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“Bring It On”

Stan was seventeen years old, five feet six inches tall, 140 pounds (soaking wet), when he got tired of his alcoholic father beating him up every time he came home. Looking for a challenge in his life, he ran off and joined the Marine Corps. They were glad to have him, and after his training they sent Stan to Korea. He was there, at the 38th parallel, when the Chinese Communists overran his position. Men were dying by the thousands and still the enemy came. “Bring it on,” Stan said, and fired his weapon until it seized from the heat.
Surviving that, the Marines sent him to join the UN Forces at a little known place called “Heartbreak Ridge”, some of the most brutal fighting of any war. Twenty men would assault the hill; three would come down that night. Stan made Lieutenant through battlefield commissions and led his squad in the Marine tradition . . . from the front. He loved the action, reveled in it and when faced with having to return Stateside offered to give up his rank and go back to Gunny Sergeant. A Marine psychiatrist deemed him a ‘loose canon’ and sent Stan home.
Faced with the boredom of civilian life, Stan looked for new challenges. Three wives and two PhD’s later (Psychology, Cultural Anthropology) he was teaching at a prestigious New England College, nearing tenure. In many respects, Stan was his own worst enemy, a conservative island in a sea of liberalism. Never one to hide his thoughts or opinions, Stan finally won the ire of his superiors and found himself unemployed and alone.
Riddled with guilt and unable to make peace with himself, Stan reached the low point in his life. Desperate to find a sense of purpose he turned to the only friend left to him, our Lord, Jesus Christ. In the love of Jesus, Stan found forgiveness and purpose, a new challenge in his life. “Bring it on, Lord,” he said.
Stan remarried and moved to the Midwest, teaching in a small two-year church-sponsored college smack dab in the middle of one of the worst inner city neighborhoods in the country. Daily he begs, threatens and cajoles his impoverished students to succeed, to accept the challenges of life and overcome them. Judging by the number of past students who keep in contact with him, he has his successes. If this weren’t enough (Stan is in his early seventies, a little pudgy now) he volunteers in the neighborhood, lugging air conditioners up rickety tenement steps to keep some elderly woman from dying in the heat. In fact, he volunteers most of his extra time to help others, putting a strain on his marriage. Still, he is driven to meet any challenges he feels the Lord gives him, and daily he begs the Lord’s forgiveness for his excesses.
And if all this were not enough, he has taken on another ‘typically Stan’ endeavor; confronting, face to face, drug dealers and convincing them to move out of ‘his neighborhood’. These warriors of the mean streets take a look at the resolve in Stan’s face and see another warrior, one tried and tested, and decide that it’s easier to move than accept the challenge. The drug dealers are still in the inner city, but not in Stan’s neighborhood.
I will not reveal Stan’s name for it would embarrass him, this notoriety. He does what he does for the Lord and he is the first one to attribute any success to Jesus. He doesn’t preach, he acts. Many times during the last five thousand years, God has had a use for a soldier. He still does.
Whenever I think that I am being overwhelmed by the challenges I face, I often think of the little Marine (“There’s no such thing as an ‘ex-Marine’”-Stan) who goes looking for them on purpose, and of the Love of Jesus that redeems us all.
“Semper-Fi,” Stan

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