Voice From the Womb
"Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour" 1Peter 5:8
"In a dream, in a vision of the night.. he opens the ears of men and terrifies them with warnings, that he may turn man aside from his deed.. he keeps back his soul from the Pit" Job 33:15-18
I trekked up the side of the driveway with my 9 year old daughter and after positioning her on the toboggan, let her slide back down the driveway and across the bridge at the bottom at high speed. I told her to steer by leaning her body. Then my six year old cried, "I want to do that!", so I had to trek her up the hill also. I decided not to tell her about leaning her body to steer because she wouldn't understand, so I just aimed her in the right direction and let her go. I immediately realized my mistake and said, "God help her!" I watched anxiously as she veered slightly to the right and at the bottom of the hill, just before she went into the creek, she nicked my 3 year old son who happened to be sitting on the right side and fell off the toboggan, and both she and the toboggan disappeared into the creek. I galloped down the driveway without slipping and beat my wife and other kids to the creek; they had been on the left side watching, just like in my dream. With my wife's cursing load in my ears I found Heidi wedged between the creek bank and a log; she did not fall into the rocks, which would have been fatal. High on adrenaline, I grabbed her up and rushed her in my car to a doctor in the snow to verify if she was OK. No harm done!
I interpreted my dream to mean that the devil, symbolized by the lion, would be allowed to obtain the death of one of my daughters if I did not give up drinking and change my ways. Considering my life at that point, I decided to heed the dream and redouble my efforts to stop drinking. Married with 4 children, I could stop drinking for weeks on end but then an opportunity to “binge” drink would come along and I would go out of control, which often led to my doing worse things. So I stopped drinking once again.
It was a miracle to me that could have gone very wrong if my son was not where he was to interfere with Heidi. That event showed me the Mercy and the Justice of God. He could have let her die, but in His Mercy let her live, a favor obtained I believe through the intercession of Mary by praying the rosary. My life changed 180 degrees. I gave up drinking, smoking cigars, and adultery all at that moment!
Several months later I decided to quit the job at Waterford Nuclear Station III and we moved back to Georgia. I had picked up drinking and bad behavior again but only for a brief while and repented. On Friday January 8, 1988, the entire Atlanta area was smothered in 6 inches of snow and ice. That was a good opportunity for me to take the kids out on the toboggan and sled around the bottom of a mountain where we lived and enjoy the beautiful snow in Emerson. A neighbor who lived further up the hill had a long, steep driveway leading down to a short bridge over the narrow creek about 10 feet deep and full of jagged rocks that ran along the road in front of our properties.
My real life drinking buddy and I were sitting on a couch admiring our rifles, when in walked a full grown healthy lioness striding by right in front of us. "We ought to shoot that lion", said one. "Yes, we ought to shoot that lion", said the other. But we did nothing and the lion walked unimpeded off to the right and around behind the couch. I got up to follow it and found myself looking out a bay window down a snow-covered landscape all white, with my family off to the left far down below, and a pool of yellowish liquid off to the right. I heard a voice say, "There lies your dear darling daughter".
The First Deadly Dream
I had a lot of time to think while walking home in the dark for seven miles along a lonely Georgia state highway. I had just wrecked my car for the second time after falling asleep at the wheel after a night of drinking and carousing in Marietta. Drinking had a hold on me. My mother had told me the Blessed Virgin Mary had been appearing to 6 children in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia. Miracles were happening, people were coming back to the church after 30 years and confessing their sins, lives were changing, so I thought maybe this is what I needed. I decided to read her messages and the homilies of the local priests in that area. She asked that we pray the rosary daily from the heart, a prayer based on the scriptural life of Jesus; make little sacrifices for ourselves and others, such as fasting, quitting smoking or drinking or limiting television. I prayed the rosary daily for the intention of quitting drinking. A new job opportunity in the meantime had led me to La Place, Louisiana near New Orleans. Soon afterwards I received a dream.
Fortunately for me, I had taken a course in Dreamology at the University of Florida, or rather God had led me to take it for his own plan. We studied the concepts put forth by Carl Jung and learned to keep a pad of paper and pen at our bedside to enable the prompt writing down a dream upon awakening before the details vanished in the waking hours. Especially important were the intense dreams that may have a message for us. So I wrote,