Gabbatha holds significance to me as it is where I spent my life.
Took this on my way to my first conference.
The Conference
The difference between a fairy tale and a
truck driving story is in the way they begin. A fairy tale begins with, “Once
upon a time.” A truck driving story
begins with, “You ain't gonna believe this.” One other difference is that the
fairy tale usually isn't true, but the truck driving story is, though it may be
embellished a bit.
Having just returned from a road trip
that took me near the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writer’s Conference site my
goal is to share how it is and has changed my life. Just attending the first
time was an act of providence. My
intention had been to go to a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I discovered that conference in Writer’s
Digest magazine. It took me two years to
get the money together for it. The trip
to the conference was 1500 miles one way.
In my van that would have been over $700 in gas round trip. I had to have the deposit for the conference
mailed in by June 1st.
While surfing on twitter I found a link
to a site run by Keiki Hendrix that listed Christian authors. Well it also listed writer’s
conferences. One of them was the Blue
Ridge Mountain Christian Writer’s Conference or BRMCWC for short. It started on the 20th of May and this was on
the 15th of May 2012. In the morning I
called and checked on it. It had a lot
of things going for it. First it was less than five hundred miles. That saved me almost two thousand miles in
gas alone which almost paid for the BRMCWC. On top of that the conference was
only $730 for room, meals and classes which was cheaper than just the
conference in Wyoming. As they say, it
was a no brainer. The next few days were
hectic.
The drive to the conference was an
adventure in itself. After attending the
conference I finally realized I do not really want to write books. My goal is to have a meaningful blog where I
can share things I have learned from life and many hours of studying the Bible. My blogging started before the conference but
had little direction. My daughter
Angelica had gone to Costa Rica to get her certification to teach high school
Spanish classes. She started a blog to
keep us up to date on what she was doing while she was gone. I really loved it
and told her so.
During my last year in the Army in Panama
I had been a photo/journalist for the command newspaper. She suggested I start writing some of my life
experiences so they could share them with my grandkids when I am gone. It seemed a good idea to me having had a
heart attack and been bought back in January 2004. My youngest daughter Glenda fought a seven
year battle with a brain tumor. She went
home to be with the Lord in August 2010.
One advantage of being on disability during that time was that I was
able to spend a lot of time with Glenda taking her to appointments and running
her around as she could not drive.
Starting the blog in March 2011 helped get me out of a bit of a low
point in my life.
Arriving at the conference and signing in
was an adventure. You meet so many
people it is almost overwhelming.
Arriving early a couple of the first people I managed to meet were Alton
Gansky and Edie Melson, later I would discover they are
a couple of the people in charge of making things happen. They are both really
nice people and were a pleasure to meet.
The chance meeting with them helped me realize I was definitely where I
needed to me.
The next morning I met a real nice person
at breakfast. His name was Joseph Bentz and he was one of the instructors. He
is from California and was on staff. I
told him I was from Indiana and he said he had grown up in Indiana and gone to
Vincennes University. Over the course of
our conversation we found out we both attended the same years and may have
actually crossed paths at some point. The thirty plus years since then made it
hard to be certain.
An hour into my first day of classes the
schedule I had made for my self was history.
It modified as the conference progressed. Finding what you really need and what will
benefit you at the level you are at is one of the learning experiences you will
go through at your first conference.
Writing was something I already felt comfortable with. How to develop and market my writing was my
interest.
The classes I took helped me realize that
many of the things that I had taught myself were not the best way of doing
things. Most of the teachers stressed
that blogs should be short and no more than three to five hundred words. My posts were and are much longer than what they
recommended. To me it is determined by
the purpose of your writing. Short is
nice if you want to break things up and post often. My style is to post four to six times a month
and while my blog is not growing as fast as some I have heard of. It is doing okay for me. It has had over thirteen thousand hits and
been read in over seventy countries.
That made me proud until I realized that those numbers were about what
one might expect from accidental hits as big as the web is. Eventually I would
like to start doing travel stories and maybe ones on crafts, especially ones
done with recycled materials.
What is fun and makes blogging worth it is
when one of your blog posts takes on a life of its own. A couple of my older blogs have suddenly
started getting hits from all over the world.
They received far too many hits for it to be a random accident.
