Post by watchmanjim on Apr 24, 2017 15:45:10 GMT -6
I just wanted to share this here. I suppose this might be the best category to put it under.
Clenched in the Hand of God
4/23/17
When I came home from Australia in February of 1998, I was 20 years old. My leg was healing from the dirt bike accident I had in Victoria when I hit the cow 12/31/97. I came back from Australia earlier than I expected to due to conflict with the host family I was staying with in Katamatite / Cobram.
I arrived back in Maine in mid-to-late February and began looking for work. However, this is a very poor time to be looking for work in Maine. My dad let me go back into the woods and cut pulpwood to sell.
Cutting pulpwood is the old fall-back for making money when you’re down and out in Maine, especially in the winter-time. You won’t get rich cutting pulp, but at least you’ll make a little money.
My parents owned sixty acres of woods in Clinton, Maine. We were the last house on our road. The woods extended beyond our house several miles. Our land was long and skinny, with other people’s woods on all sides of it.
My dad had me cut aspen trees—known locally as “popple” since they are a species of poplar. My dad referred to them as the biggest weeds in the woods. They were good for little besides pulp wood, and they didn’t even bring as much money as fir and spruce pulpwood. I would cut down two trees, and drag them out of the woods with my dad’s 1948 John Deere tractor. It could only pull two at a time—that’s all it could handle. I guestimated that each log was worth about $2-3. If I hustled, I could make one complete cycle in about an hour. I figured I was only making about $4-5 per hour. It was better than nothing, and you have to remember that was about minimum wage at the time.
It’s rather cold in Maine in February and early March. I’m not sure what the date was, but I had been logging for several days at that time. I headed into the woods and had a fairly successful day. My dad departed for his second-shift job 40 miles away in Augusta, and I drove into the woods late in the afternoon to see if I could bring two more trees out before dark. There was fairly thick snow on the ground, and the temperature was probably around 20 degrees Ferenheit. I wore layers I could strip off, since I often got hot working hard in the woods.
I drove the tractor deep into the woods to a place I remembered seeing several popple trees that needed to be cut. I parked it and shut it off.
Now—let me back up a minute and tell you about my spiritual state at the time. My 4.5 months in Australia had been exhausting to me spiritually. I have many regrets for the time I spent there, especially that I did not remain as strong in the Lord as I should have. When I came home, it was with a bit of a bleak outlook on my future. Coming back from a 100 degree Australian summer to a 20 degree Maine winter didn’t help my outlook. In Oz I had been away from Christian believers nearly 100% of the time, with a few exceptions. I had neglected my walk with the Lord, and leaned unto mine own understanding. I wanted big things in my life—I wanted to own a farm. I had graduated from Bob Jones a year earlier with a 3-year Associates Degree in agriculture at the young age of 19 and wanted to move on in my life.
As I got off the tractor and took the chainsaw over to the stand of popple trees, I don’t know what all I was thinking about, other than cutting those trees down. There were several close together. I started the chainsaw and began to cut. I aimed the first tree in a direction I hoped would bring it crashing all the way to the ground. But unfortunately, it didn’t fall all the way down, but hung up in a second popple tree, leaning at an angle.
Now I had grown up in the woods, and I knew of the danger of this situation. One tree leaning into another tree is sometimes called a widow-maker. I was aware it was not good. But I was 20 years old and wiser than the ancients. I thought to myself that it was just a good thing that this tree hung up in another popple tree, since I wanted to cut it down anyway. If it had hung up in some other kind of tree, it would have been unfortunate. So I moved in under the leaning tree to cut down the second tree, the one it was leaning against. I knew that when the second tree began to fall, I would need to jump out of the way so that the first tree did not hit me. I felt I had a good plan, and that I could dodge the odds.
I cut my felling notch on the second tree, and then began to cut my relief cut on the opposite side. At some point something happened—I FORGOT that the first tree was hung up in the second tree. I don’t know how I forgot, but it just goes to show that we as humans are fallible and we can’t think of everything. Sometimes we are WRONG.
