Day 46 – You are never alone…
My first assignment was Long Island, New York. I was “full-time” which meant that I had an income and didn’t have to work an extra job, but expenses in North Carolina and expenses in lower New York can be drastically different…let’s just say I had to be very frugal.
Nonetheless, I was in heaven. I was single, excited and ready to take on the world. I would study, put together teachings, plan strategies, and pray every day and then head out every night to teach and be with people and give them all I could.
Long Island is a big place made up of Nassau and Suffolk counties, but it was beautiful. Queens was also on the island but part of the 5 boroughs of New York City and not my territory at the time. Even in 1974, the traffic was heavy; I can’t even imagine what it is now. Long Beach was also part of Nassau County and was filled with mostly teenagers and a few parents and one of my favorite places to hang out.
Talk about a culture shock in every way…I was in it up to my eyeballs. From the way people drove their cars, to the way they talked, to the food they ate, and the passion they lived with, every day was new, exciting and a little overwhelming.
For example, in the south, the “southern way” is more, shall we say, “genteel” meaning elegant or graceful in manner, appearance, or shape the genteel manners of an old southern gentleman. My experience growing up was if anyone gets loud or angry, it’s on, a fight is about to break out. So, picture this, I’m sitting in the kitchen of one of the teenage girls in Long Beach talking to her about God and spiritual matters, and her dad, a painter by trade, comes home.
As soon as he walks in the door I hear, “Who the hell parked in my ***** driveway?!? What the hell is going on here!” I was “ready to rumble” and didn’t have a clue as to what was next.
This teenage girl just says, “Shut up Daddy, I’m talking to someone!” The next thing I know, he is sitting at the kitchen table with us having coffee and we were friends from that day on.
I am a passionate guy! I love emotion whether in sports, work, or life in general. People have commented about how disciplined I must be to get things done, that is not really true. But passion…that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning and still does to this day. Long Island, as well as all of lower New York, was filled with passion. Hot-blooded Italians, people of the Jewish faith, and nationalities of all kinds were everywhere, and I had never met anyone like these wonderful people while living down south.
There we no synagogues in Greenville, I was in college before I met my first person of the Jewish faith. There were people with Italian names in Greenville, but they weren’t “New York Italian” by any definition.
I thrived off of this energy and burned the candles at both ends as they say. It was not uncommon after nightly fellowship meetings for someone to say, “Let’s go to Hong Fat’s and get some Chinese”. Now, Hong Fat’s is in Manhattan in China Town, and it was already 10 PM, but we went. If they wanted to stay local it was Unberto’s deep dish pizza in New Hyde Park.
There were times when I felt lonely, overwhelmed, and like I was just keeping my head above water and those were the times I went to God even harder than before. As I’ve said several times before, I was never a “get on your knees” kind of guy. But I always went deep in my prayers and conversations with God, and He made sure I never felt alone. I can’t even begin to record all the things God did for me then and since, but there is no way I could have survived New York or any place else without Him.
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