand and ran to the restroom. As I washed my thumb in the sink, I could see the extent of the damage. The saw had hacked through my thumb, removing a portion as wide as the teeth on the blade. There was only a small section of the nail and flesh left intact. I was in a lot of pain.

I went to the emergency room and got it patched up. Then I spent the next week or so pushing a broom at work for twelve hours a night. That was worse than the accident itself. I was supposed to be on light duty for two weeks but after one, I couldn’t do it anymore. I bugged them until I convinced them to let me get back on the line.

I still wasn’t sleeping enough, so I started using caffeine pills to keep me awake at work. They made me sick so I had to stop taking them. Then one night, as I was packing the siding into boxes, I woke up about twenty feet away from my line. I was holding one piece of siding in my hands looking around. The plant manager and my supervisor were standing together by the break room looking at me and laughing their heads off. So I calmly walked back to my line and got caught up as quickly as I could.

Then, one morning as I was driving home, I fell asleep and slammed the side of my car into a bridge on the highway. It woke me up, and I jerked the steering wheel in the opposite direction and went into the opposite lane. Thank God there was no oncoming traffic there or I might not be here to tell the story.

After that, I had to quit and find a daytime job. That’s how I ended up with the position where I fell Asleep On The Job that I previously wrote about. You can read that post and one about another time I cut the end of my index finger almost all the way off at the links below.

God has been so good to me. I’ve been through a lot in my life and he’s always gotten me through whatever bad happened and I know he’ll always be there to help me. You can trust him, too. Never forget that.

ASLEEP ON THE JOB
https://teddylynn.blogspot.com/2017/07/asleep-on-job.html

THE DUNE BUGGY, THE BICYCLE, AND THE DRILL
https://teddylynn.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-dune-buggy-bicycle-and-drill.html

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ONE TREE, TWO COUSINS, AND FOUR FLAT TIRES

It was Halloween and I was 19 years old. I had just recently come to my senses and was off drugs and alcohol. I was trying to rebuild my life and become a better person. I had a good job and a dependable car and I was into having good, clean fun. I thought it might be fun to go Trick-or-Treating. The last time I had gone was a few years earlier when I made my own Freddy Kruger costume. It wasn’t bad if I do say so myself, and I had gotten some good compliments about it.

I felt like I was too old to go Trick-or-Treating, though. I went to my cousin, Tim’s house to see if he wanted to go. I could drive him around from house to house in exchange for a percentage of his treats and we could hang out like we did when we were younger. He’s only a couple of years younger than me so he thought he was too old, as well. He said we should go get my younger cousin Thomas who had recently gone with us on a camp-out and offer him the same deal. That sounded good to me, so that’s what we did.

I got a big, brown paper grocery bag and rolled the top down about halfway, and sat it in the front seat between me and Tim. Each time Thomas came back from a house we would empty his bag into the big one and soon we had several pounds of candy and a few rocks.

After we had hit several neighborhoods in his community, we headed up the main highway toward mine. All of a sudden, I saw blue lights behind me. I stopped and rolled my window down and waited for the officer to walk up. He said someone had been setting fires all along the side of the roads in the neighborhood and wanted to know if we knew anything about it. I told him we didn’t know who was doing it, but I had stopped to put one out earlier, before sunset. I was hoping we could be on our way after that but then he said, “Y’all been drankin?” When I said, “No Sir,” he said, “What’s in the bag?” I said “Candy” as I tilted the bag up for him to look into. A big smile came across his face as he chuckled. Then he told us to be careful and he walked back to his car.

We went to a few more houses, then decided to call it a night. We were on the way to take Thomas home when we came to a place where my aunt Lola Mae lived years ago. The house was gone but the big oak tree and the circle drive were still there. Just as we came to the drive, Thomas said, “Drive around that tree.” I wasn’t going that fast so I turned and drove around the tree. Just then, I felt something bump the bottom of my car, first at the front and then at the back. I had driven over something. I continued back onto the road and to my sister’s house just a short distance ahead. When I got out to see if there was any damage, all four tires on the car were flat.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit Thomas for telling me to drive around that tree. He assured me that he didn’t know that would happen. I halfway believed him, but nothing I could do to him would fix my tires. I had to wait until the next day to get back on the road.

We can learn a lesson from this experience. Those of us who are on this road to heaven need to stay focused and never take a detour. Sometimes though, we do veer off the road and something similar to this happens. We’re sidelined for a while. Sometimes for a long while. The key is to never leave the road, but if we do, for some reason, we need to get back on the road as soon as possible with renewed determination to never be misled again.

