When I was a kid my brother David and I used to fight all of the time. By fighting I mean we wrestled, grabbing one another and throwing the other around. He is almost exactly one year younger than me so we were hyper competitive. The back yard was this field of dreams where we competed with one another in baseball, football, games that we made up and God knows what else. We would pass by one another in the house and just start wrestling seeing who could pin the other to the ground.
Then one day I was watching television and it was some Cowboy show. I don’t remember which one but I vividly recall when the fight broke out the Cowboy used his fist and hit the bad guy in the face. He kept doing it until the bad guy fell to the ground.
“Um hum,” I thought to my eight or nine year old self.
Later on the carport my brother grabbed me and started to wrestle. I stepped back, balled my fist and hit him in the face.
“That’s not fair!” he screamed.
I did it again.
He started crying and yelling for Mom.
I hit him again thinking to myself that this Cowboy stuff worked pretty good!
Of course this stuff only works once. By the next day David had figured it all out and when I walked by him he just hit me in the face.
I learned that retaliation is something that people do.
A few years ago I lost my mind and decided to take on the state mental health system and make it better. If you follow this kind of stuff treatment for the mentally ill is one of the United States worst sins. There is not a single state that doesn’t underfund and under treat people with various forms of mental illness. One of the reasons that we build so many jails and they are all over crowded is because the mentally ill go untreated, do something inappropriate or really bad, get arrested and sit in prison.
As a matter of fact the prison system is the largest provider of mental health services in the country. It is a silly waste of tax dollars as preventive treatment is much cheaper and actually helps people to live a good life.
Anyway we were initially successful mainly because the Governor’s office understood the economics of it all. It is cheaper to treat than to incarcerate. So we received several million dollars matched it with private money, built a state-of-the-art treatment facility and all looked promising and good.
Then we were hit in the face. The government bureaucracy didn’t like that we were different from everything else that they supported. Those that had lost the contracts bonded together and aligned themselves with the bureaucrats to oppose what we were doing. And after a few years it all came crumbling down.
I was telling a friend of mine recently that I understand the crucifixion. People try to do good and oppose the way things are like Jesus did and end up getting crucified. It’s a sad fact of life.
Those people who have never been crucified have never really tried to do much that is good. It may be on a small scale in your family, a bigger one like in your neighborhood or a grand scale impacting lots of people. Along the way as you try to make a positive difference people hate you for your efforts and they do their best to hurt you.
The times that this has happened in my life it left me hurt and cynical. But I am a big believer that justice eventually comes around. Good triumphs evil. Love overcomes hate. The good guys finally overcome the bad guys. God reigns supreme.
“Waiting is the hardest part,” according to Tom Petty and I think that he is right. But the faithful wait. And they believe in these things. Even though they are hit in the face or the things that they wish for are denied.
So over the past couple of years I’ve been hit with a lot of stuff. All of my kids are gone. Love fled from my house. The things that I had given my life to no longer needed me. Lots of people who had told me that they were my friends disappeared. A blanket of loneliness fell over my life.
But outside of my bedroom window is a tree. The leaves have fallen on the ground and it stands naked in the wind. But there is this one red leaf hanging on. It believes that it will survive until the spring and be surrounded with the love of the sun.
It makes me smile. I believe in that leaf. With everything inside of me!