I watched with satisfaction as the second tree began to topple into the woods. My happiness was unceremoniously interrupted by a swift blow to the side of the head.
I don’t know exactly how long I had been unconscious. I don’t suppose it was more than a few minutes. When I came to, with a massive pain on the right side of my head, I found that I was trapped by the chest. One of the trees I had cut was behind my back, and the other was in front of my chest. I was suspended and my feet just touched the ground, but if I lifted them, my whole weight was supported by the two trees, which gripped me like giant chopsticks, tortionally stressed on both ends by other trees they had fallen between. The pressure on my chest was so extreme that I could just barely breathe.
I immediately started struggling, trying to get out. I pushed with all my might. My hands were free and I was able to push on the logs. I had dropped the chainsaw when I was hit, and it was out of reach. I struggled and panicked for a short while. I found I could wiggle a little between the logs, but my breath was very short and I was afraid I would pass out again. Even more severe, I was afraid that if I did succeed in wiggling down between the logs, that instead of my chest, I would be caught by my neck and certainly suffocate quickly.
I stopped panicking and took account. I was trapped. No one was around. I was a quarter mile down in the woods, with the closest people being my mom and my sister in our house. I had no cell phone or electronic device of any kind with me, and could not reach any tools, sticks, or other things to do anything to help my situation. Before cutting that tree, I had taken off my jacket and sweatshirt and was down to my tee-shirt and jeans in the 20 degree temperature. Already I was beginning to feel chilled. I tried to cry out for help, but my lungs were so compressed by the logs that I could just get enough air to keep conscious, and I couldn’t make my voice carry.
It was late afternoon—around 4:30 I guessed—though I didn’t know for sure. In another hour or so the sun would go down. I knew my mom would start noticing if I wasn’t back by dark—but she wouldn’t worry too much, knowing I had good night-vision and would sometimes make my last trip out of the woods after sundown and park the tractor at the house in the dark. She would give me some more time before she took any action—maybe another half hour. At that point, the action I assumed she would take would be to call my dad at work and mention that I wasn’t back yet. He might tell her to give me another fifteen minutes. Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t. Even if she took action right then and there, she could either send my sister out with her dog to look for me, or she could call a neighbor to go back and look for me, or she could possibly call the fire department or police. The quickest possibility would be if she sent my sister out. It would probably take Page (aged about 13 at the time) about fifteen minutes more to get bundled up and even possibly cover the ground necessary to find me. Monte the dog may or may not have been any help in determining which of several different logging roads I had driven down. If Page kept her wits about her, she might have been able to pick out the freshest tractor tracks in the snow. None of this could I count on. Nor even that she would dare come looking for me, or that Mom would send her after dark.
Even if Page did find me, dead or alive, she would have to run back to the house and tell my mom, who would have to call the fire department, who would take at least ten minutes to arrive at the house, and a minimum of another ten to fifteen minutes to get back into the woods where I was. No matter how I sliced it, I couldn’t imagine help coming to me any less than 2 and a half hours later. And knowing how things tend to happen, I figured it would almost certainly be more than that.
I looked around the quiet woods, watching my breath condense as I labored to stay alert. My chest felt crushed, and I wondered if I had cracked my skull. It wasn’t hunting season—at this time of year, there was absolutely no reason for anyone else to be in those woods within earshot, even if I could cry out.
It was then I realized that I, Jim Davis, at the tender age of 20, was almost certain to die. I began to shiver and quake as my body cooled down and the sweat threatened to freeze against me. It was only me and God. I didn’t know whether I would suffocate first, or die of hypothermia. The day of reckoning had come. I would shortly meet my maker.
I had made a confession of faith in Christ when I was five years old. I remember that night. My dad prayed with me, and had me pray, and told me that if I meant it, I was saved. Later, at the age of 8, I learned more fully what salvation was and entered into a much more meaningful relationship with God. I don’t know which time to count as my real day of salvation. It matters little—the point is that I trusted Jesus to save me, and I was His. Sadly, at times I had drifted away from daily meaningful communication with God. Recently had been one of those times.
