In The Summer After My 1st Year Of Bible College, ...

In the summer after my 1st year of Bible college, I hung around a lot with 2 girls. One of them I knew from Bethany, Christina, and the other was her cousin Jody. They worked for a lady who lived a few minutes away from me, so we hung out a lot that summer.

Jody’s dad had been a game warden, and I think they had had a farm as well. At any rate, Jody knew animals, and liked them well. One night after I had biked down to see them, Jody drove me back home. It was probably 10 or 11PM. Now, in those days, there were public dumps. You know, you’d take your own garbage to a landfill site and leave it there. Anyway, the dump was between my house and the one she was staying at for the summer. The garbage had to be dumped off, so she took it when she drove me home.

Well, we drove into the dump, and when we went around the corner, the road was flooded with glowing eyes. We had stumbled upon a nest of raccoons. So what did the animal lover do? She got out of the car and walked up to the baby raccoons.

Now, I like animals, but that was nuts. They were wild animals in the most unsanitary place you could think of. But Jody didn’t care. She reached down and picked one of the little darlings up. I was going crazy in the car because of the whole thing. She brought me the thing to pet, but I wouldn’t go near it. By and by she put it down, unloaded the garbage, and we drove off, neither of us thinking twice about it.

Come to find out, though, it scratched her on the hand. She developed a nasty infection. They almost had to amputate her hand because of the scratch. All because she thought she was familiar with animals. All because she didn’t take the issue seriously enough.