Face your fears, or live in regret

"It's a lot easier to run away from the problem than it is to face it head on and take a chance on gettin' hurt. But in the end all you're left with is emptiness, and regret."
~ Barry Corbin in Born Wild

Well yesterday I decided I needed a movie to clear my head. I picked a random movie that I hadn't seen before...at least I thought it was random. I know now that God directed me to watch this movie for the message it delivered. It's called Born Wild from 2013. It looks like it was one of those straight to DVD type deals and I only gave it a chance because I saw that Kix Brooks was in it. Very weird to see a country music superstar as a villain by the way. Anyway, it's a very intense character study about the effects of running from your problems, and the consequences that come with it.

The story is about a character named CJ Jennings, a former member of an underground biker gang who has just been released from prison for murdering a fellow member of the gang. That part of the story dies very early on as it not a very important factor in the overall plot. Basically, we find out that CJ left his hometown of Banshee, Texas twenty years ago, leaving behind a young girlfriend, and all of the familiar that he apparently didn't want. Instead of sticking with the simple life, he decided to run and find something new.

So he returned to find his mother dead, his bestfriend dying, his former girlfriend now divorced from the afore mentioned Kix Brooks, and a son he never knew he had. This movie kind of dragged for a little bit, and I was really wondering where it was going to go...and then it started to take shape. CJ was a drifter. He ran away from his life and decided to go be a bad boy, joining a dangerous biker gang and ending up getting involved with all of the wrong people, and as a result he paid the price with a prison sentence.

The quotes I included are spoken by his father. They reunite after about 40 years of not seeing each other. As we learn in this scene, CJ's father was a runner too, leaving him and his mother when they were young, blaming all of his issues on the war, and instead deciding to find his comforts at the bottom of a bottle. They reconnect over time and it is quite serene to watch. These quotes stuck with me immediately. They are what made me realize that this movie was not so random and within seconds, I had the material for my next blog. The Lord sure does work in mysterious ways.

This movie was actually very, very good, and it really helped me in understanding some personal issues. I've been a runner quite a few times in my life. I ran away from my home in Riverside when I was 17, and set off a chain of events that led my father to drop me off in Tucson just a few months later. I ran away again from my sister's house not even a year later, and ultimately ended up almost homeless in Tucson. Nobody, on their 18th birthday, should get the reality check that I did, but I brought it on my self. I paid the price for trying to run from my problems by hitting  rock-bottom.

Over the years I've run from several other situations. I've run from jobs, probably because I momentarily just didn't like something my boss said, and instead of facing it, I burned a bridge that could never be repaired. I've run from relationships, for various reasons. If a situation isn't working, I tend to flee. I honestly don't know if any of it is from my mother dying when I was younger, or it is just the result of some faulty wiring in my brain, but I know that I have in fact done more than my fair share of self-sabotage, and in some cases I have paid dearly for it.

Ultimately, I have learned a major lesson recently. I have been putting way to much pressure on myself to be the absolute best I can be. I want to be the bread winner, but I'm no good as a provider or a husband if I can't get a handle of my own mentality. I have to give things time. I must learn to live in the moment instead of worrying so much about the long term outcome. Nobody knows what the future will bring, that's the mystery of life. You can't waste your life in worry, and you damn sure can't run from your problems. If you don't face your fears, all you'll have is regret.

"You don't have to be a great man, a good provider, be a good husband or a father...you just have to BE THERE."