Walking the path

(6-minute read)

I attended an elementary school in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, when I was eight. After school, I would take a city bus back to my neighborhood. One day on the bus, a man started talking to me about the YMCA and everything to do there. He asked me if I wanted to go with him that day. I told him I couldn’t go unless I went home first and asked my mom if it was okay. He decided to go with me to our house to ask her. As we got off the bus, he said he needed to go by his house and pick up his YMCA card so we could get in. He lived one block off my usual route from the bus stop home.

As we got to his house, he said he lived in the basement with its own door. When we went in, the only furniture was a double bed with end tables and a lamp. The floor for half the basement was concrete, and the rest was dirt. He kept asking me questions, and I never saw him pick up his YMCA card.

Suddenly, a presence came into the room between me and the man. I couldn’t see anyone between us, but the presence was so strong that I was puzzled about why I couldn’t see it. It was a confronting presence not towards me but towards the man. I had never felt anything like this before, and even though it wasn’t hostile towards me, I became terrified. I looked at the man, and he looked afraid.

“I need to go home,” I said.

“Yeah, sure. Let’s go,” the man replied.

As we got back on the sidewalk towards my home, the man seemed to get over being afraid, and his personality reverted to how it was on the bus. When we reached my house, I asked him to wait on the sidewalk while I went and asked my mom if I could go.

I went inside, told my mom about the man, and asked her to tell him I couldn’t go. She went to the door and said to the man, “Donnie can’t go with you. If he wants to go in the future, his brothers will take him.”

Weeks later, the man came to our house on Christmas Day and asked for me. My dad said, “I’ll go talk to him. Why don’t you stay here and play with the toys you got for Christmas.” One or two of my older brothers went with my dad to talk to the man. My father wasn’t someone who was known for subtleties. I never saw the man again.

It was another year before my brother Fred told me about sex, which I didn’t believe at first. It was another several years before I had any idea of what that man may have had in mind in that basement. As an adult, I have often wondered why God saved me that day when others weren’t saved from similar danger. I was changed by this incident in ways I initially did not understand. Evil does exist in the world.

Unfortunately, I’ve known a number of evil men in my lifetime. A very few were obviously insane. The vast majority were friendly, intelligent, well-spoken, highly manipulative, and secretly untethered by the truth or morality. Children have no defense against such people. Even teenagers are easily taken in and manipulated by them.

My children had to grow up suffering the effects of an overprotective dad. When my son, Stephen, was 12, we went to a serve-yourself soup and salad restaurant after church one Sunday. Customers were constantly moving around and refilling their bowls and plates.

Partway through the meal, Stephen needed to go to the restroom. I said, “Okay, I’ll go with you.” My daughter, who was nine years older, pointed out that we could see the men’s room door from our table.

I said, “I know. I don’t mind going with him.”

“But it’s right there. I’ll help you keep an eye on the door.”

Standing up to go with Stephen, I said, “We’ll just be a minute.”

Later, my daughter said, “I always thought you were overly protective because I was a girl.”

“No, I’m equally paranoid with all my children.”

Years ago, I was told of a man I knew who let it be known that he wanted to marry a girl he knew from church who was 12 years old. It’s not his name, but let’s call him Bill. As near as I remember, Bill was around 40. I felt the Lord saying to me that I should go and minister to him.

“Lord, don’t make me go.”

In my mind’s eye, I immediately saw Jesus stopping to minister to the demon-possessed man on the road. Inside all that evil was a man being held captive, and Jesus loved the man. Jesus was his only hope. I wanted to tell the Lord I didn’t know how to take the Lord to someone caught up in such delusions, but I knew from experience that if I went, the Lord would show me what to do. So, I had to admit the truth.

“Lord, I don’t want to go. People like that frighten me.”

I don’t really understand many things about childhood trauma. I know the Lord doesn’t want me to either wallow in it, take it on as an identity, or be held captive by it. But I still didn’t want to go. I wanted Bill and his problem to just go away.

“Lord, can I love him from a distance. A great distance, if possible, Lord.” I realized at the time that I was redefining the word love.

I felt the Lord saying, “He’s in trouble. Can you just go and be with him?”

After much discussion (pleading) with the Lord, I called Bill on the phone and asked if I could come and see him. I couldn’t tell if Bill was angry or afraid when I arrived, but he had a strange, unwelcoming look.

“You’ve come to minister to me?” Bill asked.

“No. The Lord told me you were in trouble and said I should come and be with you.”

His demeanor immediately changed. He smiled and said, “Would you like a cup of tea?”

As we talked that day, as expected, Bill did the “God told me” and the “I’ve done nothing wrong” thing. He was belligerent. He was angry that people were angry with him. For a moment, it seemed like he was approaching rage, and I reached over and put my hand on him to pray for him. It suddenly hit me that I didn’t know what to pray. I said nothing, but he immediately calmed down and began to repent, not about the thing with the young girl, but something else. This repeated several times, with his demeanor softening and him turning to the Lord whenever I touched him. I was apparently no help here, and the Lord needed to do everything.

Just before I left that day, he said, “I’m supposed to meet with the men at the church to talk about things. Would you sit with me at that meeting?”

“Sure.”

I sat next to him at the meeting with the church. I discovered that when he was overly defensive, and I touched him, he would soften and become more agreeable but didn’t recognize anything that looked like repentance. In the end, the church arranged for him to join a ministry that dealt with people with his particular problem. Shortly after that, we moved to Florida, but before we left, I visited him a couple of times at that ministry.

I don’t know the rest of the story about Bill, but I was changed by the encounter. I discovered that sometimes God breaks the chains that hold me captive, and at that moment, I can choose to follow the Lord, or can pretend to still be bound and remain in captivity.