By the way, I haven’t celebrated Halloween in the last twenty-two years and I never took my kids Trick-or-Treating because I discovered that it’s Satan’s holiday, and it’s not something that God’s people should celebrate. Click on the link below for a great Bible-based video that explains the evils of Halloween. Thanks for reading my blog, and thank you, Tim and Thomas, for that night and the great memories.

Ghosts and Spooky Spirits

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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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DATE WITH DESTINY

I was Twenty years old and it was Summer. I was driving my dune buggy on the two-mile road that led to my house from the main highway. I hadn't had my toy long but I was driving it like I had always had it. It had been raining and I wanted to get home before it started again. One of my friends was with me and he said something about slowing down. I was driving faster than I should have been on that curvy, wet road.

Then my friend asked me a good question. He said, “What would you do if you went over this hill going this fast and there was a car stopped in the road?” I said, “I’d do this,” and quickly bumped my brakes. When I did we started spinning on the wet pavement. As I desperately tried to regain control, we slid off the road into the ditch, but we didn’t stop or even slow down. That’s when I saw the light pole coming straight toward us. Just as we reached it, we quickly turned and missed the pole and started flying backward into a muddy field. As soon as we came to a complete stop, I shifted into first gear and stomped the gas to the floor, slinging mud everywhere. When we got back on the road, I drove quite a bit slower the rest of the way home. That was a scary experience but I was so thankful that God was watching over us.

I wish I had continued driving slower from then on, but I was young, but not quite as wise as I should have been at that age. You may think I’m exaggerating when I tell you this connected story, but I promise I’m not. Just a few months later it was winter and I made a spur-of-the-moment decision. I worked several miles from home and decided to try to make it to my house and back to work on my lunch break.

I was on that same road to my house where I had the dune buggy accident earlier in the Summer and once again, I was driving too fast. It had snowed earlier in the week and there had been ice on the roads for a couple of days, but the sun came out that morning and melted most of it. There were pine trees on the right side of the road casting a shadow on the pavement. Where the shade was, the road had not been exposed to the sun so the snow and ice had not melted there. 

Just as I was going over that same exact hill I saw the patch of ice. I hit my brakes in the same exact spot where I had on the dune buggy. The car began to spin out of control just like the dune buggy did. I tried to regain control just like before but I slid off the road into the same ditch at the same spot. Then I saw that same light pole coming straight toward me. Just like before, as I was just about to hit it, the car quickly turned and started rolling back into the same muddy field. It stopped almost in the same spot as the dune buggy. I’m not kidding. No exaggeration. It was eerie how similar those two incidents were, and I knew once again that God had been watching over me. That time, though, I had to walk to a neighbor’s house and get him to pull my car out with his tractor.

There was a famous philosopher and poet in the early twentieth century named George Santayana. He once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I hadn’t forgotten the incident the previous Summer, but it wasn’t fresh in my mind either. I hadn’t learned anything from it, that’s for sure. There are many variations of Mr. Santayana’s famous quote. The one I like is, “Those who don’t learn from their mistakes are destined to repeat them.” I believe that one can better be applied to this situation.

The Children of Israel went through similar situations where they would serve God for many years and be prosperous. Then they would turn and serve other gods. Then God would send them into captivity. Later they would repent and turn back to God and he would deliver them, but the cycle continued.

Today, many of God’s followers are in the same situation. When we turn away from him and return to our old ways, we get into trouble. Then we call on God for help. He helps us but then we seem to forget and go our own way again. When will we learn? God will not bless us when we turn away from him and do our own thing.

A good relationship with Jesus is very important. Serving the God of heaven is very important. Jesus said, “Whoever is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12:30). He also said, “No one can serve two masters” (Luke 16:13). In John 14:6, he said he is the Way. No one can come to the Father except through Jesus. He is the door (John 10:9).

Let’s not forget who he is. Let’s not forget where he brought us from. If we do, we may find ourselves back there in the same situation we were in before. We don’t have to live in the past or focus on it to learn from it. Sometimes, we do have to look back at where we were, to appreciate where we are now. I want to learn from my mistakes and be determined not to repeat them. Who’s with me?

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MORE CUTS AND SCARS

A while back, I wrote a post about several times I had accidentally cut myself. Well, in case you were wondering, those were not the only times I’ve been cut. I want to share a few more today and hopefully, you’ll be entertained for a few minutes as you delve a little deeper into my life lessons.

