I woke up almost freezing and realized that our electricity was off due to surrounding storms.
My memory flashed back to January, 1962 when we lived in the country, often without heat after our daddy died.
I was thirteen and living two and a half miles out in the woods from Noel, Missouri.
I found myself in what I sensed as a dangerous situqtion
with some older teenagers in an apartment in town. With no cell phone, home phone or means of transportation for my mother to come and get me I saw only one way of escape.
I put on my coat and scarf, bare-legged, and headed home on the dark country road, which fortunately had no turns as I sped home to our house in the woods. With no streets lights and only three or four houses on that road I looked straight ahead being able to follow my sense of direction because we walked the road to buy groceries in town.
Getting home is still fresh in my mind now over sixty-three years later. My poor child-like mother, who had suffered a head injury as a child, was so scared she hardly knew what to say when she saw me standing there barely able to talk. I asked her to fix me something hot to drink.
I was just grateful to have arrived safely with no physical harm.
Within a few hours I was really sick and my mother headed down that same road at night to call Doctor Silas Fountain, our family doctor in Noel, Missouri, who had delivered me at home in 1948 while we lived five miles from South West City, Missouri in the same backwoods country area.
The little red-headed, mustached country doctor put us in his car and took us into town to further check me out, giving gave me shots and medicine, before taking us back home.
Those were the days when doctors made house calls.
A few days later I made my decision while sitting on the floor in the unheated cabin in the woods when I said “I will rise up from whence I came,” not knowing where those words came from or what that would entail.
My mother and I were in town getting ready to carry our groceries home when Earnest and Natalie Young, a young Christian couple, asked if they could take us home and then if they could come back and take us to church the next day. The answer was yes. Within about a month I made my decision to be baptized at the Grove, Oklahoma church where Fred Webb was the minister.
It took courage for this underweight, shy girl, to have the courage to answer the invitation but that simple decision wasn’t simple after all!
That decision made all the difference in our lives because Fred Webb and Earnest Young came to my school in Noel and asked to take me out for a conference in their car and asked me if I would like to go to an orphanage because they sensed the danger that our family was in due to our mother’s in-ability to function as a mother.
Its difficult to raise yourself.
My immediate answer was yes.
At the age of seventy six, 1962 seems as though it were yesterday and I know that God wants me to share my story because He has always pulled me through the tight places in life when I have gotten in over my head and faced situations that were daunting.
I tell my stories to not only leave a legacy for my friends and family but to give you the courage to share your life experiences because we never know who may just need to open up to others.
We all have a story. Jesus always gets me to the right place time. Without Him I can do nothing.
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