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.

This will be brief (like I hadn’t said that before and ended up writing a short story). As of late, my depression has been winning out, and my inspiration has been buried by it.  But today, I find myself running a comparison of two of my favorite Bible heroes and me.

Something to note here, I am only a microscopic version of them, but I find them interesting, and I can relate—my 1^st from the Old Testament Solomon. He was the youngest son and chosen.  I was the youngest and chosen to lead our family.  He prayed for discernment between right and wrong and, in his life, had trouble with both. I likewise with temptations of being hard in business and too many women in my life. Although I avoided casual and concubine sex with several wives and loving only about 200 out of 1000,  I had virtually no casual sex and loved and married three of them with a child from each. God tried to warn Solomon of too many women, especially from Egypt.  He just didn’t listen. And on a much smaller scale, did the same thing.

 He was a builder. I was a builder. He ran roughshod over people and did what it took to get the project of God’s temple done to specs.  I built cool stuff and was just as demanding of my workforce. He shrewdly took advantage of his business connections, sometimes to the point of screwing them.  And I drove a hard bargain and sometimes took advantage of my leverage. He paid a fair wage to his own kind. I discarded non-performers like chaff. He led from the front. I led from the front.  He had wisdom I had some, on occasion and folly and leaning on my own understanding and made serious business blunders. He loved God. I loved and pitied Jesus like he was one of us but couldn’t wrap my head around the Trinity thing.  That being like the Old Testament that Jesus had to teach us 100’s of years later.

He loved his family and knew the importance of his ancestral role and family honor.  His dad was a hard ass but was compassionate and a man after God’s own heart. My dad was much more subtle and private about it but knew God and related to Him and was a complicated man and conflicted man  My dad worked hard and built a prosperous business the hard way.  David, Solomon’s father, slew many people, took all their stuff in the name of GOD, and gave it to Solomon,  so he could pay cash and get a good deal on the materials and labor to build the temple ( I’m using a bit of liberty here filling in some scriptural silence.)  I drive hard bargains with cash when I can, and my dad left my mom and me a fair amount of cash when he died. I built several churches; He built the ultimate one.

No one knows what happened to him; it was recorded in the Annals of Solomon but got lost and never found. I’ve found a lot of my history that records my finer moments and my follies and believe that my annals will be lost somewhere as well.  But I will just fade away like General Macarthur once said, “I’m in neither category of great men by a void in space from here to the nearest star in our galaxy.”  Maybe the two huge concrete crosses I built will prompt someone to ask questions about who built these. I hope those don’t go the way of the temple being destroyed, be it modern-day Babylonians or Antifa.

So that’s why this guy is my Old Testament hero. He was very flawed but an amazing man who loved God.   I’m not worthy of even mentioning his name and mine in the same sentence.

My other hero comes from the New Testament, the Apostle Paul.  He was educated in the school of the Pharisees and did pretty well and was destined to be one and learned great knowledge of the religious and secular kind. I went to UF, and l learned business accounting and passed the CPA exam.  He did side jobs as a tentmaker, a skill he learned along the way. I play sax on the side to earn my way through college and drove dump trucks and a sand dredge for my dad.

Later in life, after tormenting Christians with his pharasitic knowledge and power, he had an epiphany on the way to Damascus and was blinded by the light. I saw Jesus while lie crying on the floor, fearing I wasn’t going to make payroll, and my second wife and I were on the skids. I was blinded by welders burn ( temporary blindness when not adequately protected by welding visor) from patching up my aging fleet of dump trucks.

He persecuted Christians.  I persecuted people around me, hurling my anger at them like the stoning of Paul’s day. Paul turned around his life and began preaching the Gospel.  I found a little church in Fort Drum, Florida, and revisited the Bible and let Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit take over my life even if it was, in my case, a little, where Paul was all in.

Paul wrote amazing words of the Gospel and passed down the words for us, and when he was older and nearly blind, he had a scribe edit and write down his words. Since my stroke, it is hard for me to follow the curser because of my blindness in my left eye to write, so my scribe is my devoted wife who also types, edits, and posts my blog, which is drivel compared to the books of Paul.

