​

Blog 522 – 01.12.2017
Strong People Don’t Put Other People Down

In at terrible drowning accident in my family when I was ten years old I lost my Uncle Richard, my mother’s brother. Richard had gone fishing with his brothers James and Lamar. It was still early spring so the weather was still cold and they were dressed for it. They pushed out in a small boat and were not wearing life vests. The boat capsized and Lamar could not swim so James, himself a good swimmer, went after him as he was closest to him in the water. Richard was the best swimmer so James, the oldest brother thought he would be fine though Richard was the youngest. Richard struggled unsuccessfully to get out of his heavy coat and boots. Water logged they pulled him under. He was lost. James fought Lamar all the way to the shore. Lamar kept pushing him under trying to keep his head above water. This was the first time I learned that the weak sometimes push others under trying to stay on top. Fear of drowning makes them powerful. I later learned in Scouting that the proper techniques for water rescue is to sneak up behind the drowning victim put one arm under their chin so you can control them and swim with your other arm while kicking your feet. Too often a drowning victim also drowns his would be rescuer by pushing them under. James rescued Lamar but always lamented that he could not also save his youngest brother, Richard.

People who perceive themselves as weak people put other people down but not people who perceive themselves as strong people as the title indicates. Strong People pull weaker people up. We are, all of us, a lot stronger than we believe or perceive most of the time. We have listened to the puny ego in ourselves and other for so long saying, “You can’t, you can’t, you can’t.” till we begin to believe it ourselves – that we are weak, puny, and incapable. Horse feathers, we are more than conquerors through Him that made us and loves us. There is no thing, nothing, that we cannot do if we want to because of Who and Whose we truly are. I love the take children have on some things that seem so complicated to adults. When the Sunday School teacher asked the class of five year olds trying to stump them, “Could God make a wall so high that He couldn’t jump over it?” little Billy was not stumped for a moment, he just said, ” Nope, God can do anything but fail.” That is Who and Whose we are. We don’t have to put anyone down for we are strong enough to carry our own weight and with still enough strength left over to help somebody else up.

When explaining what “more than conqueors” means, I heard one fellow say it means you fight five guys and whip ten. I am a lover not a fighter and I believe that Love is the most powerful force of all so I would express it a little differently. To me it means you start out loving one person and find out you have enough love in you, enough power, to love them all. Jesus like most of us started out loving his parents, then his brothers and sisters, his extended family, his friends – but he did not stop there and neither should we. Someone on Social Media commented that the problem with living overseas is that home is never the same when you love people in other places. Maybe we just need to expand our definition of “home.” Home is where the heart is and our heart is big enough to encompass the whole world. American author, Gertrude Stein said, “America is my country, Paris is my hometown.” That was not meant as a slight to her birthplace but simply to say that she had people and places elsewhere that she loved too.

We do not have to put other people and places down to love the people and places we first knew. We can grow stronger and bigger – big enough to hug the whole world. There was a Coke commercial that I liked as a young man circa 1971 that said, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke…”

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White