My Daddy Carried Me... My Father Led Me

During my childhood, I was often described as "sickly." I had  bouts of nausea and vomiting lasting twenty or thirty hours, leaving me weak and gaunt. This happened on a regular basis, several times a year. When I was thirteen, I had one of those episodes that lasted several days. I didn't get better. I became so weak I couldn’t stand up. My legs were like cooked noodles; they wouldn’t hold me up.

That's when Mama got scared and called the police. (In those days we didn't have 911.) She called the police because she didn't know any other way to contact Daddy, who was working on a lathing job in Delano. No one had cell phones or even car phones. The police found him and told him Mama said for him to come home right away, because Jean needed to go to the doctor. 

I think that was the only time my Daddy ever held me. He carried me out to the car, and then from the car into the doctor’s office and through the waiting room into an examining room. Even though I was skin and bones and only thirteen, I probably weighed about eighty pounds. He just picked me up as if I were a feather… I remember the smell of him, all grime and sweat... I also remember how safe I felt; I had me a Daddy, and he take me where I could get the help I needed.

The doctor suspected I had appendicitis, so Daddy and Mama took me to Bakersfield, to Kern General Hospital. It turned out my appendix had ruptured and I had surgery the next day. They filled me with penicillin. Obviously I didn't die. One of my uncles had died a few years earlier from appendicitis, because they had not discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic. 

I stayed in the hospital a week, and my parents drove up to see me every day. Once I was able to walk around after the operation, I went up and down the halls and visited with the other patients. 

The children’s ward was full, so they had placed me in the adult area. I could hear a woman screaming and crying down the hall from me. I wondered what was happening to her. I didn’t know exactly where she was, only that I could hear her. 

One day when I was walking along the hospital hall, I found myself quite far from my room. Suddenly I heard the crying and screaming again, and realized this patient inside the nearby door was the one I had been hearing. I went to her bedside and she calmed down. We had a good conversation and after hearing her anxiousness that she was going to die, I told her about Jesus’ healing power, and saving power, too. She prayed and received the Lord. It was like a light came on in her face. An amazing change happened in her.

Now that was not a normal thing for me. From my perspective, kids didn’t tell adults what to do. It was always the other way around. The adult spoke; the child listened and obeyed. But when I approached the bedside of that suffering woman, my Father took over my speech, saying what He wanted her to hear. My Father used me, a child, to speak hope, healing, and salvation to her. 

I learned something important that day:  My Father loves even those sinners who scream and cuss. If I had known the room I entered was the one where all the foul language had been coming from, I might not have gone in there. 

My Daddy had carried me, but my Father led me...