Friday mornings hanging out with a bunch of knuckleheads challenging one another to grow stronger in faith is rarely boring, if ever. I hope to do it until this simple dude from Missouri croaks. It energizes my spirit.
To sit in a room with, usually, 12-16 other dudes from all walks of life, with all types of stories of praise and predicament is inspiring. It’s like a football team. It’s fascinating, and gives an aging jock who loves to write plenty of material.
The weekly Platoon meeting is a blessing.
Anyway, I’m sitting there recently, settling into my chair, in possession of one doughnut snatched from the passing box, when one of the dudes starts talking about a story that would have made a hilarious skit on Saturday Night Live.
In a nutshell, this man, who is beaming about the recent birth of a baby daughter, apparently was trying to retrieve a dog before it ran onto a heavily traveled road. Somebody else (if I got the facts straight, a nephew about ten years old) was also in hot pursuit and determined to capture the canine from harm’s way.
In the fervent dash, somehow story-telling dude slipped. Quickly, but awkwardly, the gentle soul jumped to his feet and hurt an ankle. But there was a dog to save. Press on. Somehow, someway, despite the pain, the buddy sharing the story soldiered on. Dog is rescued. Ankle is broken.
The kind-of-guy you’d want your daughter to marry has been away from the group, at home bonding with wife and baby girl. He wraps up the hilarious - I didn’t do it much justice - story about rescue and rehabilitation with this gem, concerning a rapid recovery from injury: “I don’t know if it was prayer or Percocet. But it was quick.”
Bam. The final line hit me like a linebacker from the blind side. Prayer or Percocet? We all have pain in life, right? Things rarely go as planned? The big ol’ question that must always be answered? “How we gonna deal with this roller coaster we call life?”
Just my opinion, but how about, “Are we gonna mask the pain with Percocet, or endure it with prayer?” Or, as in buddy’s case, apparently a mixture of the two? The mind wonders about definitions while the hand reaches for the dictionary.
Oxford says that “mask” means “anything that disguises or conceals.” Same source says endure means “patiently bear hardship or pain.” It sure seems we’d be better off dealing with life’s challenges by choosing endure over mask.
This week, let’s patiently bear hardship or pain and not disguise or conceal it. Let’s be real. “Percocet or prayer?” Mask or endure? A buddy’s humorous statement was a powerful reminder. Sometimes each is necessary. However, the latter choices, prayer and endure, seem better.
They’re free, abundantly available and widely embraced as being good for us!
No comments:
Post a Comment