My entire life I’ve battled poor equilibrium. At age 3, I was hospitalized to find out why I wasn’t walking. When I was 12, my balance was so bad I could not stand still. I had to keep moving to keep from falling over; kind of like a guy on a unicycle. I served in the military but couldn’t march because of my balance. Then I got married and had a baby son. I’d never been permitted to pick up or hold a child before because my mother was so afraid I’d fall or drop them, so when my son was born I had no experience holding or caring for infants or small children. I have three children, and Floyd usually carried them for the same reason. Surprisingly, all three of my children survived their childhood.
Toby was never dropped, but when Jamie was a newborn, before I could stop him, he picked her up, and she fell through his arms to the floor. Then when Michelle was a newborn, without my knowledge, he climbed onto her crib and picked her up. He carefully stepped down with her in his arms and tripped when he turned around. He fell, but he didn’t let her fall. He protected her from hitting the floor. He was only four ½ years old.
But the one time I fell with a child in my arms was in Greece. We had to climb a spiral staircase to get to church. Jamie was 3 and Michelle was about six months. Floyd carried Jamie up and down the stairs so she didn’t fall. That left me to carry Michelle. The steps on spiral staircases are always wide on the outside and very narrow on the inside, but the handrail is always on the inside. So to have access to the handrail, I had to walk down the treacherously narrow steps with a baby in my arms.
About five steps from the bottom, I missed a step and down I went. My prevailing thought was to protect my baby daughter at all costs. Knowing that I couldn’t prevent myself from falling, I released the handrail and cradled that baby with both arms. At that point, I didn’t even try to prevent myself from falling. I simply sheltered Michelle as much as possible.
I did not tumble down those steps. I missed them all, landing on my knees on a slab of concrete with that baby cradled in my arms. As I looked back, I realized how easily it would have been to have shattered both my kneecaps; to have broken both my legs; to have tumbled head first down those stairs; to have dropped the baby and fallen on her. It was nothing short of a miracle that I walked away from that fall and neither of us got hurt.
God is good. He’s afforded me extra protection due to my balance. And He helped my children survive their childhood.