God called an audible, or The Other Elephant's Child
One of the features of Frances’ family reunions is “the telling of tales” in which the family history is repeated as a series of stories which seem to get embellished as the years progress, but which provide a source of great amusement and joy to the gang, especially those who were present and remember, perhaps a bit less so to those of us who weren’t, or who have good memories and have heard them for the umpteenth time. But let me suppress my inner grouch for long enough to recognize that these are origin stories that help us sort out who we are, that help us pass that knowledge to the younger generations amongst us, and to begrudgingly admit that I in fact have one of my own.
Because, oh best beloved, today is a special day, marking no less than the twentieth anniversary of the day I came to be. And it started off rather unpleasantly. Now the reader may do with the following whatever he or she may please, but the author will go to his deathbed convinced that a voice, not his own, shouted somewhere in the vicinity of the vast empty space between his ears that his way up to this very point, was in fact not working, and that forthwith and immediately, he was to go seek help.
At such point, the author was set upon with such anxiety that he literally shook from head to toe and paced the innards of an otherwise empty house until such time as he could raise a friend of his wife’s (for he hadn’t any of his own). Likely waking or at least disturbing this dear lady’s morning coffee was far from his brain, which was utterly occupied with finding some relief from this otherworldly fear and trembling.
And so, on this remarkable day, within an hour of that call, he found himself sitting in the office of a pastor he hardly knew, who shared his own experiences as a child of an alcoholic father, and he was somehow convinced to go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, at which point he discovered to his absolute amazement that there were many such people who had been just like him, wretched and trapped in the awful snare that is alcoholism, but who had somehow found a way out, and were now happy, joyful people who had encountered God through the Twelve Steps.
Now, best beloved, you must know and understand that this was a formidable stumbling block for our wayward traveler, who heretofore had discarded thoughts of God like so many melon peels, and in fact had expressed great distain for those who held on to such silly notions.
And yet, here they were, all these happy people, and here he was, and so it began. And he left that meeting with a copy of The Big Book, and proceed to devour it from cover to cover. And there, in a chapter entitled “We Agnostics” was the silliest of sillies, and yet it captured his little brain: just pray to God as you understand him, every night for two weeks, whether you believe in Him or not. Absurdity! Nonsense!
And so every night for two weeks, feeling rather stupid, lying next to his sleeping bride, he stared at the ceiling and prayed to a God he had formerly been rather hostile to, and night after night, he prayed and his prayers became somewhat refined, and he came to believed that God could not only help him, but could remove his obsession for alcohol.
And one morning, also seared into his memory, he awoke and found it was true, for what can only be described as a hundred pound weight had been removed from his shoulders, and he shook his bride and woke her and declared it gone.
And so our now-not-so-weary traveler really began his journey, and whether it was the Kolokolo Bird who urged him or not, no-one remembers, but he became determined to find out more about this God who had so rudely inserted Himself in his life, and one night, in a hotel in Georgia, there in the pages of a Gideon’s Bible, in the book of Mark, he found his Lord and Savior in the God-Man, Jesus Christ. And, my best beloved, our no-longer-wayward child has been singing a joyful tune with a full heart every day of those twenty-years-less-a-little-bit since.
One of the questions I have pondered along the way is “Why?” And it struck me that had God not intervened, my bride and I would likely not be together, and He knew she would need a fellow traveler to help her with a difficult part of the journey, and so He did, and here we are, she, and I with the big, bulgy nose…
Copyright ©
Jeff Kyser
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