For the first time since that night under the PT boat in 1944 I did some real selfish praying.

I promised God that if he would help Dr. Mc Grew restore my hearing I would do anything he asked of me. Now that is one damned big promise and I never took it lightly. However I was very skeptical, not because I didn’t trust God but because I was sure that I was not deserving.

Larry brought me back for the surgery and stayed with me as I felt one of my children should have. Every thing went extremely well as the doctor stated and I went home the next day.

All implants are allowed to heal for at least three weeks before they are turned on and you are allowed to use them.

Three weeks to the day, my friend Larry and I were back in Birmingham and the doctor told the audiologist to turn my implant on. This was one of the most memorable days in my life because the audiologist had told me not to expect anything right away because my brain had to become accustomed to the new signals it was receiving. As she completed the final strokes on her computer she turned and said something to Larry and I repeated every word she spoke.

She was amazed and it showed in the expression on her face. She said, “You are not supposed to hear that.”

As they say in the South; to make a long story short: God had just kept his part of the bargain and that left me to wonder what was in store for me. I was honestly scared to death because you don’t make a promise to God and then welsh on your word.

I sound very flippant about this but I want you to know that I meant every word of the promise, but I had no idea what He had in store for me. I started praying in earnest and kept coming back to the same thing, children.

I had no idea where to go at that time except to keep looking. I called the Smile Train number which professes to fix kids all over the world who have a cleft palate and lip. I couldn’t get a firm amount from them when I asked, “How much of the donated money goes to the children and how much goes to administration?” I was suspicious of most of these so called help the needy groups perhaps due to an experience I had with the Red Cross following the death of my father in 1944 when I was overseas and the treatment I received from them after I arrived back in the states. It is too long and too old to cover here but suffice to say that I never gave one dime to the Red Cross over my entire earning lifetime. I did however give to the Salvation Army because they took over where the Red Cross employee, and I underline that word because that is exactly what he was, drawing a salary supposedly to aid Navy men who were coming home following the war.

I was directed by God to go to my computer and there I typed in Books a Million and I have no idea why because until then I had not purchased a book from them, I did use the library though.

When I opened the Books a Million site the first book to catch my attention was, Silent Tears, written by Kay Brat who lived in South Carolina. The book was not a best seller but was written about a subject that I knew something about: Chinese children in orphanages throughout China. I had a Little Chinese grand-daughter who had been adopted in 1998 and I had studied the subject at that time because she came to us physically damaged as a 13 month old baby girl who had been abandoned on a path to an orphanage in late 1997. I had then learned of the terrible conditions these babies lived and died through unless they were fortunate enough to be adopted by a foreigner and taken to another country.

At that time, the Chinese government was enforcing a law that a family could only have one child so if the first born was a girl; she was abandoned or just destroyed because all families wanted a boy so that he could care for them when he grew up.

I read the book and knew without a doubt that this is what God wanted me to do. Help those children. I now know what people mean when they say God spoke to them. He didn’t speak to me as such but I knew this was my calling and when I discovered it, I felt warm all over and a peace settled over me that I had never felt before. I am normally a very short tempered man and a bit paranoid but the peace I felt was absolute.

I had felt this peace before on 3 occasions; at the funeral of my mother, the funeral of Rose’s mother and following the death of my 49 year old son. At both funeral’s I felt a hand on my shoulder when there was absolutely no-one near me, but following the death by suicide of my beloved son I sobbed in church for everyone to see and could not stop it. This went on for exactly one year when one Sunday at Communion Service I was kneeling at the rail praying for God to take me because I was so miserable when I looked up and the entire alter was lit up like a spot light was flooding it. I felt the peace of God at that moment and never cried again. I do know the peace of God and I now know why he kept me here all these years through the hell of war, two atomic bomb blasts, two wives and many surgeries.