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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© 2023 Teddy Lynn – All Rights Reserved

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ASLEEP ON THE JOB

If you’ve been following my blog or read my books, you know I’m not one of those Christians who pretend they’ve never done anything wrong. We all have a past, and at some point, we've all said and done things that God has told us not to. The Bible says we've all sinned (Romans 3:23) and none of us are righteous (Romans 3:10-12). We like to think we're good on some level, but without Jesus, we're nothing. Ronnie Freeman sings a song that says, “The only thing that’s good in me is Jesus.” That's a profound statement, and no matter what we like to think about ourselves, it's a very true statement.

God tells us in Hebrews 8:12, that after we come to Jesus and have been forgiven for our sins, he doesn't remember them anymore. That doesn't mean that God loses his memory. He says the same thing in Isaiah 43:25. It simply means that he doesn't hold our past against us.

Satan, on the other hand, does hold our past against us. He uses our past in any way he can, to hurt us, and keep us from moving forward. God forgives us, but he can use our past to bless others, both by their learning from our experiences and by us using what we learn to help them. People can come to trust and believe in God when they see what he's done in our lives, the way he has changed us, and the things he's brought us through. That’s one reason why I tell people about my past. I want others to know they're not alone in their struggles and that there is hope in Jesus.

Everything that has happened in my past hasn't always been bad. I've had many good things happen to me, lots of funny things, and I've had a lot of good, clean, fun times with my family and friends throughout my whole life. I guess I write more about the negative things because I want to share the lessons I learned from them, but I want to find better ways to share more of my positive experiences.

As I said before, I left home when I was sixteen years old, and for about three years I did whatever I wanted to. I did whatever I thought was fun and entertaining. I certainly wasn't living a moral, or healthy lifestyle. I was very unhappy. I wanted to do better so I made several changes. One of them was that I started going to church again.

That’s when I met Jesus and gave my life to him. He gave me a new job that I really loved, with an awesome supervisor who was a godly man. It's amazing how God can change a person's life if we just allow him to. Many of us are so self-destructive that we get in the way of God's blessings. We want what we want and often refuse to even consider doing what God wants us to do. Jesus said if we will first seek his kingdom and his righteousness, then he'll give us all that we need. I started seeing that in my life as I submitted my will to my heavenly Father, and the joy in my heart was unbelievable.

I was still young, and I still liked to go out and have fun, only now it was all good, clean fun with some of my younger cousins and other young people from the church. I was really enjoying my life for the first time in years. We had services several nights each week. We had Sunday services, prayer meetings, prayer service, youth night, and choir practice. Many times we would go out to eat before or after church. We would take somebody home or just ride around the town.

My new job was farther away than what I was used to, so I had to get up pretty early to get to work on time. Some days I would be really tired by lunchtime. I was reading the Bible every chance I got, so that's what I would do while I ate lunch if I didn’t fall asleep. One day, I was so tired that all I wanted to do was sleep during lunch. I had an hour, so I set the alarm on my watch, went into the sample room, and lay down on the sofa. As soon as I closed my eyes, I was out.

When lunch was over and I hadn't returned to the line, my supervisor and the floater started looking for me. When they found me, I was still in a deep sleep. They thought it would be funny to wake me up by screaming and beating on something. When I actually woke up, I was standing in the corner of the room holding my chest, and they were both laughing so hard they could barely breathe. As startling as it was at first, I'm glad they did it that way, rather than yelling and cursing, or firing me like some supervisors might have done. We all had a good laugh and went back to work. Thanks, Bobby and Al. I miss you guys.

Memories are funny things. They have the power to change our mood in a variety of ways. Some memories can make us sad, some can make us angry, and some can make us smile, laugh, and bring us all kinds of joy. We should try our best to keep the good memories on top of the pile. They can help us to be happier as we realize how blessed we really are.

Related Topic: Once Saved, Always Saved

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My Blogs
https://teddylynn.blogspot.com
https://teddylynn.wordpress.com

© 2017 Teddy Lynn – All Rights Reserved

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