The Mind of a Child

The Mind of a Child

As a child I went through some very difficult situations, which led me to truly realize the capabilities of the human mind. The budding mind of a child is an amazing and wonderful contraption, unperceived by its owner and similar to a tangled ball of yarn to everyone else. Full of life and the desire to explore, not a single care or worry in the world. Even though this sort of young mind seems open and utterly defenseless, it can withstand far more than we give it credit. The youthful nature a child’s mind allows a resilience that we almost always seem to lose as we age. Many times we make the incorrect assumption that children are not as affected by the hard circumstances that surround them. I began to really consider this seemingly common opinion while mentally reliving some of the situations that I went through around the age of seven.

It was around this period of life that my family moved from Arkansas to West Virginia. My father’s family lived in Salem, West Virginia, a small mining town about two hours outside of Pittsburg, and we were going to rent a house that was right down the road from my father’s parents. I wasn’t very close to this portion of my family due to my parents moving to Arkansas shortly after I was born. As an energy-filled first grader the sixteen hour drive felt like a literal eternity. Going through town after town, seeing more “Welcome To Our City” signs than I could ever think of counting. Once we finally arrived, I was amazed by the amount of snow on the ground. I eagerly jumped out of the moving truck only to be met by two and a half feet of snow. The snow came almost to my waist, making it nearly impossible for me to walk. The little yellow house was nothing to behold, but a welcome sight after the long drive.

The long drive was difficult for my dad due to health complications caused by being trapped in a house fire as a teenager. At the age of eighteen, he had to have a lung transplant and from that point on his life was filled with residual heath issues. It seemed to me that everything had kind of calmed down and that he hadn’t had any real health problems recently. He tried his best not to let us see how he was feeling, but sometimes I could still tell that he wasn’t feeling the best. As the months passed, I began school and my mom started a new job. It began to become more apparent that his health was beginning to deteriorate. It eventually got so bad that he checked himself into the hospital. After many tests and examinations, it was discovered that his body had begun to reject the set of lungs from the transplant nearly thirty years before. He was placed on a list of people waiting for a set of lungs to be available for a second transplant. After some time a set became available. Even now having a set of lungs to transplant there was no guarantee that his body wouldn’t reject this set the same way it had the first. I didn’t know what to think. My mind filled with every scary possibility and nothing reassuring that the very worst of those wouldn’t be the outcome. He went through the procedure, but never seemed to fully recover. After a rough couple of months he caught pneumonia in the hospital, and his weak immune system couldn’t take any more. He passed away peacefully in his sleep, finally reunited with his Maker which he had devoted his entire life to as a pastor. He was finally free of the struggles he had gone through