自強之路

Life was so sketchy for Danny after being home for his nerves were shorted out. Reality came into pieces, like jigsaw puzzle. After a couple of days, for instance, Danny talked with a woman and listened her chattering away about people and events he didn’t know. He liked this woman. She had a familiar way about her and was very pleasant.

'Excuse me’, Danny interrupted, 'But who are you?’

There was a shock on the woman’s face. ‘Why, Dannion, I’m you mother.’

So depleted was his stamina. He could at most stand for 15 minutes; sometimes he could walk for 10 steps, then he had to sleep at least 20 hours.

Yet as shambles as his physical conditions might be, Danny had a rich spiritual life, through which Danny was taught to build the healing ‘Centers’ by watching and deduction demonstrated by the Beings.

Most days he sat in the living room and did nothing, too exhausted to move after getting out of the bed on all fours. The only bright thing was that he still had stream of visions. Otherwise he could just ‘crab’ around and live like a totally disabled person. Even walking into a restaurant with his own power, without Sandy’s help to roll him by the wheelchair, could be a risk for he was so exhausted that he fell his face into a soup bowl, sputtering and coughing. Life in this world was a mess proper to him.

By the end of 1975, Danny was broke. His hospital bills and loss of income exceeded $100,000, and the debt was climbing higher with each passing day. He had to sell everything he owned. There was no open for a half-blind who walked like a crippled crab. He was forced to leave the fieldwork he used to be good at, and he would not do it either, in which he had hurt lots of people then. He didn’t want the old dirty jobs to mar his record again as he told anyone would listen, 'Be careful about what you do in life, for you have to see yourself do it again when you die. The difference is that this time you are on the receiving side.'

People became distant, even Sandy. Danny could not blame her. Since she was a beautiful young woman with a long life ahead of her, she had not to squander such good times on a man walked like a crab and balled about heavenly stress-reduction project, like a ‘retarded fundamentalist’, which was exactly he sounded like. Even there was someone who urged him to commit suicide, ‘Dannion, if it was so great up there, why don’t you kill yourself?’ Yes, it indeed was a very logical solution. But Danny knew he had jobs to do. He knew there was a great and powerful God. He knew the world on the other side was magnificent. In this world, he felt nothing but pain.

Regardless of his poor condition, the death experience gave him the inner strength to endure. In his worst moment, all he had to do was recall the love that he felt emanating from those heavenly lights and he could just press on. He knew it was wrong to take his own life while in fact, he never thought of doing so. When things went worse, all he had to do was think of the love in that light and he just felt much better, to have the strength to live with the adversity.

To the outside world, Danny had a total tragic story: he had to wear welder’s goggles in the daytime, weighing 155 pounds, 70 pounds under his normal weight, crooking and bending himself like a question mark out of deformity, ranting and raving like a religious madman, talking about spiritual beings, a city of light, boxes with visions of the future, and of course, the centers.

Danny really thought about checking in a mental hospital, had he not seen an article in the newspaper that changed his life again.

To be continued...