Near Death Files... Crashing Down

I have been told by a few people that I should start writing down all of my "Near Death Experiences", so I started about a year ago. Some of these things are a little hard to believe so you don't have to if you don't want to... but they're true. Durring most of these events, I was pretty screwed up on alcohol and drugs, so I have had to contact people that were there, or involved in one way or another to validate my memory .
I only have one reason for telling these stories, and that is to show just how good my God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has been to me. I should, by all reasonable accounts be dead.

So, without any further ado, here is the first of my stories...

When I was about twenty-six years old, I worked as a hod carrier for a brick mason. A hod carrier is the guy that makes and hauls the mortar for the one laying the brick. It is very hard work, and it’s hard to keep people on a crew because of the high demands and low pay.

On one particular job, we were laying concrete block for a building at a steel mill. It was supposed to be a wall that stood about twenty-four feet tall when finished. When the wall grows to about five feet off of the ground, you have to set up scaffolding in order to keep building up. This was never a fun job, and people seemed to rush to get it done, which is not a good idea from a safety standpoint. The scaffolding that we used came in four foot high sections that were about eight feet long. We were all familiar with how to put this stuff together. We also knew that the pieces all had to have cross bars put on them. Why this section in particular wasn’t put together with the cross bars on it is unknown to me, but never the less, they were missing.

The wall we were working on was about 8 or 10 feet high, so we had two sets of scaffolding, one stacked on top of the other. I was on my way to lunch, walking on the top of the wall, in order to get to another set of scaffolding so I could climb down to eat. There were two people in front of me that had stopped to talk about what they were going to do that weekend, so I went ahead of them, and stepped out onto the platform that was on top of the second set of scaffolding. As I stepped out, I felt the platform begin to give, and to my horror, there was a huge “cube” of concrete block immediately in front of me, about ten feet away (a cube is somewhere around 140 concrete blocks). As the scaffolding began to teeter, I could see that the blocks were going to fall in my direction, and I had nowhere to go but down with the ship.

I heard a voice in my head, but it wasn’t really a voice; it was more like a very loud thought, which told me to tuck my arms in, and stand up. Stand up?! It all happened so quickly, that that was all that I could do anyway. As I looked down, I could see an opening in the middle of the piece that made up the vertical side of the scaffolding section. I sort of aimed for that hole, and closed my eyes, hugging myself as I went down. I don’t remember what it felt like to land, but I remember being taken off guard by doing so. I had landed standing upright in the middle of that side-wall with concrete blocks and metal tubing totally surrounding me. When I say surrounding me, I mean up to my waste, in every direction. The dust was still falling when I heard a voice from the top of the wall saying, “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my- I can’t believe that just happened!”

It was a woman who was on the crew, and maybe it was because she was getting ready to step on to the platform, or maybe it was it was because of what she had just seen, but she was actually in tears when I looked up. Before I could even take in what had just happened, the boss was yelling from the other side of the wall, “What in the h#@l was that!?” Followed quickly with a “Get that G*@@#*%#@ mess cleaned up!!” He was feeling nice that day.

I never did explain to him what had just happened. I don’t think he really cared. The lady who was so upset was told to go on to lunch, and I was told to clean the mess up. This was my last experience involving concrete blocks and scaffolding. I did go on to build a few foundations, all of which were no taller than four feet.