One incident at the conference happened the
second night and set a tone of things that has continued happening to me since
the very first conference. My room at
the first conference was in the Mountain Laurel East building on the third
floor. In the evening I decided to have
some Pepsi, but the ice machine on the third floor was not working. So I went down to the second floor to get
some ice. As I did two ladies were sitting in the hall and signing books. When passing I said, “Hi” and continued on to
get my ice. While waiting on the elevator to come back we made small talk and
one lady said it was her book she was signing. I said that was nice and
proceeded to get on the elevator and had a sudden and overwhelming desire to
know what her book was about. I stuck my foot in the door as it closed. It was about the loss of her daughter Megan.
It was something I could definitely relate to having lost my own daughter. We talked a few minutes and Marcia gave me an
autographed copy of her book. It really
touched me and I realized it was not only my cross to bear, but that many others
had been through the same thing.
The conference went well and way to
fast. On the way home I pondered all the
things I had heard, seen and experienced.
Stopping for gas and coffee at a truck stop in Leavenworth, IN in the
wee hours of the morning I saw a man come in with one leg and on crutches. I assumed, which is a bad thing to do, that
he was riding with someone until I watched him go out and start sliding the
tandems to make his truck legal. It would never have hit me that what I was
watching was a story before the conference, but now I was seeing stories
everywhere.
In 2013 on my way to the Conference I
decided to stop and see my daughter in Corydon, IN and watch my grand-daughter
play softball. Friday night I went to an
oldies but goodies car show in Corydon.
Saturday morning we went to the game. Things went fine till I made a
comment to my grandson about the pitcher having a real good arm. Very sarcastically he looked at me and said,
“Yeah she has a real good arm. Did you look at her Papaw?” It was then I knew
where and why the sarcasm was in his voice. She only had one arm. In my defense
she really is an awesome pitcher. Anyhow
I found out her father was the coach for her team. She and a friend play in a traveling league. She played with the 16 to 18 year olds but
she was only 14 at the time. There is a
definitely a story here and if things go well I will get it. Her Dad has been too busy to find time for
me, but my daughter said he was just hired by the same high school she works
for as a coach so the door still may open.
The second year was pretty nice and again I
threw away my schedule. It was a lot
less hectic than the first year and I seemed to get a lot more out of it than
the first year. While I had submitted several stories to publications I still
had not had any luck generating revenue from my writing. That was when I decided if my writing didn’t
pay my way that I would not be back in 2014.
A couple things happened in 2013 that I
found strange. There is a lady that goes
to the conference and uses a walking stick.
I had wondered who she was and what her story was in 2012. Well I sat down and struck up a conversation
with and elderly lady, It happened to be
her Mom. Thank you, Lord, for that gift of knowledge. Then later in the
conference I sat at a table with Edie Melson who has a son who is a
veteran. Five of us sat with her and
every one of us had lost someone in the last couple of years. That had to be a God thing. Some very
powerful testimonies were given at that meal
Well 2014 came up kind of fast and I had
to either admit I wasn’t a writer or lie and go to the conference anyhow. So to justify going I had to use some “trucklogic,” which is the title of the first post I wrote on my blog after my first
conference, to allow myself to go to the conference. It certainly was not because of a lack of
money. Between 2013 and 2014 my income
had quadrupled. In 2011 providence allowed
me to go to a 4th of July get together at an old friend’s house. His wife is a retired Lt. Commander from the
Navy. Well in the course of events I met
a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel. We got
to talking and I shared how it had been my goal to lose weight and get back
into skydiving. It was something that I
did in the military. My goal was to get
my Gold Wings for a 1000 jumps. In the
course of the story I explained I had a heart attack, after losing ninety
pounds and that they had implanted a defibrillator in me and that I doubted I
could jump as they had taken away my CDL.
Well it seems he had worked in the compensation department and informed
me that if I had a defibrillator and was a Vietnam vet I was automatically
qualified for Agent Orange compensation.
That was July and I didn’t do anything till January, when I decided to
turn over a new leaf and fill out the paperwork. The worst they could say was no. Well in October 2013 the VA informed Me I
would start receiving my compensation.
So having the money I could justify going to the conference. I did fill out the papers and write all the
forms they wanted me to write for the compensation and if I had not done so I
would not have gotten the compensation.
So with a little stretch of my “Trucker Logic” my writing did pay my way
to the conference. I also found I can still jump, even with a defibrillator,
but I still have to get down to two hundred and twenty pounds.
