Growing up in the 1950s I had nowhere to turn but God to survive

 I'm writing this now because I realize that the experience of a child in the 1950s here in the U.S. is so different than if you grew up now in places like Los Angeles or Seattle where I mostly grew up along with San Diego.

I had great parents who didn't drink or smoke. My father was a good provider even though we were not rich. I had a grandmother (my mother's mother) that took care of me while my parents ran a church in Los Angeles from 1954 until 1960 when I was 12 years old. My father was an electrician and then became an Electrical Contractor when I was 12 in 1960 and I often worked for him and he paid me for this so I always had a bicycle, then a motorbike and then a car by age 16 from the money I made working for my father. But, this is only one side of the story of my life.

The other side is sheer terror of the health problems I faced from age 2 first with whooping Cough which I almost died from until Archangels came and saved me and I saw them when my grandmother sang "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" like in Christmas 1950 or 1951 when I was 2 or 3 years old. The Archangels saved my young life so I didn't die of whooping cough by the way.

So, there is this paradox to my life where on the one hand I was always a head taller than most people in my class at school and I had an uncle who was 6 foot 6 inches tall so I grew to around 6 foot 5 myself but that actually means i grew to 6 foot 4 1/2 inches tall. So, this height advantage and since I'm very sturdily built to the point where I never have broken any bones in my body except my nose and my little toe even though I have fallen up to 40 feet during my life but I do know how to roll to take away the shock of landing hard or wrong. So, I'm strong maybe like a football player in this way and always have been. So, I was never physically picked on by boys my own age only older ones so I really relate to the movie "Stand By Me" with River Phoenix before he died in real life made in 1986 because I had experiences pretty much like this from ages 5 to 12 years of age in Mt. Shasta at Shasta Springs walking along the railroad tracks with boys around my age alone without any adults with trains going by.

So, there was always this paradox of being big and strong and intelligent and capable of lifting great weights to the point where I could lift 1000 pounds if it was just my legs when I was in my early 20s. So, being so big and strong has some advantages. Also, girls started taking an interest in me starting at age 10 when one girl asked me to go steady but I wasn't mature enough for that. But, I was by age 15.

But, the secret side of my life was the whooping cough and what that does to a person psychologically. In some ways it strips your childhood away and you become fearful and scared from almost dying and more serious than other children. I made a friend who I gave my newspaper route to when I was 10 who had also had polio but had recovered by 6 or 7 years old who was like me in this way where we both were more serious and adult than most children or young adults our age.

Then around age 9 I fell and hit my head on a rock while rock climbing with my father in Chilao in the Angeles National Forest near Los Angeles at around 6000 to 7000 feet in elevation and I likely got a concussion but never went to a doctor because of how my father was then. We had to be very tough sort of like Cowboys and I was like that too in many ways then.

So, the concussion caused me to have seizures at night when I was asleep for 5 years time until my skull grew enough so that the pressure on my brain lessened enough. This is called blunt trauma childhood epilepsy but I don't think this was fully understood by any or many people in the 1950s yet. So, I had no idea until my son was studying to be a nurse in the 2000s that I had had this concussion caused childhood epilepsy. I didn't know much about it.

However, the terror of these seizures was like being murdered over and over again. This was my experience as a child where I would go into this and wake up on the floor with one of my parents holding my head so it didn't beat against a wall and kill me during a seizure. I fully expected at the time to die from this at the time eventually. Each seizure seemed to be worse than the last by the way. So, my death seemed inevitable to me. Finally, 3 years later my father took me to a doctor regarding the seizures and the doctor wanted me to take phenobarbital. My father refused to let me take this drug which is probably a good thing now because it was a bad drug in many ways in it's effects on a human body.

So, I was left with NOTHING to face this problem alone and so I expected to die from one of these seizures which were about like someone murdering you again and again and waking up after being unconscious for an hour or more each time.

I had nowhere to turn but God during all this. no medical intervention was allowed by my father at all. But, then again there wasn't much known about all this then either likely medically in the 1950s either.

And the best thing about all this is it kept me from being drafted into the Army and sent to Viet Nam during that war to die or get fucked up there with lifelong PTSD. So, in this sense God protected me so I could start businesses and get married and take care of myself and my children all these years instead of wandering the streets homeless like many Viet Nam Veterans are still doing today 50 years later.

The turning point was one seizure that I woke up in an "AURA" which is when you know one is coming on so I jumped out of bed and ran for my parents room but the door was ajar to my room and I nailed the edge of the open door with my nose in the dark and was knocked unconscious and I woke up in a pool of blood from my nose on the floor surrounding my head. My father had a butter knife trying to open my teeth and jaw so I didn't swallow my tongue and die during the seizure. 

He said to me: "Freddie! You've got to get some religion under your belt or you are going to die!"

This is exactly what he said to me. Now, some of you might consider this a form of child abuse saying this to a child now. But, to me, then I took him seriously and started going to church several times a week with my parents then because I was 14.

So, when the next seizure tried to happen I was ready and I screamed and invoked God into my life to live with me in my body.

God agreed with me and came into my body and the seizures stopped and never returned after that. 

However, becoming sort of like a  Prophet out of the Bible is not for everyone and I found having God literally move into my body with me very difficult to manage 24 hours a day because of the constant supernatural events that were occurring into, around and through me to everyone around me on earth.

So, this likely would have killed most people experiencing this but I guess I'm made of tougher stuff than most people.

But, by the time I was 30 years old I began to realize that I was a Gift from God to all mankind and all life in the universe.

God just radiates out through me and changes all lives around me for the better and this has been going on non-stop since I was about 15 years old now.

By God's Grace 

It's sort of like being one of God's Secret Agents on earth constantly changing lives for the better.