As I hung there, I focused on my Lord and addressed Him directly. “Well, God, I guess you’ve got me exactly where you want me. I can’t get out. It looks like I’m likely to end here, but it is not the end. I know you—I have trusted you for my salvation. I’m ready to meet you now, if that is what you have for me. I am ready. Lord, I know that you can use my death for your glory, and I’m all right with that. But if you can bring more glory to yourself by my life than by my death, please get me out of here.”
At that point I relaxed and sank down, a deep peace filling my soul. I was willing to live, willing to die. A strong resolve welled up inside me, and I knew that for the sake of life, liberty, and honor, I needed to make one last valiant attempt to free myself. I gathered my strength, and felt a surge of adrenalin course through my veins.
Suddenly, the strength of the Holy Spirit came upon me, like Samson of old, and I threw back the two logs and dropped my body and head down between them. Barely had my head cleared, when the logs slammed back together above me with a loud bang. I sank down on the ground, gasping for breath, giddy with excitement, my heart beating like mad.
Shaking, I crawled over to my sweatshirt, put it on, then gathered up my coat, the chainsaw, and all my things. I started the tractor and drove slowly out of the woods in a daze. I briefly told my mom and sister what had happened. The side of my face was all scuffed up and my ear, too, where the log had scraped me. I had a big bump on the head. God saved me from the jaws of death that day.
It has been nineteen years now, since that happened. I have had a lot of ups and downs in life. Sometimes I have been close to the Lord, and too often, not. But every time I start to get disheartened, I like to think back to that day in the woods where I gave my life back to God, and He gave it back to me. Every day I live is living on borrowed time. Every gift, every blessing, every trial, every reward, and every service I’m able to participate in is a bonus, an extra, a freebee, something that by all rights I never should have experienced. Many times since, when things have looked grim, I have told God again—“If you can bring more glory to yourself through my death, then by all means, take me. But if you can bring more glory through my life, then spare me, and bring me through.”
Clenched in the Hand of God
4/23/17
When I came home from Australia in February of 1998, I was 20 years old. My leg was healing from the dirt bike accident I had in Victoria when I hit the cow 12/31/97. I came back from Australia earlier than I expected to due to conflict with the host family I was staying with in Katamatite / Cobram.
I arrived back in Maine in mid-to-late February and began looking for work. However, this is a very poor time to be looking for work in Maine. My dad let me go back into the woods and cut pulpwood to sell.
Cutting pulpwood is the old fall-back for making money when you’re down and out in Maine, especially in the winter-time. You won’t get rich cutting pulp, but at least you’ll make a little money.
My parents owned sixty acres of woods in Clinton, Maine. We were the last house on our road. The woods extended beyond our house several miles. Our land was long and skinny, with other people’s woods on all sides of it.
My dad had me cut aspen trees—known locally as “popple” since they are a species of poplar. My dad referred to them as the biggest weeds in the woods. They were good for little besides pulp wood, and they didn’t even bring as much money as fir and spruce pulpwood. I would cut down two trees, and drag them out of the woods with my dad’s 1948 John Deere tractor. It could only pull two at a time—that’s all it could handle. I guestimated that each log was worth about $2-3. If I hustled, I could make one complete cycle in about an hour. I figured I was only making about $4-5 per hour. It was better than nothing, and you have to remember that was about minimum wage at the time.
It’s rather cold in Maine in February and early March. I’m not sure what the date was, but I had been logging for several days at that time. I headed into the woods and had a fairly successful day. My dad departed for his second-shift job 40 miles away in Augusta, and I drove into the woods late in the afternoon to see if I could bring two more trees out before dark. There was fairly thick snow on the ground, and the temperature was probably around 20 degrees Ferenheit. I wore layers I could strip off, since I often got hot working hard in the woods.
I drove the tractor deep into the woods to a place I remembered seeing several popple trees that needed to be cut. I parked it and shut it off.