He had a plaguing problem with a thorn in his foot that he often prayed for God to remove (may have been gout).  I have gout, and fortunately for me, a medication that keeps it under control, but my thorn is seizures that I have to fight off with medications and even rebuking that evil in the name of Jesus to make the evil that accompanies them.  Jesus and I fight this battle at least once a week, and the power of His rebuke is the power that saves me and completes the void where the meds calm me physically while Satan attacks both mind and body.

Paul was either imprisoned or in the form of house arrest for doing the right thing and preaching the Gospel. I spent an afternoon in jail for making payroll instead of paying sales tax to the state of Florida, which I bounced a check on. I am now under virtual house arrest in paradise in my homestead and write this insignificant blog with a little gospel thrown in haphazardly.

Paul was a saint. I’m way short of that bar.  Paul said he was the worst sinner and killed Christians early on. Except for killing anyone, I’m right up there with him. I even was a murderer one time when I was young and afraid, and my 1^st wife and I killed this poor little boy that lived in her womb within months after Roe versus Wade made it legal.

Now my life begins anew. I these past and future years, with my friend Paul’s words and my buddy Solomon’s wisdom, the journey has been and still is a bumpy ride.  As for me, Jesus and Paul, I’ll catch up.

Well, as I said in my last post, I was taking some time to reunite with old friends via Facebook and in person. This group was old Florida Jaycees that I served with 40 years ago, people in music I went through high school and college. My music friends went on to serve lead roles in the Army and Air Force bands, performing at with the Chicago Symphony and Carnegie Hall, producer, and drummer for Dolly Parton and drummer for Three Dog Night. Director of bands at Eastern Florida State College. 

In my Jaycee friends, one is a mayor, another a city councilman, a head of security worldwide for a major bank, a retired principal at a major high school, and the list goes on, and they all are my dearest friends. We have genuinely missed each other over the years.

We all are bound by the act that we were ordinary people with the heart of God doing extraordinary things, albeit at times irreverently. The back and forth with a lunch gathering or Facebook and texts was another oasis for me in my battle with depression. After this gathering of souls, I have found a useful antidote for depression that my fellow followers can relate to.  Find friends, laugh at those crazy times, and yes, our bloopers, a few tears over the amazing things you did together.  The different timelines are interwoven with America’s history, even though we were just a wisp in winds of time. Even if you don’t think you have done anything extraordinary in your life rest assured, God knows all the amazing things you were a part of and the people you shared them with.

I recommend that you find some old farts as I did.  When you talk about old times, you will discover a treasure of memories of where you were and the differences you made in people around you, A pat on the back, someone who listened when they just needed to be heard or vent to.  These seemingly small things made you amazing even if you weren’t on stage getting an award or getting applause and accolades.   God knows your heart, and the greatest feeling is to feel the words no matter the size of the accomplishment “with you, I am pleased, faithful servant.”

The greatest of leaders are servant leaders that take you by the hand and say, come on, we can do this together, and I’ll be there for and with you.  No matter how small or how huge your project is, all of us matter.  It sounds a lot like Jesus. We are called to be like him, no matter what you believe. You lived and served, so you are worthy and loved.

Don’t get discouraged, my friends; you are loved by people you never realized just how close you really are until you stop and gaze back at far you have come.   The journey was hard and sometimes narrow and times hopeless, but you are an overcomer. And you are still standing, you mattered.  All of you mattered in one way or another. You were created for the moment, the future you really can’t know, and the tarnished past can be polished by remembering the good you did and share it with others.

Now a caution here, my fellow depressants. As you enjoy these reunion moments, push your depression to the rear. Don’t bring your friends to a pity party or bitch and moan about your situation. Savor the moment and the preciousness of this time together. Please don’t bring them down into your pit of despair, give them a chance to lift you with laughter and tears of joy. It will be like a cool fresh sea breeze you haven’t felt for a long time because they are yearning for these reflections as you are. No matter what kind of life you’ve had, there were moments of peace and fun even when you played together as kids getting into mischief; a fish you caught, a first prom looking so elegant, and your date fumbling around to get the corsage just right, slamming your gorgeous dress in the door, that first kiss, that concert in the high school band that was just perfect and made your band director cry with pride, that pass you caught when nobody thought you could, sitting under the tree in the grass dreaming about a world yet to be, BB gun wars, playing in the snow, passing a college exam you thought you didn’t study hard enough to make it. You did these and countless other milestones you passed and still more to come even if in this present state you have to return to baby steps, you are moving forward, and you have mattered and DO matter.

