Friday, October 19, 2018
A Fresh Start
For
a second time that Saturday before Memorial Day emergency workers scrambled to save
the life of D.B. As they loaded him into
their ambulance they could see where his face had been charred by the tailpipe
of his 1969 Ford Galaxie 500. He had been pinned under the 2,000-pound car,
after his wife accidentally ran over his chest as he lay drunk on his front
lawn begging God to take him out of this world because his life was such a
mess. The night before, D.B. had been drinking with friends and then tried to
walk home from the bar only to pass out in the middle of the road on Main
Street in Southbridge, MA. After visiting the emergency room, he was sent home
to sleep it off. Instead, he drank even more. That is how he ended up on his front
lawn in a stupor. That was the weekend that convinced him he had hit rock
bottom and that something needed to change in his life.
D.B. recalls that he was actually an
answer to his parent's prayer for a child, after they had experienced many
miscarriages and lost a full-term baby girl due to her umbilical cord being
wrapped around her neck. A few years later his brother was born, and the
doctors told his mother to never try having another child. But they prayed, and
he was born. His mother was loving and doting, and she was a praying woman. His
father was always working and when he was not working he was drinking alcohol.
Wanting to be like his father, he started drinking and smoking when he was 13 years
old and was an alcoholic by the time he was 17 years old.
After many alcohol-induced accidents
which should have taken his life and several brushes with the law which should
have put him in jail, he joined the Navy and began hanging around with people
that were addicted to alcohol. Then drugs became the norm. After being released
from active duty from the Navy, his drinking became heavier and many more
accidents ensued. One accident which should have killed D.B. involved a drunken
motorcycle race. When his front tire locked up he was catapulted down the road
at 70 miles per hour wearing only a T-shirt and dungarees. He lost a lot of
skin on that one, but he believes the prayers of his mother kept him from dying.
Then came the Memorial Day weekend
that marked the beginning of the end of his old life. Shortly after he returned
to work in Hartford while training a new employee, the trainee actually started
to train Him - using the Bible. D.B. was hungry for God at that point and
realized that this life is way too short to live it controlled by substances.
The trainee invited him to church, where he received the Holy Ghost and spoke
in tongues as the Spirit of God gave the utterance just like the Disciples and
Jesus’ mother did (see Acts 2). He was then baptized in the name of Jesus
Christ for the remission of his sins. Almost
forty years later his testimony is: “since that day I have never gotten into
another accident induced by alcohol or drugs.”
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