I had been working at my new job for just a few weeks packing vinyl siding in boxes as it came off a conveyor belt. Sometimes a piece of trash would get in the vinyl somewhere along the way and it would make a hole in the piece of siding. When that happened we would have to quickly saw the piece of siding off behind the hole with a hacksaw and feed it back into the track between the rollers.

One night, a huge hole formed so I grabbed the hacksaw and cut the piece of siding as fast as I could, but I wasn’t fast enough to get it back into the rollers in time. I had to try it again so I grabbed the quick-moving siding with my left hand and the saw with my right hand and started sawing again. After only two strokes, I stopped. To my shock, the second stroke had cut my thumb almost completely off.

I ran to the restroom and washed my thumb in the sink. I could see that the saw had cut a trench in my thumb as wide as the teeth on the blade. There was only a small section of the nail and flesh left, and I was in a lot of pain.

I went to the emergency room and got it patched up. Then I spent the next week at work pushing a broom for twelve hours. That was worse than the accident itself. I finally was able to start doing more after a week and soon I was back to regular work.

Several years later, I picked up a small, metal pipe at work to toss it in the scrap truck. As I tossed it, I simply pushed it off the tip of my middle finger to watch it flip into the trailer as I had several times before. I didn’t get to watch it flip that time because as it left my hand, it took a piece of my finger with it. There was a metal burr on the end of the pipe and it sliced right into my flesh. More pain and more bandages, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

I have had some pretty bad scrapes and cuts and cracks. A few of them have been on, or around my head, but not many directly on my face. There was that one time, though. My wife’s dad had a camper he was using as a storage shed. He had built a deck around two sides of it. We lived just down the road.

My oldest son and I were doing something there and I stepped up onto the deck which was only a few feet high. The sun was setting in the sky, and I was facing West so it was shining right in my eyes. Just as both feet hit the deck, I came to a quick stop. It was a hard stop, too. My face had hit the end of a TV antenna pole that was propped up on the deck at about a thirty-degree angle. It struck me at the top of my nose right between my eyes.

My vision became blurry for a minute or so. When I felt to see how bad it was, then I felt the blood and I felt the pain arrive. When I looked at my hand it was bloody. I told my son we needed to go before I passed out. We made it home and I cleaned it up and got to feeling better, but I still have the scar to remind me of that painful day.  

Let me give you one more for the road. I was picking a few things up off the floor at work. I don’t remember what it was but there were several of them. I think it might have been trash or screws or washers. I don’t know. I guess it really doesn’t matter because what happened next is what I want to tell you about.

When I bent over to pick up that last, whatever, I would never have imagined what happened next could even be possible. As I raised back up, my head was abruptly stopped by the sharp corner of an electrical panel. I hit it hard, and it cut deep. I think it took three stitches to close the wound. I’m not sure about that either. The whole thing is a bit blurry. Anyway, I feel I was blessed in all of these situations because each one could have been worse. I truly believe that old saying, “It could always be worse.”

I feel fortunate to have experienced all I have in my life, and I’d like to think that I learned valuable lessons from each experience. If nothing else, hopefully, I at least learned not to do the same thing again.

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400 MILES FROM HOME

If you’ve read my book, “The Journey To Heaven,” you know I left home when I was sixteen years old and started using alcohol and drugs and doing many of the bad things that are usually associated with that lifestyle. After about three years of that, my life was a mess. I was a wreck. I wasn’t happy at all. I wanted to get my life straightened out and get back to being me, instead of the miserable person I was. By this time I was nineteen, and I was back home with my grandmother.

I wanted to make a better life for myself so I started working on a plan. I hadn’t had a steady job for a while so that’s where I started. My cousin and I were best friends and we went looking for a job together. We were introduced to a free job training program that would give us the skills to qualify for a number of job opportunities. The catch was, it was almost four hundred miles away, and I think it was going to take about a year to complete if I remember correctly.

It sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime, so we decided to go for it. We got everything together and kissed our families goodbye, and boarded the bus for an all-day ride with a changeover to another bus. We met some young people on the bus who were returning from a weekend visit home. One of the girls was really nice and talkative. She filled us in on the operations of the place, and the teachers and students and she shared all the negative things she could think of with us. We were not too thrilled with what she told us. It sounded like a prison with some pretty mean inmates. We were young and had never been this far away from home, so the whole situation was a bit scary to us. We were hoping she was only kidding.

