Wilson

Wilson. As in Tom Hanks friend who is a volleyball in the movie Castaway. I find myself periodically watching the part in the movie where he goes into the toilet facilities on board the Fedex plane and the plane begins to fall out of the sky on through to when he makes fire on the deserted island and starts drinking from coconuts to stay alive.

Somehow a part of me needs to watch this. There have been times in my life that remind me a lot of this part of the movie. You know, the parts where you are traumatized by events out of your control and don't know whether you can survive them or not. These are always moments of truth and of wonder.

There haven't been many moments like this that permanently changed my life in a way I didn't necessarily want but at that point it doesn't appear I had much choice in the matter but to simply survive the situation. Sometimes now, years later I know that God did this to me because I still had work to do on earth. The last extremely traumatic event of the kind I'm referring to happened in 1994 for me.

The shock of those events led directly to my getting a heart virus in 1998 and almost physically dying. At which point I had to decide to give up my anger enough to at least stay alive for my then new wife and all my children.

Now I'm fine but it appears the world isn't. So I have the feeling that God tested me in the way he needed me to grow and I survived and I even prospered. There was a cartoon once that I watched on TV as a child in the 1950's. In it someone reached up a Camel's behind and pulled his head outside his rear end and turned him inside out. The Camel said in funny style, "Don't Ever do that Again!" I guess that was my reaction too in 1994 when I didn't think I would survive the events in my life.

There are times in most of our lives that we need a Wilson Volleyball to talk to just like Tome Hanks did in his Castaway movie to survive that terrible aloneness. However, the loneliest time in my life I think was the last 7 years in my 2nd marriage. (However, to be fair the first 7 years were the best in my life then).

It is amazing what people can survive when they have to. Many times what is hard to survive isn't at all what one might imagine!