Pray and ask and keep asking. God doesn’t keep time as we do. Be patient. Much easier said than done, especially in this screwed up world we have right now. Remember, none of this is your fault. Only your life, your goodness of heart, and your will to keep trying are what matters. Those memorable experiences shared with others matter; the bad doesn’t matter because you are forgiven by the One that really matters. Our earthly love hurts, like the song says sometimes, but His love never hurts or hurts beyond what we can stand for it is Agape love, no conditions just pure love that happens even when we don’t seem to deserve it.

I have no informed cure for depression. I asked my neurologist if I was mentally ill, and he said yes. I was pissed and taken aback, then I caught myself and thought this guy had given me chemicals, which I only take seizure meds for (by the way I had another one about a week ago putting a crimp in my writing inspiration). His answer to that was up the dosage, but nobody really knows what causes them, and they come without warning and scares the crap out of my family and me. I got some excellent advice from one of my fellow bloggers, and since by my title, I attract many people.  Many younger females, I surmise ladies tend to express their feelings, maybe while men hold it in.

That is, mental illness doesn’t mean your crazy town or a serial killer; most people are helped many times with meds or toughed through like me. My depression or mental illness is mainly due to being partially debilitated by the stroke, limiting my ability to drive because of the loss of peripheral vision on my left side and unpredictability of my seizures. This results in a huge loss of freedom and mobility and freedom to be the provider in chief and a hard-charging overachiever. It really sucks and makes me depressed. I overcome it many times but have setbacks and have to start over about halfway up the hill, so I regroup and try again no matter how frustrating it gets. 

Thank God for my wife, who preps my meds, endures my frustrations, and carts me around, and I have a few friends that load my miserable ass up to go to Sonny’s BBQ for all you can eat ribs. That will hold me over for a while with well-needed fellowship and damn good BBQ. My mind is sharp. I’ve lost about 70 pounds and am otherwise healthy.   I’m a functional, mentally ill person, my eccentricity and creative mind have been with me since birth.  My faith is battered and bruised, but I still wait upon the LORD, what else can I do. I trudge forward in search of my future purpose and draw comfort from those wonderful memories and the good friends I shared them with.  I draw upon these for a brief period of time.  I wait upon the LORD from the beauty of my wonderful but aging house and my precious family and call upon the LORD for discernment and perseverance.  Switching gears, on my next post, I want to talk about love. I think I have experience in this, with three marriages (I think the last one finally stuck) and one wonderful kid to go with each. We’ll explore “What is Love,” and I don’t mean the 1990’s song by Haddaway, but it has some appropriate words, lol. Thank you to all my fellow bloggers and followers for your collective insight and support. I need all the help I can get.

This post will be brief. I’m sorta going through a rough patch on my battle with depression; this week, so bear with me.  I’m going to give you all a brief break for a week or so while I add a new outlet in a new genre called the Florida Jaycee Alumni.

 You may recall I was the president of the Florida Jaycees(Junior Chamber of Commerce) in 1990-91.  I spent over ten years of my life culminating in, at that time, a 20,000 member organization. My newly found reunion group that John F Kennedy, Gerald Ford, and many other prominent figures in the US were members and tout their success from those early days.

Going down this memory road has been fun but also tends to violate my own advice as to visit ONLY the past and not tarry too long; because this week was largely absorbing my mind in glory days and not “what do I do now” I sense that of us who were considered in many ways “overachievers” it seems not logical why we should just be content with our successes and move past the not so successful moments.

But the feeling of your best days are behind you, and the world is so different, albeit screwed up that there is no place for me.  If you are one of those garden variety depressants, then you know where I’m coming from.  I tell myself, and a cadre of others tell me, just to wait upon the Lord. Well, many times, I feel like I’m surrounded by two groups, those who await the coming apocalypse or those waiting for the return of Christ. 

 Many I fear are more like the Thessalonians (2 Thessalonians 3:6-15)  who just wanted to stop charging ahead, sit on their ass and wait for Jesus and drop out of the responsibility of earthly life.  I want to charge ahead, do good deeds, build things, demonstrate the power of a believer, in short, get off the bench and score some points for the good guys. I’m just stuck. The financial chains that bind me are great, but I have overcome worse; the deafening silence from God is unbearable, being unheard by those closest is breeding loneliness, and I have lost my passion for most everything. Writing this blog is different and somewhat satisfying, and hopefully, in my small way, I am helping others battle some of the same things I fight with.