After we arrived, we found out that it was as bad as she had said. Maybe even worse. There was a high fence with barbed wire at the top surrounding the building and a big open yard. The doors were locked and had alarms on them. It was like a prison. Some of these young people had been in trouble and were sent there by their parents or the courts to get headed in a positive direction.

It was after midnight when we arrived. The place was a wreck. The walls were just raw plywood. They were dirty and looked like they had been there for twenty years. They had holes all in them and writing all over them. We were shown to our room which we would be sharing with two other guys. It was only big enough to hold two sets of bunk beds with just a few feet between the beds.

One of our roommates hadn’t made it back from his weekend visit home, but the other guy was snoring so loudly that it was hard to sleep. After all, that girl had told us, we had joked that we should sleep with one eye open, and when we looked at our sleeping roommate one of his eyes was halfway open. That’s funny now, but I don’t remember it being funny then.

We did finally go to sleep, but we only got a few hours. At six o’clock in the morning, the door flew open and a guy came in yelling that it was time to get up, eat breakfast, and get our day started. We had orientation all morning, which was very stressful and we had to choose what trade we wanted to start learning. We had a couple of breaks and we were sent outside to a small courtyard with a few tables.

There was a beautiful girl out there, and my cousin and I both kept looking at her. She noticed us staring and finally, she looked at us with an angry face, as she stopped right in front of us. She put her hand on her hip, and with just as much anger in her voice, she said, “Do you like what you see?” We were both shy, and neither of us liked confrontation, so I guess we were in shock having her say anything at all to us, especially with a mean tone like that. We both turned and looked at each other at the same time, and without saying a word, we both turned back to her at the same time and started nodding our heads in a YES motion. She must have thought that was funny because she just started laughing and went back to her friends. Looking back, I guess it was funny.

When lunchtime finally arrived, we were starving, and apparently so was everybody else. When we started lining up in the courtyard, outside the cafeteria, it was like a stampede of hungry cattle. My cousin and I just stepped back out of the way and stood against a brick wall, and waited for the line to diminish. When twelve O’clock came, a big tall guy started beating on the door, cursing and yelling, and saying “You better open this door!”

When they unlocked the door a few minutes later, there really was a stampede. People were pushing and shoving, and one guy got knocked down and trampled. He got up and ran on in with the others. It was madness. My cousin and I went in last and got our food and sat down. With breakfast and lunch behind us, we could see why they were acting so insane about getting in to eat lunch. The little bit of food they gave us wasn’t appetizing at all, and it wasn’t long before we were hungry again. I wasn’t a big guy then, but I still don’t think I could have lasted a year on those kinds of rations.

When we finished our last class we went back to our room. I think we had the third one from the front door. A few of the guys kept going in and out, and the door would take a minute or so to close, then it would automatically lock. My cousin said he was escaping the next time he saw the door open. We got our suitcases ready and we waited. The next time that door opened, he was gone without saying a word. Just then, one of the guys yelled to someone else to get the man who was in charge. When I heard that, I froze. I couldn’t move. I thought my friend was in big trouble and I didn’t know what to do. The man came up the hall and the one who had sent for him, told him he had a phone call. What a relief. He didn’t stay on the phone long and as soon as he hung up and was out of sight, I ran for the open door.

When I made it outside, I headed toward the bus station where we had planned to go. When I turned the corner onto the main street, I didn’t see him anywhere. He was long gone. I met a group of guys walking up the street and asked them if they had seen a guy “running” by. They said, “yeah, he went that way.” I finally caught up with him and we went on to the bus station a few miles away.

We called home and told them what had happened and that we wanted to come home. My mother and my sister’s husband headed out to pick us up. We waited there all night and in the morning before lunch, our family arrived. We were so happy to see them. We crawled into the bed of that little truck and laid down and went to sleep. When I woke up I had a pretty bad sunburn, but I was happy to be headed home. When we finally made it there that evening, the rest of our family was happy to see us, and we were so happy to see them.

In a way, this story reminds me of the one Jesus told about the prodigal son in Luke 15:11–32. He went far away from home, and some bad things happened to him, and he was hungry. He wanted to be back home, so he headed that way. When his father saw him in the distance, he didn’t wait for him to come all the way to him, he ran to meet him, and hugged him, and kissed him.

Many times, there are children of God who turn away from him, for a number of reasons. When we decide to return, our Heavenly Father is very happy and welcomes us back with open arms. He loves us and he is always there for us. So don’t be afraid to come to God and allow him to shelter you in his loving arms. It’s the best place you can ever be.

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