EMBRACING DIVINE Grace

An incident at the mill affected my schooling. One day I saw my dad break the ice loose from the waterwheel (five or six shovels full of water), by stepping on the flywheel and turning the wheel in the opposite direction. There were many different sizes of gears; stepping on the speed wheel would create great pressure on the waterwheel. It was very dangerous. Once it was running again my dad looked at me and said, “Don’t you ever do that!” All I could say was, “OK!” That same winter it happened to me. Dad was not at home, and we had customers waiting. I found out that the slower the waterwheel ran the sooner it would freeze up. I did exactly what my father told me not to do. I was not so lucky, though. The water pressure on the waterwheel caused it to break loose. I stood next to the flywheel ready to step on it and suddenly the flywheel started to turn and I lost my balance and fell into the flywheel. I was thrown headfirst seven or eight feet into a horizontal beam. I could have been killed. It wasn’t until sixty years later that my doctor told me that my nose was broken from that fall. One day I asked my wife if she knew that she was unequally yoked together with an unbeliever. My wife said that she prayed about that and for me to someday “see the light,” in other words, that I would accept Jesus into my heart. As I studied the Bible I learned more and more about the Word of God. When anyone would complain that there were so many different churches and denominations, my wife would simply say, “If the ministers would be closer to the Word of God, there wouldn’t be so many churches.”An incident at the mill affected my schooling. One day I saw my dad break the ice loose from the waterwheel (five or six shovels full of water), by stepping on the flywheel and turning the wheel in the opposite direction. There were many different sizes of gears; stepping on the speed wheel would create great pressure on the waterwheel. It was very dangerous. Once it was running again my dad looked at me and said, “Don’t you ever do that!” All I could say was, “OK!” That same winter it happened to me. Dad was not at home, and we had customers waiting. I found out that the slower the waterwheel ran the sooner it would freeze up. I did exactly what my father told me not to do. I was not so lucky, though. The water pressure on the waterwheel caused it to break loose. I stood next to the flywheel ready to step on it and suddenly the flywheel started to turn and I lost my balance and fell into the flywheel. I was thrown headfirst seven or eight feet into a horizontal beam. I could have been killed. It wasn’t until sixty years later that my doctor told me that my nose was broken from that fall. One day I asked my wife if she knew that she was unequally yoked together with an unbeliever. My wife said that she prayed about that and for me to someday “see the light,” in other words, that I would accept Jesus into my heart. As I studied the Bible I learned more and more about the Word of God. When anyone would complain that there were so many different churches and denominations, my wife would simply say, “If the ministers would be closer to the Word of God, there wouldn’t be so many churches.”