I think my biggest challenge, while I’m not the sharpest tack in the box, is that I’ve become bored with the world I live in.  Change of scenery, activity, projects, business, theology, doesn’t appeal to me.  I’m not thrilled to be alive in this fallen world interrupted ever so rarely with a little hope and spark in others who are going somewhere. Don’t get me wrong I choose not to take my own life. I’m too close to the heavenly goal line to fumble the ball here and lose the game of eternal life and have the trap door open and drop into the smoking section (and I don’t even smoke).

 So, where am I? Jesus is there sometimes on a “just in time” basis. I talk to Jesus, and he answers with actions I can at least sense if not actually see and experience. The Heavenly Father, not so much. The world and everything I can sense seems to be whizzing by going nowhere, and what is it that I’m supposed to do? I feel disconnected from my environment, nothing to see here move on, to what?

 I give thanks daily to God for my provision, at least for now a roof over my head and a beautiful little piece of real estate, my wife, my kids, and my dog when they’re not mean to me lol. Still, I’m missing that calling, that mission, that thing that goes beyond Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 “meaningless Meaningless it’s all meaningless.”  Even the stuff I really thought was from God, and not my own understanding isn’t cutting it.  I have no choice but to wait upon the Lord.  Do I really have any other options?  Maybe someone can help me out here. 

As I let my mind wander, I’m taking yet another side trip from the Haiti story to what I woke this morning to write about, which is a topic relevant to my title. I have come up with a weird analogy of my state of mind periodically.  The state of depression for me right now is like being a passenger in a hurricane hunter plane; you’re going right through a storm. You seem somewhat safe in the plane because it’s a stout aircraft and is piloted by capable well-trained pilots (aka my doctors). Still, every time I go through the turbulence of anxiety and hopelessness, I begin to think that the 3 Stooges are at the helm, and we’re going to crash any moment.  Then we make it through to eye of the storm, where my home and family and my brief stops at my Bible Study Fellowship class, church, quiet times at home with my family, and Bear my dog give a reprieve to the unnerving journey. Then it’s back into the storm again. I look up in the eye, and I see peace from above the heavens and wonder why things are so dangerous around me.

I’m trying to fly the plane myself and find that, hell, I’m about as good at this as they are. God is my compass, but it is swinging back and forth between faith and despondence. I cling to a sense of direction through prayer so that I don’t end up getting lost in the Bermuda Triangle(too much Science channel, my guess).  I become so frustrated with myself because “here I am mentally paralyzed when folks coming home from war with arms, legs missing, trama from the horrors of war, those around me battling cancer and the like seem to find their place and start anew. I’ve lost some eyesight that makes me not safe to drive, Big deal! And yet, by comparison, my bar is low.  I surmise that we, no matter what the severity of our state is, we all share the despair of being left behind.  Everything we thought we used to do, relishing in what we got right and repenting for what was not so right, still isn’t enough to “put us back together.” I wish I had a quick cure for that. If I did, I would practice the posed question “physician…heal thyself”.  I have help.  I have prayer partners and close friends and family, and THAT’S what keeps me from losing my mind.  My neurologist just defaults to “the brain is complicated, and we don’t know a lot about how it works” (thanks captain obvious!).  I think my happy neurons got disconnected when my afib heart decided to wig out and threw a clot (so the experts say). I’m giving up the big problems to God; let Him work them out. That Isaiah 55:8 thing about my(God) thoughts are not your thoughts my(God) ways are not your ways, is a tough one to grasp when you are built with your DNA like mine; that says, “quit wasting time GET IT DONE.”

Here’s a good read if you need a little encouragement to the fact that God does exist, and he wonderfully created us even though we honestly don’t always “feel the love.” Imagine how He and Jesus feel/felt with us self-centered slugs daily, blaming Him for all our problems.  The book is by Francis Collins,  noted genome scientist and believing Christian called The Language of God.

For this post, this is all I’ve got, but I would encourage anyone reading this to share with me your trek through life we may have crossed paths and not known it.  Later today, I’ll try to finish the Haiti thing and have it in my next post.  Thank you, my followers, feel free to pass this down the line if it helps someone you know.