Finger Prick

Actually, this is why I live in Bora Bora. Don't bother coming for a visit, I won't be home. I'm down at the beach doing push ups with the girls.

Mea culpa to everyone. I have been absent from the blog
for a very long time. Here’s the deal: I wanted to see if I
could do push ups around the world. You know what I
mean? It was one of my burning ambitions. Some gluttons
want to see how many Nathans hot dogs they can shove
in their mouth. Me, I wanted to do push ups from
Bora Bora to Bora Bora and all places in between. It
takes a lot of time and push ups to accomplish that
journey.

When one is doing push ups around the world,
you are going to come across some weird people.
Yeah, strange coming from a push up guru, est bon?
I really have a lot of interesting adventures to relate.
Such as when I was  almost run over by this idiot
dragging a cross down a highway in Colorado on
the west side of La Veta Pass between Walsenburg
and Fort Garland. So I stood up to speak to him.
Believe it not he was coherent.

This guy, who will remain nameless, was dressed in a gown made out of burlap bags, wore sandals, and
a rope tied around his waist. He also had an old Army surplus knapsack on his back and a plastic milk
jug filled with water tied to it. The cross was pine with two gate handles attached and two lawnmower type
wheels on the bottom end. All the better to drag around your cross. He had a scraggly beard, long hair,
was unwashed (I would guess for years), smelled worse than and old goat and had a mouth full of
rotting teeth. I thought he was in his late fifties but he did tell me he was thirty-eight years old.

Here’s the good part of the conversation:

I:  Hello brother!
Him:  Hello to you also brother.
I:  Sure is a hot day to be carrying that cross.
Him:  I don’t mind, I’m doing this for Jesus.

Now this is where it gets scary.

I:  Why would you do that for Jesus.
Him:  Because he died on it for our sins.
I:  You mean he died on that cross you’re holding?
Him:  No, the cross of Jesus is a symbol of our Lord’s love for us.
I:  But, I don’t understand how dragging this symbol down the road does anything for anyone.

By this time he had laid his burden down (pun intended) and moved off the highway shoulder under a
tree.

Him:  It is for my salvation and the salvation of others.
I:  Then you are doing this for yourself?
Him:  No (with just a hint of an edge to his voice),  not just for myself for the salvation of men.
I:  Only men? What about women?
Him:  Men, as in mankind,  that includes women (no smile from him).
I:  What if I told you I was God come back to visit my children in an earthly form, would you believe me?
Him:  Of course not. God doesn’t need to take an earthly form to be among us. That’s blasphemy.
I:  Well then, if God doesn’t need to take an earthly form, and Jesus is supposed to be the son of God,
then the Virgin Mary is a hoax and Jesus was a fraud which makes Christianity a lie. So you’re dragging that
cross around for nothing but exercise.

I kid you not, that man let out a string of explicative that would make a Marine blush. I started to
take the prone position getting back to the push ups when he threw a rock at me.  A modern-day version
of stoning the whore. By the way did you know that the story of the stoning the a whore does not appear
in the original Biblical text? He missed me by a mile. I turned around and start walking in his direction
calling him a little shit. That was when he took off running through the sage without his cross. He never
looked back and disappeared in a distant cloud of dust. Noting that it was hollow and very light (there is
something intriguingly philosophical in that observation), I propped the cross up on the tree we had been
standing under. Then I got back down to the business of returning to Bora Bora and pushed off.  He was
still nowhere in sight.

Here’s the moral to this story:    “Don’t go dragging the cross of your religion around where everyone
can see it if you cannot stand being crucified by deductive reasoning”~ Kat Mandu, Blogger