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By Dean Kelly

Minister, Highland Home Church of Christ

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t cough. I surely couldn’t speak. I was in a gathering of thousands of people who were eating and waiting to hear Drew Brees speak.

No one knew. I did get someone’s attention nearby, and tapped my throat to indicate I was choking. I didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to do. Time was standing still at that moment. I don’t know how long it really was, but it seemed like a long time.

I picked up a glass of water, hoping it would knock the rebellious piece of meat from where it stubbornly lodged and did not belong. Instead, it went down and came right back up. Through it all almost no one in that huge crowd noticed me.

The force of the water coming back up actually did begin to work. I began to gag and sputter a little.

Suddenly, I could cough, and just as suddenly I felt it dislodge. I coughed it up and could breathe again. I finished my meal (very slowly and carefully). Then, I enjoyed listening to Drew Brees interviewed by Kim Hendrix. I rode home and had a good night – a night I wasn’t sure I’d have.

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit’; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.  Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.’ But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.” (James 4:13-15).