During the next year, my sophomore year in high school, my biological father came back into my life. My mother and I were staying with a different aunt this time, in a house that actually fronted on a street. One day a man drove up out front and parked his car halfway onto the curb in the yard. My mother called me to the door and said, “Come here, son. Joe Robison’s here . He’s your daddy.”
A tall man, about six feet two, got out of the car and started staggering toward the house. He came inside, smelling of booze and we visited for a while, and I can remember thinking, with the hopeful naivete of a boy who grown up without a dad, Maybe he can play catch with me sometime.
I soon found out he couldn’t even throw a ball to save his life. All he had ever done since he was nineteen years old was open whiskey bottles and beer cans.
When my mother got another in – home nursing assignment, we moved into the patient’s house, and my father came to live with us as well. I didn’t understand why my mother would allow a man who had raped her back into her life, but I had no say in the matter.
I has purchased a motor scooter with money from my job, so I now had transportation and I didn’t have to walk as much. I was really careful out on the roads, but one day a police car turned right in front of me, and I had a terrible wreck.
Just before the collision, the police officer saw me and instantly accelerated, and his car lurched forward so that I almost missed him altogether. If he braked instead, I would have hit the car broadside and would have certainly been killed.
With no time to react, all I could do was hit the brakes, lay my bike down and hope for the best. Like most people in those days, I wasn’t wearing a helmet. They weren’t required and were seldom worn by anyone. But though I miraculously avoided cracking my head apart, I took off the back part of the police car – the bumper and taillights – with my right thigh. To this day, my leg has a big indention where the muscles were compressed in toward the bone.
After radioing for an ambulance, which came pretty quickly, the officer came over, picked me up and moved me onto the grass median. He was really shaken.
“I’m so sorry, son,” he said more than once.
He followed the ambulance to the hospital and later visited me in the hospital and at home and became a real friend.
I got an insurance settlement from the scooter wreck, but I didn’t want to buy another scooter, so I , bought .30-06 rifle, a pre-64 Winchester model 70, hoping that one day I’d be able to go hunting with it.
One day my dad came in a drunken rage and choked my mother until she passed out. Thinking that he had killed her, he left the house and drove off. When I came home from School that day, my mother had marks on her neck. When she told me what happened, I became really angry.
“Son,” she said, “if I hadn’t passed out, he would have killed me.”
I don’t remember if it was later that day or sometime the next day, but when my father came in drunk again, and when he found out my mother wasn’t home, he started cursing me and threatened to kill me.
When he sat down in a chair still cursing me, I ran back toward my bedroom, where I had a baseball bat leaning up against the wall just inside the door. I grabbed the bat and looked to see if my dad was coming after me. If he’d been there, I would have hit him. That’s how scared I was.
When I saw he hadn’t followed me, I dove under my bed and grabbed my rifle. This was just a few days after I had shot an oil can filled with water and blew a hole in it the size of a softball, so I knew what it could do.
I chambered a bullet, went back to the front room, and sat down on a little stool by the telephone, which was mounted on the wall. Sitting maybe twenty feet from my father, and with the safety off, I pointed the rifle at him and said with all the firmness I could muster, “If you move so much as a finger, I’m going to blow a hole in you big enough for someone to crawl through.”
I reached for the phone, dialed 0, and asked the operator to send the police. “My father threatened to kill me,” I said, “but I’m going to shoot him.”
Within ten minutes, the sheriff’s deputy who had hit me with his car was standing at the front door. He had been to the house many times after the accident to visit me, so the minute he heard the address on the emergency call, he came right over.
Here’s the amazing part: although my father sat there cursing me and calling me every name under the sun, he never moved a finger. If he would have so much as raised his hand to scratch his cheek, I would have shot him. And I would not have missed. At age fourteen, my world would have been turned upside down. Who knows what would have happened? But I believe the prayers of the Memorial Baptist Church of Pasadena, and the people who had been praying for years for the little boy who had stayed with the Hales, froze my father and kept me from killing him.
That story is part of the miracle of my life, and that’s why I tell people “Don’t ever give up on your prayers, and don’t ever give up on the people you’re praying for.” We don’t always see our prayers answered, or answered in the way we would choose, but prayer is like love – it doesn’t fail. And it’s an amazing privilege to be able to pray for people.
MLE now:
I find it interesting that this Sunday’s Utmost reading focuses in on personality. Personality, Chamber’s reminds us in the Dec 12 Utmost reading, is the unique, limitlessness part of our life that makes us distinct from everyone else. Such perhaps is too vast for us to comprehend when examining our seemingly mundane lives, but when we read wisdom books such as scripture or like this boy’s future life being spared possible devastation as portrayed in “Living Amazed,” we suddenly realize the visible portion of our island of our personality is merely the top of a large mountain, and similarly, our personality is much like that island. We really have no idea of the great depths of our being, expressed as our personality, as neither we or anyone can measure ourselves. We may start out life off thinking we can, but if we’re honest, we soon realize there is only one Being who fully understands us, and that is our Creator.
Personality is the characteristic mark of the inner, spiritual man, just as individuality in the Dec 11 reading is described as the characteristic of the outer, natural man. Folks, don’t worry if you’re struggling with all this, I’ve been reading Utmost for fifteen plus years (not continuously though) and I’m just beginning now to grasp its truths.
Our Lord can never be described by individuality and independence, but only in terms of His total Person – “I and My Father are one”(John 10:30). Personality merges, and you only realize your true identity once you are merged with another person. Consider the chemistry activated when love or the Spirit of God comes upon you or another person; you or they are transformed! You or they will no longer insist on maintaining your or their individuality or the isolating portions of your personality. Our Lord always spoke in terms of the total person – “. . that they may be one just as We are one. .” Love is always the overflowing result of one person in true fellowship with another.
I’d be remiss now not to tell you this truth forms the basis of the best book on marriage I’ve found to date. Tim Keller’s book of accumulated sermons titled “The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment With the Wisdom of God” is essential reading for anyone who wants to know God and love more deeply in this life during this culture’s chaos! Consider reading it in 2022. Such wisdom books change lives. Perhaps enjoying self – centered entertainment for Christ followers will soon no longer be so enjoyed? Perspective?
Consider how even before James reached fifteen years of age and the necessary understanding of the dangers described in Ephesians 6:12 “ For we wrestle not merely against flesh and blood , but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world , against spiritual wickedness in high places,” God reached down and protected this child once again by the earlier prayers of his intercessors. They no doubt were quite limited in assessing or acknowledging the magnitude of the darkness about James, but they chose to concentrate on the provision of God’s abundant light far surpassing James momentary present darkness. These intercessors possessed an opportunity to intercede for James, it was not merely a job or an assignment!
And as James matured spiritually, his book explains his love for David starting off as a shepherd boy through his entire life. James understood he who is forgiven much, loves much, as well as the inverse. It is also evident throughout the book that James fully appreciated God’s continual demonstration of protection.
The question begging an answer now, is do we? Or do I?
Listen to the Kidron Mennonite Church 12/12/21 sermon by Pastor Craig about receiving and dispensing Joy in a dark world. May we be found “pulling” people in, rather than “pushing” them either out or away!
Blessings as YOU GO FORTH TRUSTING IN OUR GOD OF PROMISE>>>>> mle
