Freefall Into Fate

This is a story about a young man whose life, near death and faith brought him closer to the Creator of us all. His story will capture your heart with his will to live, and your spirit with his realization of God.

– Pastor Ron King, Shawnee United Methodist Church

FREEFALL INTO FATE

An Army Veteran’s TRUE STORY of Faith, a Sport Parachute Crash, and a Glimpse into God’s Realm

By Matt Carpenter

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Matt Carpenter

First Edition – April 2014

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL

VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973,

1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™

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Cover design and production formatting done by:

Matt Carpenter

This book is also available in print.

www.freefallintofate.com

To all of those whom God aligned me with…

Blue Skies,

and

God’s Love!

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 - The Morning of August 29, 2002

Chapter 2 - The Crash

Chapter 3 - The Hospitalization

Chapter 4 - Recovering at Home

Chapter 5 - The Draw to Skydive

Chapter 6 - Returning to Work

Chapter 7 - Reengaging in Aikido

Chapter 8 - The Struggles

Chapter 9 - Return to Skydiving

Chapter 10 - A Different Personality

Chapter 11 - The Realization

Chapter 12 - Reengaging in Life

Chapter 13 - Back to Life

Chapter 14 - The Faith

Skydive Lingo

Acknowledgements

Our Prayer for Jacob Nocks

In Loving Memory

Testimonials

About the Author

Foreword

On August 29, 2002, I was confronted with a set of circumstances in which, regardless of the efforts, disaster was imminent. It happened while attending an annual skydive event in Iowa, where I had done a lot of skydiving over the years. On this jump though, I came face-to-face with a situation that forced me to decide how to crash my parachute. Yes, crash it! I had no other choice but to face the threat of serious injury and death. Since that day, life has not been the same, physically or spiritually.

God has been there for me, attentive to the limited opportunities to reach out and connect with me throughout my life. My father, with a young child of only thirteen month of age, died from a car accident in 1973. I was baptized into the church as a baby, but the clergy and the church community unfortunately did not provide the support my mother needed after this horrible loss. Although being left without a husband to raise a child was tough, with the limited resources available, she did a fantastic job of providing for us.

Mom worked multiple jobs and earned her master’s degree, but the church was not a part of our lives when I was growing up because of the huge loss of trust she experienced after my father’s death. I had very limited exposures to organized religion, even though I graduated from a Catholic high school. I did not devote my attention on developing my faith during the three years I was at the school. I was on a teenager’s schedule with a teenager’s priorities. God knew these things though and was patient.

Close to a year following that near-death parachute crash, a coworker asked me a thought-provoking question. I had met Margaret Gundy not long after returning to work in 2003. Knowing that I almost died and had been through an agonizing recovery, she asked, Do you know what your purpose is yet? That question completely caught me off guard. At that time I didn’t know what to think that God’s plan could be for me, but I knew well enough to suggest that If there is a purpose for me, it will be presented in God’s time.

Other coworkers and friends around the same time period suggested that I write a book and tell my story. That idea struck a chord and it crossed my mind that, This could be the purpose, and I would love for that to be the case. However, I didn’t truly feel there was a story in me to tell. The truth was that I was just a guy living day-to-day, doing what I could to perform at my job and resume my life. I needed to focus on the ongoing recovery. I still had a long ways to go with the process and that was the only purpose I knew at the time.

Years passed, yet the interest of sharing a story stuck with me. Still not truly knowing if there was a story in me to tell, in 2007, I bought a laptop and would set aside time on a regular basis to try writing. However, I only experienced writer’s block and a lack of true inspiration. All of a sudden though, nine years after the crash, almost to the day, something changed.

On August 27, 2011, while routinely sitting next to my wife that evening, I picked up the computer and unexpectedly started journaling. Thoughts were flowing out and amazingly I produced several pages. The next day, I wrote many more pages with little effort. I don’t know why suddenly my outpouring started, but I did know that I needed to stay focused on it.

Before I started journaling, I had no previous memories of the sequence of events that led up to the crash because of the brain injury. However, that very next day, something happened while I was journaling on August 28. Around one o’clock that afternoon, I began having flashbacks of various images of the parachute flight. My heart started racing, and I became nervous of what I might learn, but I knew this moment was a chance to regain a vital piece of the puzzle—so I didn’t fight it and kept my mind open.

On August 29, I talked to my friend, Chris Armstrong, who witnessed the last few seconds of my parachute flying through the air. A couple of comments that he said caught my attention, in particular when he said, That’s a long time ago. It’s been about ten years, but I’ll do my best to remember. The other comment that grabbed my attention was when he said, The last turn that I saw looked like something done out of desperation.

His comments were critical because one of the regained memories I had was up to that turn, and I had remembered the turn as a desperate attempt to avoid crashing. He elaborated more, which helped me to validate what I needed.

