Trauma

This is about trauma I recently experienced. Mostly selfishly self-induced because similar a few posts ago, I wanted to feel relevant and productive.  Warning don’t try this at home.

As I may have mentioned earlier, my background is construction and among a myriad
of other equipment, I am a very competent 50-year veteran dozer operator. I own a 15-acre ex mining site I operated and finished in the late 80’s. So, in order to rehab my mental health, I thought what the hell, I’ll go and hop on one of our dozers and dress up the banks and get it ready to sell hopefully to the county for a water treatment system. Just like riding a bike you never forget even if it has been 3 years since I’ve been on one.  As the video shows it took me about 5 minutes to regain my proficiency to top notch and was doing this for about half a day and I was having a ball and building my self confidence that I at least could do SOMETHING besides sit on my porch and think about the next drivel I was going to bore my blog readers with.  The lake is about 25 feet deep, and I was very careful as to work cautiously and professionally as I worked the banks. I kept one of my employees with me in case I got stuck or something.

Well, the “something” resulted in having a bank give way that even the best of operators could not have seen coming and I slid off the edge flipping the machine upside down in the deep lake. As the water poured into cab (fortunately it was an open ROPS cab so as not to trap me inside) as I was in the water upside down things happened quickly.  My thoughts raced through my mind. I thought should I ride it down or just jump and let it crush me and be done with it.  Well, much earlier in life I loved running a dozer because at the end of the day at a construction site I would, after hours and finish grade and look back at the earth god has let me to play with and create sculptured land art. I could think about anything and everything (because when you are really good at running a machine it is so rudimentary that you could do the two at the same time and the purr of the dozer and its finished product was the therapy one needed after dealing with the pressures of running a business and dealing with bureaucratic inspectors that never built anything from the ground up in their lives not to mention figuring out how to make payroll while actually building something.  My oldest son, who now runs the business, is the same way. Even your own family has to allow for this time of mental decompression.  It is this moment that I entered the world of trauma. 

While I was going down into the water you might think that I had one of those flash backs of your whole life things, I did not. Perhaps seeing God and the great white tunnel thing as I was on the verge of drowning, I did not. But I was told, by someone, to swim out of the trap and paddle like a bat out of hell and head for the floating turbidity boom nearby and came up from the water and yelled for help. My wife and my guy drove over when they saw me go in and as he got out of the car, he heard me yell and quickly ran over to help me crawl out the steep bank.  He has COPD so after the runover he was nearly winded.  My wife got back in the car and went for help.  Finally, the two of us, my employee and me, dragged me out, my legs were weak because of all the sitting, I do on the porch contemplating.  My wife came with one of my agile friends who was working on our house at time. By that time, my guy and I were sitting on a pipe nearby and resting.

Then round two happened, with my wife and my two friends there, I suddenly had one of my devil- Jesus come rescue me – attacks full on with the bad taste and smell deal.

As I sat going through the chills and the whole thing, I rebuked Satan in the name of Jesus, as my wife prayed with me and my agile friend Paul put his hand on my shoulder and prayed, my other guy just sat nonplused at what he was witnessing.   It all went away we got up we all went home to shower and relax, and I went to bed. The dozer slept with the fishes until my oldest son and Paul did a Lazarus rescue with a lot of help from our giant Volvo 330 excavator and drug it out of the lake to dry out and fight another day maybe with me at the helm and to stay away from deep lakes LOL.

The Devil attack I believe only hit because as I said before only strikes when I’m weak physically. Going into the lake never happened to me before and I was sort of shaken up and relive it in dreams.   I made light of it in jokes about the John Deere and I went for a swim or maybe a full immersion baptism to help me laugh off or to hide my trauma.

My youngest son flipped our all-terrain John Deere a few years back and he was pinned under one side, my wife and nearby neighbors righted it, and pulled him out with really bad scrape that is still healing to this day and it still is a nasty scar, healing still today.   I told him to check the oil and get back on and drive it home.  At the time I was being a good dad and was teaching him to get back in the saddle and ride again. And until this moment, did I realize that I forgot the compassionate and understanding part. He carried that for years.  After this little event and years later, we sat down, and I apologized and we both learned a lot me at 68 and him at 18. As he hops on the Gator to take trash down to the gate and I maybe hop on that dozer two men, one young and one old, work to overcome their fears and let God give us the nerve to try again. 

Maybe those around us will understand. Most of us have never been in combat and anyone says they understand will never get it until they’ve been there. My little brush with near death is nothing compared to that and the friends I saw come back from Vietnam.  It changed My uncle who served with Patton’s Army during WW2 and witnessed the liberation of the concentration camps and Nuremberg trials. He just sat looking out the window and, years later the TV for hours. Only to regain his dry humorous self to hide the horrendous trauma he went through.

I got a tiny taste of that mentally toxic experience the other day and with the stroke and all that goes with it that have written about. I now know and that we try to forget but you can’t, you just can’t forget just overcoming it no matter what the outcome be it from the wars, sexual abuses, self-punishment from self-inflicted failure or undeserved guilt. Give this a try,  Jesus went through all there is to go through, and He took all your hurt pain and guilt and for lack of some more theological statement about the cross, took the ultimate one for the band of brother and sisters enough said.