Now—let me back up a minute and tell you about my spiritual state at the time. My 4.5 months in Australia had been exhausting to me spiritually. I have many regrets for the time I spent there, especially that I did not remain as strong in the Lord as I should have. When I came home, it was with a bit of a bleak outlook on my future. Coming back from a 100 degree Australian summer to a 20 degree Maine winter didn’t help my outlook. In Oz I had been away from Christian believers nearly 100% of the time, with a few exceptions. I had neglected my walk with the Lord, and leaned unto mine own understanding. I wanted big things in my life—I wanted to own a farm. I had graduated from Bob Jones a year earlier with a 3-year Associates Degree in agriculture at the young age of 19 and wanted to move on in my life.
As I got off the tractor and took the chainsaw over to the stand of popple trees, I don’t know what all I was thinking about, other than cutting those trees down. There were several close together. I started the chainsaw and began to cut. I aimed the first tree in a direction I hoped would bring it crashing all the way to the ground. But unfortunately, it didn’t fall all the way down, but hung up in a second popple tree, leaning at an angle.
Now I had grown up in the woods, and I knew of the danger of this situation. One tree leaning into another tree is sometimes called a widow-maker. I was aware it was not good. But I was 20 years old and wiser than the ancients. I thought to myself that it was just a good thing that this tree hung up in another popple tree, since I wanted to cut it down anyway. If it had hung up in some other kind of tree, it would have been unfortunate. So I moved in under the leaning tree to cut down the second tree, the one it was leaning against. I knew that when the second tree began to fall, I would need to jump out of the way so that the first tree did not hit me. I felt I had a good plan, and that I could dodge the odds.
I cut my felling notch on the second tree, and then began to cut my relief cut on the opposite side. At some point something happened—I FORGOT that the first tree was hung up in the second tree. I don’t know how I forgot, but it just goes to show that we as humans are fallible and we can’t think of everything. Sometimes we are WRONG.
I watched with satisfaction as the second tree began to topple into the woods. My happiness was unceremoniously interrupted by a swift blow to the side of the head.
I don’t know exactly how long I had been unconscious. I don’t suppose it was more than a few minutes. When I came to, with a massive pain on the right side of my head, I found that I was trapped by the chest. One of the trees I had cut was behind my back, and the other was in front of my chest. I was suspended and my feet just touched the ground, but if I lifted them, my whole weight was supported by the two trees, which gripped me like giant chopsticks, tortionally stressed on both ends by other trees they had fallen between. The pressure on my chest was so extreme that I could just barely breathe.
I immediately started struggling, trying to get out. I pushed with all my might. My hands were free and I was able to push on the logs. I had dropped the chainsaw when I was hit, and it was out of reach. I struggled and panicked for a short while. I found I could wiggle a little between the logs, but my breath was very short and I was afraid I would pass out again. Even more severe, I was afraid that if I did succeed in wiggling down between the logs, that instead of my chest, I would be caught by my neck and certainly suffocate quickly.
I stopped panicking and took account. I was trapped. No one was around. I was a quarter mile down in the woods, with the closest people being my mom and my sister in our house. I had no cell phone or electronic device of any kind with me, and could not reach any tools, sticks, or other things to do anything to help my situation. Before cutting that tree, I had taken off my jacket and sweatshirt and was down to my tee-shirt and jeans in the 20 degree temperature. Already I was beginning to feel chilled. I tried to cry out for help, but my lungs were so compressed by the logs that I could just get enough air to keep conscious, and I couldn’t make my voice carry.
