Second Chances

Like most everyone, I have only a few early childhood memories before age 5. One of these was a dream, actually a nightmare. I dreamed I was on a game show. I tried but never remembered what the show was called. Today, I remembered the dream and did a little research. I found it was called Second Chance. It ran for only one 19 week season in 1976, which was a good reason why I couldn't recall it. Here's a three minute clip from YouTube.



Isn't that weird? It was later revamped and retried as Press Your Luck with the Devil being replaced by a Whammy. Anyway, I was three years old at the time and in my dream, I was playing the game--oddly the set was blue/black, not yellow/ugly--and if I landed on the Devil, my parents would go to hell. That scared me good enough to sear it into my mind for 30+ years! And people wonder why kids wake up crying in the middle of the night.

I despaired, if that's possible for a 3 year-old, for weeks because I thought it was real and that one day I would be on that game show and have to play it for my own fate or my parents. You can imagine the stress it created.

The good news is that the next year I went to a Sunday School where a missionary named Pat explained that Jesus died to save us from hell and that if I wanted to go to heaven, I could ask Jesus into my heart. It wasn't a matter of luck or chance! I took her at her word and when I found my parent in the hallway that Sunday, I ran and told my dad what I had done. I think it's because I wanted to make sure he knew too so he could go to heaven. Anyway, my dad was thrilled and picked me up in his arms. That's all I remember.

When I had grown up, I later found out that God had been pressing my dad through the Holy Spirit to share the Gospel with me and the impression was that if he (my dad) wouldn't do it soon, that God would do it another way. I got my second chance, so to speak. But I also realized that God takes the early reservations for heaven just as seriously as he takes the last-minute bookings.