Problems gain as much weight as you give them. Where David saw the giant, everyone else ran, but David said, “Can't miss.” Pastor Conicious (I know I spelled it wrong. I can't remember how it was spelled.) sat at the head of the table, in his wheelchair, telling a story. He hadn't touched his meal, busy telling us about his childhood in Uganda. We were at a mountain lodge with Mom's friend, Debbie, and her husband, Matt, and their son, Daniel, and Pastor Conicious. That man is an inspiration. He's gone through so much that, you're listening to him thinking, “Man, I've got to be more thankful for what I've got.” When he was seven years old, he was on the way home through the jungles of Uganda when a puff adder bit him. Now just to give you an idea, puff adders inject more venom than any other snake in the world. Grown men die within hours and he was two miles from home, in the middle of the jungle and it started to rain. He said that he had to crawl and it was raining so hard that the path became like a river and he was holding onto a tree trunk to keep from being swept away by the current. His father, about one mile away heard him finally, screaming for help and carried him home. It was during a civil war in Uganda, so the roads weren't safe and the hospital was 80 miles away. So, he stayed home for 3 weeks before it was getting too much, (he said that the flesh was literally rotting and there were maggots eating away at his flesh. I'm not going to go into too much detail, because it disgusted me.) and his dad said, “If I die, I'm going to die trying to save him.” So he took Conicious in a bike, to the hospital 80 miles away and he barely survived. For you all who live in Florissant/Divide/Woodland Park area, just to put that in perspective, that's like biking from your house to Denver. I can hardly bike around our neighborhood hood twice without nearly dying (yes, I know. I need to get in better shape:) After two months in the hospital, they managed to get all the poison out of him. He went home and right after that, got measles and almost died from that. He said maybe four months after that, he got polio, a disease that left him crippled. After he got over that, he couldn't walk. So, he put rubber boots on his knees, to protect them, and crawled nearly two miles to school, learned, crawled two miles back, changed his clothes and crawled two miles to church and back. And I think of how sometimes on Sunday morning, I'm like, “It's too cold. I'm too tired. I really don't feel like going to church today and being social.” I got the feeling that was only part of his story. I really want to hear the rest. “Everyone has a story to tell, even when you think that it's not important.” There was one story he told to give an example of this. He was living at an orphanage and he had hiked to this big city and saved up enough money to buy himself a fancy pair of pants. They were a little too big for him, he realized when he got home, so he sent them to a tailor for him to bring them in a little. When he got them back, the man had cut them into shorts. He said that he was really mad and he asked God why he would let that happen. He told this story at a church he preached at and he said a woman had her hair cut badly by this hair stylist and she was prepared to never forgive him, and he helped her realize that she didn't need to hold on to little things.
He was talking about how he blamed God for his polio. "Why God?" He'd ask. "Why do I have to be crippled?" He said that one day he saw a man who was crippled and disfigured, begging for money on the streets, and he asked himself, "Why are you not begging on the streets?" And he realized that wherever you have suffering, someone is suffering more. He was an inspiration and he had an impeccable memory. Holy cow. He was talking about when he was eight and he got polio in September on a Friday. How do you remember that? Anyway, I had a great time listening to his stories and this post is going on way too long, so I'll finish it up.
1 Comment
Jessica
10/30/2014 04:59:00 am
Hannah,
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About Me!Hannah writes to satisfy her imagination. She's written six books so far--five of which need to be rewritten--and is working on a seventh. She ranges through a variety of genres, but favors contemporary YA, fixing broken characters. She wants to use her writing to change people and bring hope. She's currently going to college for Nursing and that takes up most of her writing time. She's a rather stereotypical writer, talking to imaginary friends, eavesdropping on people at the store, secretly being nosy, stashing herself away in her room with a paper and pen and chocolate and her teddy bear. She loves Jesus, the way the morning smells, her family of seven (four siblings), old movies, fairy tales, candles at night and helping people. She writes on another blog at nerdywriter.blogspot.com to hopefully build her chances of publication. My Author Site:Archives
December 2016
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