As I stated in the last post, though God had completely healed me, I had an extreme fear of reinjuring myself, and worst of all, the devil had tricked me into believing that God had only taken away the pain but my back was still messed up. I lived with this fear for two years after the Lord healed me on February 14, 1993.
One morning I was knelt down praying in the living room on a Saturday morning. As I prayed, the words came out of my mouth "Lord, if you want me to have a different job than the one I have now, send someone by to offer it to me." I stopped praying and threw my head up and said "Lord, I'm not unhappy at my present job, why did I say that?"
I was working the best paying job I had ever had as a termite treater for Terminix. I had no thoughts of going anywhere, so why did I say that? I then said "Lord, if that was you speaking through my mouth, then send someone by to offer me a job." I bowed my head to pray again, and there was a knock at the door.
When I answered the door, a man I knew was standing there asking me if I wanted to go with him to apply for a job in the oil field, he thought he could get me on. Oil field?!! All I could think of was back breaking work. I wanted nothing of that, that was a good way to reinjure my back! However, I remembered what had just happened, so I agreed.
I was living in Ruston, Louisiana at the time and we drove to Haughton outside of Shreveport to talk to the drilling superintendent. The man asked me "Do you have a strong back? All this job requires is a strong back and a weak mind!" I felt like the biggest liar in the world when I told him "Yes". He then replied that he would find out, he was sending me for a full back exam. Gulp!
On the way to the doctor's office for the physical, my back started killing me. I was so paralyzed with fear all I could say under my breath was "Oh God, Oh God, Oh God!". When we got to the doctors office, they immediately took me back and examined my back. The doctor x-rayed me, then put me through a bunch of range of motion test. My back was killing me the whole time, but I kept a straight face and did all the test. When it was all said and done, the doctor told me I had passed! Immediately the pain left.
I was placed on a crew working south of Ringold, LA, southeast of Shreveport. It was on a triple (meaning it could pull 3 33' joints of pipe at a time) rig that was 120' tall. Rig #6 drilling for natural gas. When I walked onto the location my first night thankfully I was totally ignorant to what was going on or it would have been my last day on the job! The well had blown out and it was screaming like a jet engine and shaking. It was spraying pea gravel propelled by natural gas up through the derrick and sparks were flying everywhere. People were running everywhere screaming and cursing as it could blow up at any moment. I thought this was a normal days work.
All of the mud had blown out of the hole and all the mud (barite clay) in the bulk hopper had been used up. They screamed at me to grab sacks of mud off a pallet that had just been delivered and dump it into a hopper. The first two hours were spent running 96 100# sacks through the mud and dumping them. After I finished, they finally got control of the well and things calmed down. I looked at the empty pallets and realized my back still felt great!
Over the next several months I discovered that I was unique on the drilling rig in two respects: 1) I was the only Christian 2) I was also the only one that didn't either drink heavily or use drugs. Rather than sit in the dog house and listen to dirty stories and smoke a joint, I climbed up in the derrick and scrubbed with tsp, or cleaned up the location. I also endured harassment and threats for my faith by men that had lived violent lives. I had never been around men like this before whose only thought was continually on evil.
Once my driller told a long story of how this man had wronged him terribly. He asked me what the bible said he should do about it. I said the bible plainly says we should forgive our enemies. He drew his fist back to punch me and I yelled at him "You asked me what the bible says. Do you want me to LIE TO YOU!?" He put his fist down and cursed and walked away.
Many times I was faced with fearful circumstances and I would talk to the Lord and say "I don't believe you sent me here to kill me." I would encourage myself in the Lord, put my head down and work anyway in spite of the fear. I was in fear of dangerous men, fear of the work environment. I can't hardly tell all the near misses and brushes with death in just a few short months. When one mixes the normally dangerous job with coworkers being under the influence of drugs and alcohol on the job it is a recipe for disaster.
Through it all, the Lord kept His hand on me. He was proving to me that my back was truly healed, driving every ounce of fear I had about my back out of me through extreme circumstances. Once we had someone get hurt and someone get sick so we were short handed. I was required to pull and throw in the 200 pound slips for 12 straight hours as we tripped pipe out of the hole. No back problems!
Another time we had a gas bubble coming up and we were racing to get to the bottom so we wouldn't have to shut off the well and lose it. I was down on the pipe rack rolling pipe onto the catwalk, chaining it up, and the motorman was using the air hoist to skid it up into the V door (not a door at all, it was a ramp that held the pipe). I would get several pipes rolling, ducking under each one until I got six of them rolling, then I would spin around and push them all onto the catwalk to chain up.
