Shocked

When Douglass was about seven or eight years old, he was transferred from a plantation in Talbot County to Baltimore. When he was at the new home Douglass, a black slave, saw something unique in his new mistress, a smile directed to him. The woman was kind to the young slave child and began to teach him how to read. However, a time came when the husband of the woman found out and forbade her to teach him, because it was against the law and a slave that could read would be able to know the reality of his or her condition. This encouraged Douglass for the rest of his life (literally) to never give up and find freedom.

Like Douglass, when I was 15 years old I received an impact in my life that marked me forever. We had missed out a lot of days of school, not consecutively, but one day yes, two days no, then, two days yes and three days no. It was like our second month doing this. Due to the circumstances we were going through (too complicated to explain in detail here) my dad called us to the living room and said, “I think you will have to drop out of school. The school keeps calling and asking why, you are not assisting constantly, I have told them the circumstance and I will meet with your principle tomorrow to drop you out.” Shocked at those words, I remembered my thoughts in one of the chats I had had with one of my friends a year ago.

His name was George and he was telling another classmate and me about a friend of his that had dropped out of school at the age of 15 and was not studying anymore. At that moment, I thought with a firm stronghold in my mind, “Poor kid, he just ruined his life, I can’t imagine what will be of his life in the future. He will probably have no career, no college, and end up working in a McDonalds or something that pays a wage I do not want to earn. I want to have a family, a nice job, a nice home, and know that I have gone through school successfully.”

Now my dad was telling us we were going to have to drop out of school and this declaration was causing earthquakes with hundreds of increasingly strong aftershocks that begun to shake the strongholds in my mind. However, I did not think that the worst was about to come, but my next thoughts were the certainties that something new and extraordinary was about to happen in our lives. I knew God was with us and training us for the days we were about to live in the weeks and months to come.

This circumstance that, in turn, gave open doors to a chain of different effects shaped me for life, because they broke down and turned to dust all the lying and preconceived strongholds I had formed within my mind.