Some memories arrive as stories long before they become your own. Others come back in flashes — a sound, a sensation, a breath you almost didn’t take. My earliest encounters with danger happened before I was old enough to understand what danger was, yet they left a mark that would only make sense decades later.
The first came when I was two and a half. My father was sitting on the back porch at my grandparents’ house, shelling peanuts and handing them to me one at a time. It was one of the rare moments when the world felt calm — no shouting, no tension, just the steady rhythm of shells cracking in the warm Texas air. When my mother called him inside, he gave me several peanuts at once. I did what any toddler would do: I shoved them all into my mouth.
One slipped into my windpipe.
My fever shot up. My breathing turned ragged. The doctor in Brady examined me and said my left lung was blocked and there was nothing he could do. My parents drove me 150 miles to Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio, praying the whole way. I spent two weeks under an oxygen tent, my breathing so loud the nurses could hear it down the hallway. Eventually, doctors went down my windpipe with a slim tool, crushed the peanut, and let it fall into my lung. It saved my life.
I don’t remember the fear or the pain, but I remember the story — told and retold until it became part of the foundation of who I was. Looking back, I believe that was the first time God intervened on my behalf, long before I understood what it meant to be protected.
The second time, I was old enough to understand exactly what had happened.
Life on the farm had given me chores and responsibilities, but it had also given me curiosity — the kind that can be dangerous in the hands of a five‑year‑old. My dad had 55-gallon barrels of gasoline he used in the tractor, and I had developed a fascination with red ants and gasoline, a combination that should have ended badly. I would pour gasoline down their holes and light it, watching the flames shoot up like a tiny volcano. It made me feel powerful, as if I could control something in a world where so much felt out of control.
One day, I filled an empty oil can with gasoline. It was the old style of can that had to be opened with a can opener. You would place the opener on the edge and lift, making a small triangular hole in the top, then making a second, smaller hole on the opposite side so air could flow in as the oil poured out. I sat, leaning up against the barrel of gasoline, with the can between my legs and lit it like a candle. I expected a small flame. Instead, a geyser of fire roared out of the opening — a column of heat and light that should have burned me alive.
Somehow, I didn’t panic. I tipped the can over, crawled away from the gasoline barrel I’d been leaning against, and threw dirt on the spreading flames until they died.
Not a hair on my head was singed.
I remember sitting in the dirt afterward, the smell of gasoline thick in the air, my heart pounding. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I knew — absolutely knew — that something beyond luck had kept me alive. That was the second time God protected me, and the first time I felt it, and there was no way I was going to tell my parents about that episode until years later.
Those two moments — one I don’t remember and one I will never forget — became quiet pillars of my early life. They reminded me that even in the chaos of a broken home, even in the uncertainty of drought and hardship, I was not alone. Something was watching over me, preserving me for a future I couldn’t yet imagine.
I didn’t know it then, but those early interventions were only the beginning.