We were almost on bottom and I was almost out of pipe when I heard "CLANG" behind me. One of the pipes had gone crossways and fallen between the pipe racks. I looked up at the motorman to get him to send the air hoist down to pick it up and he yelled "No time, NO TIME!" The gas bubble was almost on us and their was a danger the rig could blow if we didn't beat it. I looked at the pipe, squatted down and picked it up and THREW it up on the catwalk! I chained up the remainder of the pipe and sent it up and stood there huffing and puffing.
It was then that I realized what I had done. That pipe was HEAVY! Normally it took two men to lift a joint of it, and we are talking men that are accustomed to heavy lifting every day. I had thrown the pipe by myself! I felt of my back and no pain whatsoever! As the reality of that sunk in, we got on bottom just in time and the gas hit through the diverter and the whole rig was shaking as the gas roared out over the mud pit.
Often people got hurt and sometimes killed. I was the only one on my rig that didn't sustain a serious injury but I didn't work there for years either. My driller got his face smashed with all the bones broken from the block hitting him, the motorman got hit by a hook on a cable and it laid open the main artery under his arm but didn't cut it. The chain hand made three trips around the pipe and crushed his left arm. All of this had happened prior to me coming to work on the crew. While I was on the crew, no major injuries.
One week one of our rigs that was working in our area blew up, killing all five men that were on the location. The same week on another one of our rigs, a man was standing by the V door as a wireline was spooling cable down the hole. The probe down the hole hung up briefly and the cable snarled, throwing a loop around the man's head. When the probe dropped free again, the man's head popped off and flew out over the pipe rack. His best friend was walking up the steps and when he saw his friend's head pop off, he dropped dead of a heart attack.
When these 7 men died, the OSHA came in and cracked down. The company gave us a month warning and said that everyone would be tested for drugs. If anyone either quit before the test or failed it, they would lose their position. Prior to this, guys would quit for a day or two then rehire back on and get their position back. The company knew that if it did drug test without warning there would be no workers left.
This presented a problem for my driller. He smoked more marijuana, popped more pills, and drank more beer that anyone else on the rig. He had worked in the oil field for a long time to get his position as driller and he didn't want to lose it. He stopped taking everything cold turkey. Wow! That was quite a trip!
My driller got really paranoid at about the three week mark, and I was the object of his paranoia. He was sure that I was trying to get him fired. He kept calling me over and accusing me of many different ways that I had supposedly tried to either get him fired or arrested and each time he said "I'm going to get you!"
We went to make the next connection and I was working lead tong, which is basically a 200 lb pipe wrench. Another tong had a cable attached to it and pulling the cable was 3 large diesel motors. My tong was held by a stub line as the other tong torqued the connection together. I would swing the tongs into the pipe, catch 3 latches and spin the tong back against the stub line. The driller would gently rev the diesel motors and pull on the backup tong, tightening the connection.
This time was different. I swung the tongs in and hit the pipe, catching my first latch, when I heard an audible voice in my left ear: "He is fixing to pull." When I heard the voice I instantly let go and dove for the floor, kicking my feet out from under me. At the same instance, the driller screamed a maniacal scream and floor boarded the accelerator pedal and yanked, trying to cut me in half. I was still airborne, diving for the floor, when the tongs hit me.
The blow was about the same as if someone had picked me up in the air and body slammed me face first on the metal deck. It hurt like crazy but it didn't kill me. I immediately covered the back of my neck as the stub line beat on my back. The driller was screaming "That'll teach you, you #@%$, that'll teach you."
The tongs went out in a huge arc and came sailing back in, hitting the cage the driller was behind. It smashed it within an inch of his face. They then became like a pinball machine swinging from pillar to pillar across the floor. I kept my head down until I heard them slow down and I jumped up and grabbed them, dragging them down to a stop. The driller was shocked that I was still alive, so then he started screaming "Why didn't you make them bite, why didn't you make them bite?!" He was saying in essence it was my fault for what had just happened because I didn't bite the tongs in.
I looked at him and said "You know exactly what you just did. Lets make this connection." After I finished untangling the cables, I swung the tongs in again to the pipe and bit them in. The driller jarred me hard as he tightened them, but he didn't attempt to kill me again. I racked the tongs back and put the safety chain on them and walked past the driller towards the steps. He asked, "Where are you going?" I replied "That is the last connection I ever make for you." He said "If you go to another rig, I'll get you killed there too!" I replied I wasn't going to another rig and left.
Some have asked me why I didn't come off the floor and fight the driller for what he had done. My reply is that I had just heard the voice of God! The audible voice! I recognized that Satan had tried to kill me, but God had spared me. I don't even recall being sore when I went home even though I had just taken a severe beating. I forgave the driller, but I wasn't foolish enough to continue working for him. Danny, if you are reading this, I forgive you!
After coming home, I never again had fears about my back. I also never skipped a beat money wise. The Lord had sent me there for a purpose and it was fulfilled. While working on the rig, I was able to witness to all 18 hands that worked the location at one time or another.
Jeff
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