It was late afternoon—around 4:30 I guessed—though I didn’t know for sure. In another hour or so the sun would go down. I knew my mom would start noticing if I wasn’t back by dark—but she wouldn’t worry too much, knowing I had good night-vision and would sometimes make my last trip out of the woods after sundown and park the tractor at the house in the dark. She would give me some more time before she took any action—maybe another half hour. At that point, the action I assumed she would take would be to call my dad at work and mention that I wasn’t back yet. He might tell her to give me another fifteen minutes. Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t. Even if she took action right then and there, she could either send my sister out with her dog to look for me, or she could call a neighbor to go back and look for me, or she could possibly call the fire department or police. The quickest possibility would be if she sent my sister out. It would probably take Page (aged about 13 at the time) about fifteen minutes more to get bundled up and even possibly cover the ground necessary to find me. Monte the dog may or may not have been any help in determining which of several different logging roads I had driven down. If Page kept her wits about her, she might have been able to pick out the freshest tractor tracks in the snow. None of this could I count on. Nor even that she would dare come looking for me, or that Mom would send her after dark.
Even if Page did find me, dead or alive, she would have to run back to the house and tell my mom, who would have to call the fire department, who would take at least ten minutes to arrive at the house, and a minimum of another ten to fifteen minutes to get back into the woods where I was. No matter how I sliced it, I couldn’t imagine help coming to me any less than 2 and a half hours later. And knowing how things tend to happen, I figured it would almost certainly be more than that.
I looked around the quiet woods, watching my breath condense as I labored to stay alert. My chest felt crushed, and I wondered if I had cracked my skull. It wasn’t hunting season—at this time of year, there was absolutely no reason for anyone else to be in those woods within earshot, even if I could cry out.
It was then I realized that I, Jim Davis, at the tender age of 20, was almost certain to die. I began to shiver and quake as my body cooled down and the sweat threatened to freeze against me. It was only me and God. I didn’t know whether I would suffocate first, or die of hypothermia. The day of reckoning had come. I would shortly meet my maker.
I had made a confession of faith in Christ when I was five years old. I remember that night. My dad prayed with me, and had me pray, and told me that if I meant it, I was saved. Later, at the age of 8, I learned more fully what salvation was and entered into a much more meaningful relationship with God. I don’t know which time to count as my real day of salvation. It matters little—the point is that I trusted Jesus to save me, and I was His. Sadly, at times I had drifted away from daily meaningful communication with God. Recently had been one of those times.
As I hung there, I focused on my Lord and addressed Him directly. “Well, God, I guess you’ve got me exactly where you want me. I can’t get out. It looks like I’m likely to end here, but it is not the end. I know you—I have trusted you for my salvation. I’m ready to meet you now, if that is what you have for me. I am ready. Lord, I know that you can use my death for your glory, and I’m all right with that. But if you can bring more glory to yourself by my life than by my death, please get me out of here.”
At that point I relaxed and sank down, a deep peace filling my soul. I was willing to live, willing to die. A strong resolve welled up inside me, and I knew that for the sake of life, liberty, and honor, I needed to make one last valiant attempt to free myself. I gathered my strength, and felt a surge of adrenalin course through my veins.
Suddenly, the strength of the Holy Spirit came upon me, like Samson of old, and I threw back the two logs and dropped my body and head down between them. Barely had my head cleared, when the logs slammed back together above me with a loud bang. I sank down on the ground, gasping for breath, giddy with excitement, my heart beating like mad.
Shaking, I crawled over to my sweatshirt, put it on, then gathered up my coat, the chainsaw, and all my things. I started the tractor and drove slowly out of the woods in a daze. I briefly told my mom and sister what had happened. The side of my face was all scuffed up and my ear, too, where the log had scraped me. I had a big bump on the head. God saved me from the jaws of death that day.
It has been nineteen years now, since that happened. I have had a lot of ups and downs in life. Sometimes I have been close to the Lord, and too often, not. But every time I start to get disheartened, I like to think back to that day in the woods where I gave my life back to God, and He gave it back to me. Every day I live is living on borrowed time. Every gift, every blessing, every trial, every reward, and every service I’m able to participate in is a bonus, an extra, a freebee, something that by all rights I never should have experienced. Many times since, when things have looked grim, I have told God again—“If you can bring more glory to yourself through my death, then by all means, take me. But if you can bring more glory through my life, then spare me, and bring me through.”
