Don’t let this blog post title offend you. It’s not blasphemy, I promise. It’s more like a “divine comedy” which less than a hundred people can actually remember witnessing. It all happened in 1979 at a small church in Decatur, Alabama. It could have been a disaster, but ended up being a blessing– and a hilarious one at that.
THE MEDICINE MAN
Five years ago about this time, my father, Coolidge Sims, learned that he had cancer– a health difficulty far beyond the heart condition he had dealt with for years. It took him by surprise, as it did all of us.
My 88 year old Dad was in the hospital for an overnight stay to investigate the source of pain and discomfort he was feeling when the tests came back with a malignant tumor diagnosis.
DRIVING LESSONS
It’s a rite of passage in our country– learning how to drive. From the time I first became a teenager, I lived for getting my permit at age 15 and my license at 16. It was the longest wait of my life.
All my childhood I loved playing with little toy cars– the cheap ones made out of five inches of molded plastic. My neighbor Cathy and I would play for hours with them, making roads in the dirt with our hands until our hands were raw and caked with red dirt. It only took one summer rain shower to obliterate our little homemade town of highways, streets, and driveways, but we were always eager to get back out there the next day and make new ones. When I was playing cars, I was driving those cars in my mind.
GASP
My brother, Dr. Mike Sims, has served as a family practice physician in Columbus, Georgia since the mid-1970’s. For many years his practice included obstetrics– the delivery of babies. Mike often expressed to me how much he enjoyed participating with God in the divine miracle of birth. Mike has always been pro-life and has never wavered. Obstetrics only strengthened his conviction that life begins at conception.
Sadly, sometimes even the best of care and the most effective medicines cannot prevent miscarriages. In the early 1980’s my brother was in the midst of a one of those crisis moments with a young expectant mother, when something absolutely unexpected occurred. Here is the incredible story.
WHAT CHARLOTTE DISCOVERED IN CALIFORNIA
Family stories are the best. Aunt Charlotte, my mother’s only sister and my granddaughter’s namesake, loves family stories as much as I do. Sometimes we laugh and carry-on during a phone call like nobody’s business! I can seem to get Charlotte to laugh at almost anything, and we enjoy every moment of it. When we’re not discussing politics, religion, or Auburn football, we are recalling and re-telling our family stories. Aunt Charlotte and I are truly oral history junkies.
