Gone Are the Days: A True Story of Forgiveness and Healing.

By Ken McArthur

From childhood into manhood I staggered, lost within the mystery of a deeply flawed relationship. For so long, as though blind, with hands and feet touching my way through life, I made little emotional progress. The morning I found my mothers lifeless body, my eyes were opened and my life changed forever.

Gone Are the Days is a moving account of an unusual woman and the troubled son who came to love her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449753177

Ken McArthur

The tracks of Ken McArthur’s life cannot be found along unadventurous roads. At age seventeen, he chose to embark on an American version of “Waltzing Matilda.” Inspired by the music of Woody Guthrie, the young man hitchhiked thousands of miles, slept under bridges, in fields, and along roadsides. He met the landscapes and the peoples of the great nation in which he was fortunate to be born. Seeking to satisfy an insatiable hunger for understanding life, he joined a traveling carnival, lived in a commune, and in silence sat alone in the Rocky Mountains. One rainy day in Colorado, the pickup in which he was riding slid over a cliff onto a steep incline and rolled many times, leaving him severely injured. After eight surgeries, a life-and-death battle with flesh-eating bacteria, and two months in the hospital, Ken went home to Texas. The accident ended his hitchhiking days, but not the lure of adventure. Through deserts, swamps, and forests, he journeyed in airplanes, abandoned mines, caves, cults, and canoes. For over two years he worked with a professional treasure-hunting company on many of America’s famous lost treasures. In his thirties, Ken became a carpenter as well as an inventor. However, at age fifty, his life took a downward slide and he found himself in yet another dire life-circumstance. Due to a physical and an emotional decline, he lost everything and became homeless for eight months. During what he calls “his time outside,” Ken witnessed a living parable involving a wasp and a spider, and once again his direction in life changed. He heard the call to write. You can read the story of the wasp and the spider in the prologue of Gone are the Days. Ken McArthur now lives in Carmel, Indiana and has written a children’s book, Spinny the Spider, and is presently working on The Foolishness of God, an account of his relationship with his father. If someone were to ask Ken, “What is the greatest experience of your life?” without hesitation, Ken would avow “The day I received Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior!”

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Copyright © 2012 by Ken McArthur.

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-5317-7 (e)

WestBow Press rev. date: 06/21/2012

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Prologue

The Door

The Chair

The Trip

About-Face

Little Red Ruler

Dilemma of Lights

The Parade

Dad Needs a Favor

Peanut Butter

Political Winds

How to

Make a Record

Slow Down!

Beauty in Contrast

Snap!

The Sun Came Out

Snow

Apples

Thank You

Time Changes Everything

About the Author

References

Dedication

To Beth Uland

a friend who failed

to hold my faults against me

who missed

every opportunity to quit

whose oversight

made all of the difference

Thank you

Acknowledgments

A very heartfelt gratitude to

my Christian mentors

Orlando and Joanna Reyes

The shoes you made for me and the directions you gave

have served me well. Thank you.

Without Walls Church and The Hope Center,

Fort Worth, Texas

http://www.fwhope.org/

And to my life-crisis counselors

Doctor Mal Couch and Doctor Lacy Couch

Tyndale Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas

http://www.scofieldprophecystudies.org/

Prologue

In 2003, on my fiftieth birthday, I found myself not only homeless, but hopeless. Afraid and depressed, I felt like I had reached what was surely to be a dismal end for me on this earth. But one day from inside a simple, self-made shelter, I observed something that fixated my attention and forever changed my thinking. I noticed a large spider, waiting, sensing for movement from his intricate web. To my surprise a hefty wasp came into contact with the sticky strands which quickly ensnared its legs. At once the hungry web maker leapt forward to further entangle its prey. Naturally, I empathized with the wasp, as if I were watching the closing scene of my own life. When the spider lurched again, the wasp began beating its wings so vigorously that the little dragon started to spin. The web lines began to twine into a larger rope, somehow encasing the spider in its own web. Suddenly, the web’s moorings broke and the stinging beast took flight. In amazement I watched the cocooned spider dangling beneath its intended supper as both disappeared into the distance.

Through this occurrence I realized that the outcome of a thing cannot always be predicted by present circumstances. Indeed, what might appear to be one’s doom may easily become one’s new beginning. During my time outside, the Lord Jesus Christ supernaturally met my needs and daily washed my feet. Like the disciple Peter, I asked the Savior to wash not only my feet, but my hands and my head also. During eight months of homelessness, the Lord met me in the wilderness, and like three million children in the desert, I experienced the loving provision of the God I had known only from inside dwellings. When my time of testing was at end, I entered back into dwellings, certain that I truly was the richest man on earth!

Through the parable of the wasp and the spider, I heard the call to write, and was inspired to endure my present adversity and to allow God to write the next chapter of my life. So I have written this account of God healing a crucial relationship and filling a hellish void of the soul with hope, peace, and joy.

I now live in