The great escape

For as far back as I can remember my brother and I fought like two of Michael Vick’s pit bulldogs at every opportunity. These were not mere tussles, but often bloody fistfights. My father had a “Laize-Faire – boys will be boys” approach to these fights and I suppose wanted us to be tough. He would only intervene when my mother would get him “fired up” about it. My mother was a small person and her punishment of trying to flog us with a belt was laughable as she often hit herself with the belt more often than us as she wildly flailed away at us, and when she did land a blow on one of us, it did not hurt. Now when my father got home later that evening and she stoked him into a rage with her tears and hysterical yelling and he lit into us, it was a different, more serious and sobering story.

I remember one time getting in a fight with one of my brother’s friends. My brother was two years older than me, but I was big for my age and was the same physical size, if not a little bigger than he and his friend were. I started getting the best of his friend in the fight and my brother came from behind me and pinned my arms back and allowed his friend to hit me in the stomach. When he did that, I yelled an epitaph referencing his friend’s mother to a dog; I made a similar remark to my brother. Later that afternoon my brother told my mother that I cursed him and his friend.

I told my side of the story, but it did not make any difference. My brother told her that I started the fight, (which I did not), and she believed him and not me. I got the whipping. It didn’t hurt and I told her so and in fact laughed at her. When my father got home, she promptly told him through tears that I had started a fight and had cursed my brother and my brother’s friend and she told him the terrible name that I had called them. She then dramatically sobbed through tears and blurted out that when she gave me a whipping that I had laughed derisively at her; (oddly she left out the part of the story as to why I had cursed the kid in the first place, because my brother was holding my arms behind me and had allowed the other kid to pound me in the stomach with his fists). My father’s face turned beet red and he pulled off his belt and he beat the living heck out of me and you can believe me when I tell you that I was not laughing about that beating.

This really got to me as being unjust and I decided I would run away from home. In retrospect this might not have been my brightest moment. I did not get very far, because this entire event took place on the island of Guam. In case you do not know, Guam is located several thousand miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and the odds were that, similar to trying to escape from Alcatraz, I was not going to get very far with this escape plan. My escape was short lived. Compounding my problem of successfully running way from home, we lived on an Air Force base and the Air Police (AP’s) picked me up in short order and returned me home. When I got home, you guessed it; I got another whipping worse than the first; this time for running away from home.

Although this happened decades ago, I remember this event as if it happened yesterday. As I look back on it I suppose I come away with the “lesson-learned” that one cannot run away from their problems. Life is not always fair, especially in our eyes and yet we cannot change our situation for the better by trying to run away from our problems. There are various forms of escape that can be tried in addition to just running away, including turning to drugs and alcohol which later in life I tried too, but none of it ever worked for me save turning to Jesus Christ and asking Him to help me to deal with my problems.

I once had a boxing coach that used to say, “If you want to avoid getting knocked out, you must Roll with the punch’; if you do not”, he said, “You will get knocked out; plain and simple”. This is good advice. If you are dealing with problems and you think life is too unfair, simply “Roll with the punch”, and let your problems slide off your chin. You cannot change the world, so let your problems go, like rain water slipping off a duck’s back. Don’t dwell on what you perceive as the unfairness of life as it will not change anything, save making things worse. Turn to Jesus; he is fair and just in every manner. He will provide mercy and justice and will, in time, right every wrong.

Psalm 101:1
I will sing of mercy and justice;
To you, O Lord, I will sing
praises.