The Pair of Shoes That Changed My Life

The Pair of shoes that changed my life


Hello all, I hope you have been well. Today is just a little story on how God will do what is best for you no matter how much you resist, change your ways, or even HAVE SURGERIES to change your body and how it works.

Rewind to 1992, Nirvana and “Smells like Teen Spirit” owned the radio waves and MTV, and Bill Clinton was elected President.

My wife and I got married a bit early, I was 23 years old and she was 26. We only dated for about 10 months before a “surprise” happened and yes, before we were married, God gave us a son. When I was about 25 or so and year after we got married, another “surprise” happened, god gave us another son. And almost to the day when I turned 27, guess what? God gave me another son. SO, at the tender age of 27, I was married w/ 3 kids, all under the age of 5 and I felt like I was done having children and decided to get my tubes tied. Despite my wife’s objections, I went and got a vasectomy, I was now going to be free from worrying about any future “surprises”, or so I thought.

I will not paint the picture of our perfect little existence and happy life that it was all warm and fuzzy and “lovey-dovey” a lot. Matter of fact, it was the opposite at times, sad to say. We fought, sometimes a lot, sometimes not, sometimes about the lack of sleep, money, friends, etc. There was always an underlying “resentment” to my surgery I think. Or at least I interpreted it that way anyway. Don’t get me wrong, we had and still have great times, I am happy to report that my life and our marriage is on an upswing, big time. We are gellin’ like Magellan and we have the good Lord to thank for our blessings.

I believe the turning point for this was after a very sort of “gloomy day”, where I went for a car ride in the rain. My wife and I had gone head to head for a while and I was getting to the point where I just could not take the hot and cold of the relationship anymore. The stress was giving me chest pains and I felt suicidal at times.
I can vividly remember driving down the road and the repetitive motion of the wipers, and the pounding rain against the windshield was putting me into a trance-like state. I could have easily driven my little car into the oncoming traffic of 18 wheelers that were spraying water off the back of their rigs little salt shakers. I calmly pulled off to the road and said “God help me” and slowly turned the car around and headed back home.

As I pulled up the driveway, the winds were whipping the tree limbs like the devil and the rain was headed sideways like you read about. However, in the midst of the storm, I noticed a very small pair of baby shoes, sized super small. Now, all my kids are between 1 and 5 yet these shoes did not fit any of them. Why were they there? Who’s were they? When I looked closer at them, WHY DID THE SOUND IN MY EARS GO SILENT, WHY WERE THE SHOES COMPLETELY BONE DRY AND SHELTERED BY A LONE BRANCH COVERED WITH LEAVES AND WAS FIXED MOTIONLESS TO PROTECT IT AND KEEP IT DRY IN THE MIDDLE OF GAIL FORCE WINDS? Do you see what I see?

My heart skipped a beat, then another, and I caught my breath. The tears welled in my eyes, (as they are now as I write this), because that was the first time I had ever felt God had spoken to me. Maybe not in words like some people hear, but he SHOWED me what to do.

I walked into the house, very quietly, dragging my feet, wet from the rain and sat down on the couch. I must have looked like I saw a ghost or something because Michelle came over to me and was like, what is wrong? I looked at her with a very concerned look on my face and said, “I am ready to have another baby”.

She threw her arms around me, we cried for a while and sobbed and then it kinda hit us, uh,,,,I kinda had my tubes tied so how in world am I gonna pull this off?

Micro-surgery, that’s how. I will spare you the operating room details, but let’s just say that a very gifted surgeon performed on operation on me called a “vasovasectomy”. This is where they actually sew my tubes back together, from the inside out! They use micro thread 100 times thinner than a human hair and the difficulty of the procedure can be compared to sewing two pieces of wet spaghetti together, end to end.

This ain’t cheap and it is not covered by health insurance, nice. So I did what other self respecting home owner would do, I re-mortgaged my house to pay for it and took out some extra to finish the basement for more bedrooms.

Well, about 10 weeks had gone by and we paid a visit to the Dr for a follow up and he said that my sperm count was low. I asked a few questions, he said to “be patient, all it takes is one” and he was right.

A few weeks went by and my wife and I found out we were pregnant, God was to give me another child to watch over for him and I was accepting of this gift. This time though, he would give me a daughter, daddy’s little girl. Michelle and I had a deal that if it was a girl, I could name it, if it was a boy, she would name it.

I appropriately chose the name “Nevaeh”, which is Heaven spelled backwards. I did this to signify the backwards way in which the more we try to resist God’s Will and retreat, the more he will course correct us, no matter what we do.


Hope you enjoyed the read, god bless you all- Joshua