Also I have enough money to do some
serious traveling this year and hopefully by next year I won’t have to play
games to justify my coming to the conference. It is nice to know that money is
not the issue anymore. In the course of
events though it was humbling to have realize what and why the Lord is opening
doors for. Since the first conference I
have met dozens of people like Marcia and myself. It is a ministry which I had not counted on
but which gives me peace each time I am able to talk with a person who is
recovering as I was when I met Marcia.
One evening I decided to stop at “The
Cloud” and get a cup of coffee before going to my room. I met a pastor named Dan Ellrick who was
attending the conference from Japan. He won the award for furthest travel to
the conference. I mentioned I had a
close friend that was Japanese that I had lost contact with her over the
years. He asked me for as many details
as I could give him. Her husband, my
best friend at the time, had been killed in a plane crash on his way to his
first demonstration with the Golden Knights Army Exhibition Parachute
Team. The next morning at breakfast he
handed me a sheet of paper with some info on it. I had tried for years to track her down. He had done it in one night. When I called the number it turned out he was
successful. It had been only forty one
years since I had contacted her.
On the way home from the conference I had
an experience that defies logic and kind of spooked me. I stopped at the Wendy’s in Cherokee, NC and
got me some lunch. I got Chili, fries
and a frosty. When I got to the table
and sat down I realized I only had three crackers. As I pushed my chair back to go and get some
more, a lady across the restaurant from me got up, picked up crackers off of
her tray, walked over to my table and put her crackers on my tray. Then she walked back and sat down. Neither one of us said a word. Kind of freaked me out till the next
morning. I, being a creature of habit,
stopped at the same truck stop where I had met the one legged trucker. I started talking to the coffee lady and
started to get the wrong coffee. She straightened me out. In the course of the conversation she
revealed her Mom had died from a brain tumor a couple years before. I told her my cracker story and she simply
said, “You have someone looking out for you.” Yes I do and my prayer is that I
learn to use it and walk in the power of it to help others.
So what happened to 15, 16 and 17? Fate I guess. I have twin great-grand-daughters and they
were being raised in government housing and it really bothered me. Then I was
reading in First Timothy the fifth chapter and I got convicted. Their Mom
wanted out of her situation but she needed a job to do it. One verse says that
he who won’t provide for his own is worse than an infidel. That did not sound
good and I looked it up. It is not, it is one that does not know God, which is
not a good situation for a professing Christian to be in. So I stepped up and
started taking care of the girls for her.
My wife said I was nuts at almost seventy taking on that responsibility. It may be, but it was the right thing to do.
So for the last three years I have been taking care of the girls. My wife is
retired and goes to Texas a few months every year. When she does I am on my own with them. They
went to Head Start last year which made it easier. This year they are in Kindergarten
and it is a lot easier. I get up at 5:30 every day Michelle works and she
brings the girls to me. We go back to sleep and get up in time to get on the
bus. After school they come here till she gets off work. It is working.
I took my first break in three years and
took twenty- five days off. My wife and
daughters worked to keep it going till I got back. It worked fine and so now if
things keep going well I will be back to the Conference in 2018. I’ve slowed
way down on my blog but now that the girls are gone all day it is my goal to
get back to being active writing on it.
My recent trip covered forty-three hundred
miles, went to Niagara Falls, Ft. Ticonderoga, in eastern New York, up thru
Quebec, over to New Brunswick, and down too Bar Harbor, ME, Then down thru Rhode Island where I had
planned or hoped to see Lori Roeleveld, who I met at my first conference and before she was a published author. Her book 'Running from a Crazy Man" is a very good read. Hoped to take her and her father to lunch, but she was
obligated at work. I hope I did not upset her as I did not really warn her I was coming. I tend to "go with the flow"which is how I did when I was trucking for a living. I based it on John 3:8, which says to me I was where I was because the Lord already had plans for me. It didn’t really matter though as the exit before hers I picked
up two hitch-hikers and their two dogs, who were going to Richmond, VA. We went
thru New York City, around Central Park, past the new World Trade Center, out
thru the Holland Tunnel and down to Richmond where I dropped them off. Finally I finished up at Raeford, NC where I
spent three days watching skydivers over sixty attempting to break some world
records. Then I made a leisurely three day drive back to the house with all
kinds of new material to write about. Confidant that next spring my plans to go to
the conference should work out well.
My 10/29/2017 post has forty trucking stories with links if anyone is interested.
My 10/29/2017 post has forty trucking stories with links if anyone is interested.
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