LIFE'S SLIDESHOW

I really had nothing for tomorrow's post till I was talking to a friend on the phone just now. She had just gone through a life threatening experience and the question of if your life flashes before your eyes before you die came up. I told her of my such experience and now it will become a blog post. Her scare occurred today, mine took place when I was around 9 years old.

I spent a lot of my early childhood on a lake in Ohio. I can blame a lot of my wrinkles today on the sun damage I got in those days. We lived in bathing suits all summer long and were quite good swimmers. We took Red Cross swimming lessons each summer.

There was a large raft fairly far from shore that we played on endlessly. This day, there were about 10 of us lake brats pushing and shoving on the raft, having a wonderful time. The raft was about 20 feet square and was kept afloat with about 10, fifty gallon drums for buoyancy.

Not exactly sure what happened. I know I fell or was pushed off the raft. I went fairly deep and when I swam towards the surface, I ran rather noisily and painfully into one of those drums. I was really startled but not yet frightened. I reasoned I had come up underneath the raft and tried to swim from under it. Again the bong as my head hit another drum.

My friends who were all about my age would hear the bonging and would run to the side where they heard the noise. Their collective weight lowered the raft even more on top of me. Then pure panic set in. I flailed about blindly but repeatedly kept running into the barrels. Bong, bong, bong.

I hadn't gotten a good breath when I fell in and my lungs were really screaming. I was about to panickly take in a mouth full of water when the first picture appeared. My life till that moment, suddenly became a series snapshots.

It was a regular slide show. I saw a baby in a crib, I saw me stepping on my brothers kite and breaking it as a toddler. I saw Christmases, I saw my parents, grandparents and brothers. I saw my bloody face from the dog bite I had gotten in first grade. Many of these images flashed quickly and almost comfortably through my mind.

It didn't take long to relive my life, possibly since I was only 9, so there wasn't a whole back log of memories to go through. By now, I was crazy wanting air when I heard the voice in my ear. Very calmly, a man's voice told me simply,  "Open your eyes".

Yep, they had been cranked tightly shut in the panic. Obeying the voice, I opened them and the way from under the raft became obvious and quite simple. I rolled over on my back, looked up and swam from under the raft. 

I felt more than  a little dumb for panicking when the solution was so simple. The truly odd thing is that I never questioned where that voice came from nor thought it odd. I never told my friends about it.

Have you ever had your life flash before your eyes? And have you ever heard a voice instructing you when there was no one near?