Who has made a difference in you life? Has someone stuck their neck out for you?

[looneylane]

I know I have brought this up before but one guy who stuck his neck out for me was a fire chief in Saskatchewan. After I broke my neck I still helped for a while as I didn't know it was broken. I finally gave in and only helped with fundraisers as i was in the wheelchair. One day he came to a mens lunch at church and he saw me wheeling around I asked him how things were going and talked to him about some new techniques and tactics  for fire rescue and he looked at me and said "Your not done! I hear it in you you will be back!" I was in an electric wheelchair with all the doctors not sure I would ever walk unassisted again and this fire chief tells me I will be back! Heres the thing he was not a perfect guy he had a lot of things going on to the point where he ended up quitting and even stopped talking to his friends even the ones who wanted to support him. No matter what though he believed in me he is now a full time city fire chief in Saskatchewan.. he made a difference

[foxgrove]

Sounds like someone who I'd love to meet. I've been taking some time to consider through my life all the people who have influenced my life... good grief, there have been so many of them. Aside from my dad, who is the most driven person I've ever met and met me along the way many times with a kind word and good advice, I would say it would have to have been my best friend's dad. His name was Huey. When I was in my teens, I spent a lot of time up at Hilbre where Huey and Corrine his wife) and their two kids lived and ran a Bible Camp for the Shantyman's Association. I worked there for a couple of years, just another grunt on the team, but I had a bad attitude and I knew it. I grew up not understanding how to socialize like the other kids and was always left out of things so I created a deep and elaborate fantasy world for myself which often spilled out into reality... I could be anything I wanted to be. This dug me armpit deep into sci-fi (which I still love) and more and more stuff that would distract me from real life which meant that real life was getting excluded from my reality.

One day, we were stoking the boiler for the camp and he turns to me and asks how often I've been digging into my Bible. I had only become a Christian about two years earlier and had little notion of what the Bible actually said. He sat me down and told me he saw me heading in the wrong direction. After a long talk, he told me, "garbage in, garbage out," referring to what I had been filling my head with and what had started to leak out in my attitudes to people. I don't know exactly why but it has stuck with me all this time. That was when my attitudes to life changed and I started to become worthy of the wife that God was preparing me for. ok, in all honesty, I'll never be worthy of that beautiful soul but that's another story...)

[looneylane]

Awesome!