I was getting overwhelmed as he shared his memories so I took a minute to digest them, and I realized something about Chris’s first comment—and the years passing.

The crash had happened exactly nine years ago to that day. At that exact moment, nine years earlier, a team of surgeons had my torso spread open on the operating table, working together to keep me alive.

After we finished our conversation, I started to connect everything that had been happening. I began recalling memories, which gave me a newfound motivation to write and prioritized for me the importance of staying engaged in the writing process.

I can’t explain the timing for everything, but my business, which I had started only eleven months earlier, halted in September and October. Although it had only stalled because the weather was nice, my inspiration amazingly coincided with this downtime, and for those months, all I did was work on this manuscript. It became another one of the many validations for God’s presence, but I didn’t see it until later because I was in the middle of living it. God provides us with what we need, when we need it. God created an opportunity for me to write full-time, and I fortunately had enough money in savings to do it.

As the manuscript had developed, Victoria, in her radio industry lingo, later said, When you’re inside the bottle, you can’t see the label on the outside that others can see. Her analogy acknowledged that there was more to my story. Up until August 2011, my focus had been on the recovery and not on all of the processes involved throughout the whole experience. By taking a step back, I was seeing the bigger picture. I realized I had more to consider—and that awareness came in God’s time.

I wrote the bulk of this story in those two months. The manuscript still needed its final editing and publishing, but I had finished the hardest part of creating the rough drafts for the fourteen chapters. By the first week of November, the phone started ringing and business picked up again just before my savings had run out. Being able to write this book was a blessing and finishing it has been my goal. However, focusing on only one new professional industry at a time was necessary for producing quality results, so the book was delayed for a while as my attention was redirected toward earning an income.

As much as I wanted to keep making progress, reality reminded me that I had responsibilities with running my business and paying my mortgage, so I set the book aside until another chance came along. From 2011 to 2013 I explored two different industries in an effort to narrow down my professional passions, learning that my real enjoyment came from crunching numbers and providing services of a fiduciary nature to my clients. I owned a franchise in the energy efficiency industry and then earned the credentials necessary to do financial planning, all while my passion for this book set idly aside, as I accrued more savings.

I remained patient, and another opportunity unexpectedly came available. It wasn’t a great situation, but when life was handing out lemons, I chose to make lemonade from it. This circumstance offered me the chance to dedicate my attention to the book and finish the publishing process. God works in awesome ways!

Because of my brain injury, I had broken memories about the crash and what happened after the crash. As a result, when writing, I relied on friends and family who had been involved to fill in gaps. I gathered information from medical records and then incorporated the personal experiences that I lived during the recovery.

Being able to write this book makes more sense to me now. I have a much better understanding of why I didn’t feel like I had a story to tell in 2003. The core of this experience has been, and is, about my walk with God and how I have come to know God’s presence without question. In 2003, I had lived only a couple chapters of this story. Life is a work in progress, and I needed more time to understand it. I am grateful to have compiled these chapters. Because life is a work in progress, I look forward to the next chapters that are in store for me. I just hope they will be a lot less painful.

Introduction

Each year skydivers organize events, called boogies, so they can spend time with friends and skydive for days on end. The organizers typically have several different types of aircraft available, ranging from turbine airplanes with tailgate exits and helicopters to hot-air balloons for jumping from. These events are a freefall heaven for the common skydiver! Hundreds of jumpers come to jump and socialize with friends, new and old.

A number of large boogies usually take place every year and are held in different parts of the United States (and other parts of the world too). Most members of my jump club liked going to a boogie in the Midwest over Labor Day weekend every year.

My first trip was in 2000, when I had logged about 110 skydives up to that point. When somebody asked though, I sometimes embellished because I was counting all the times of exiting from an aircraft while in flight, which increased the total to about 140 jumps. Those additional parachute rides were not recorded in the skydive logbook, but they included jumps that I did with the US Army, starting in 1993. The army jumps were a lot different than sport jumps, but any kind of knees in the breeze time was great for me! The time in the sky happened a lot more frequently as a sport jumper though, and I loved it!

An airborne training jump at Malamute Drop Zonein Fort Richardson, Alaska.

College graduation on May 12, 2001, making a commemoration skydive.

Taking time off from work each year to attend the boogie became a routine event for many of us. In 2002, I went to that Labor Day boogie for my third time. The event officially started on the Thursday before Labor Day, with the majority of attendees usually showing up on Friday for the holiday weekend. That year though some of us wanted to get an early start on the festivities, so we arrived on Wednesday night.

The next day, on August 29, we made our first jump early in the morning. In fact, we were up as soon as the airplanes started flying. The first jump of the day marked my 347th logged skydive that I had made, in addition to the army jumps.

Unfortunately