This Could Save Your Life

My Life and Lessons - Chapter 4

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Chapter 4 - This Could Save Your Life

The Sermon on the Mount is more than some nice things Jesus said. It contains commandments that he wants us to know and keep. “Whosoever therefore shall break one of the least of these commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:19)

I’ve often asked institute students to read Matthew 5, 6 and 7 and come to class with an insight from those chapters that’s been important in their life, or an experience that’s related to something in those chapters. We have had many wonderful lessons using that approach. You may want to take a break and go read those chapters now. I’ll share a few verses here.

Agree with thine adversary quickly, whilst thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing. (Matthew 5:25, 26)

When I first came across that as a seminary student, I didn’t understand how it applied to me. I did not understand about “agreeing with your adversary” or paying “the uttermost farthing.” I also struggled with these similar verses:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: [which is referring to the law of Moses] But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee, turn thou not away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; That you may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and he sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if you salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:38-48)

When we hear Matthew 5:48, “Be ye therefore perfect,” we do not often remember that it is in the context of loving your enemies. An important part of becoming perfected is learning to love not just our friends, but also our enemies. I always had a hard time understanding about loving my enemies. I learned when I was in grade school and in junior high that if you let people pick on you, they keep picking on you. Sometimes, I had to stand up to bullies and fight back.

Jesus was not telling us that criminals should not be punished according to the law. There are many places in the scriptures and teachings of the prophets where we are taught that it’s important that there be laws and punishments associated with those laws. He was not telling us that we should not exercise the right of self-defense. We are taught that the Lord expects us to defend ourselves. However, instead of talking more about what Jesus did not mean, I would like to discuss what he did mean, and how to apply it.

When I was a senior in college, my wife and I had one child and another on the way. We lived in Ogden, Utah at the time, and I was going to Weber State College. I didn’t have any scholarships or grants, and it was difficult to make ends meet. I had to get jobs where I could work many hours and make a good hourly wage in order to make enough money to get by.

One of those jobs was working at a turkey processing plant in a rough part of town. I was hired to be the foreman of the clean-up crew. I was responsible for 16 crew members. Our job was to clean up the entire plant so that it would be ready to start processing the next day. Generally, we would work from about 5:00 p.m. until midnight, or until the plant was clean. We used all kinds of cleaning implements: steam hoses, high pressure soap guns, hot water hoses, scrubbing brushes, and chemicals. We usually worked 7 to 8 hours. It was a difficult and dirty job.

I’ll tell you a little bit about the turkey plant process because it is an important part of the setting of this story. It also gives insight into the working conditions inside the plant. In the turkey plant, they had an area where the turkeys came in, called the killing room. They took live turkeys off the delivery trucks and hung them by their feet in brackets that moved on long conveyor-chains that carried the turkeys upside-down around the room. The turkeys fought and flapped, flinging feathers and dust in the air and all over the floor and walls.

A worker waited on a rubber mat for the turkeys to come to him. He wore an electric ring over a big rubber glove in his left hand. He grabbed the turkeys by the neck and shocked them to make them go stiff. Then he cut their necks with the knife he held in his right hand, killing one after another, thousands a day.

The turkeys then went into an area called the blood tunnel. It’s important that the blood be drained from the meat, and that occurred as they continued on the conveyor through the blood tunnel. Next, the conveyor chain took them up into the feather room. The feather room had whirly-things with rubber fingers on them that beat the feathers off the turkey. They didn’t bruise because the blood was gone by then.

Then, the conveyor carried the featherless turkeys over a big, long, stainless steel trough that went down through a long room. Workers stood on the side of the trough and cut open the turkeys and took out the insides, which were dropped in the trough. Water ran in the trough and washed the innards down to a conveyor belt with cups that caught the guts and carried them up and dropped them into large metal bins. They were hauled away to be used by feed companies. A lot of the innards fell off of the conveyor into an area known as the gut pit. After that, the process was a lot less disgusting. The turkeys went into large long chillers flowing with water and ice. Then they went into the boning room where they were cut up and packaged as frozen whole turkeys or turkey pieces.

At the end of each day, there was a lot of grease, blood, guts, and feathers and other filth to clean up. There were some cleanup jobs that were so dirty that crew members refused to do them. If I told them they had to do a certain dirty job or be fired, they would just walk. Therefore, the really, really, dirty, hard stuff, I had to do myself. Sometimes I had to lay down in coagulated blood with just my face up above bloody water to clean out drains. Sometimes I was over my head in turkey guts in the gut pit, with my eyes closed and my fingers holding my nose, cleaning out drains. But I’ve always had a strong stomach. I could tell many stories about gross things that happened there. (I could also tell you about some worse things at my next job, helping with dead bodies at the mortuary.)

Luckily, with that kind of equipment, water fights can be awesome, so it wasn’t completely awful. But we did have to work hard to get the entire plant ready for work to start again in the morning. If everything was not cleaned spotless, the plant could not open the next day, and if it could not open, I would lose my job. If I lost my job I would not be able to provide for my family and go to college.

I had to be back at the plant at six in the morning to go on a full plant inspection with the USDA inspector. We called him “The Doctor.” He literally put on white gloves and inspected everything in the plant. He reached under and behind anything he could, and if he found the least little bit of grease or dirt, he insisted that it be cleaned before we could start operation that day. I went with him while he looked for areas that we had missed.

The reality was that he always had to find something wrong to prove that he was doing his job. I learned very quickly that I needed to leave a little something that was obvious for him to find, that was easy to clean up, so that he could find it and write it up. Then we could clean it up in time to start the plant at 8:00. They hired people to come in early from the day crew to be there to help clean up in case we needed them, so that the plant could start running. Hundreds of employees and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment needed to start at 8:00. Every few minutes of delay cost a huge amount of money. As we did the rounds, he usually found whatever I had purposely left. Many times it was something I could just do myself quickly, but sometimes we would ask the people who were there early for that specific reason to clean it up.

But one morning, the doctor didn’t notice the place that I had left for him to find. He got to the end of his inspection, back at the far end of the plant in the killing room. I was concerned because I didn’t want to spend any more time in the killing room than I had to. The people who worked in there were an unsavory bunch. He went in and looked around. “Okay, well, you know, there’s some tarnish on some of these racks where you hang the turkeys. I want you to get some steel wool and clean the tarnish off.”

No problem. I whipped some steel wool out of my pocket and got right over there and cleaned up that little bit of tarnish. He said, “Yeah, that’s good. Now do them all.” Well, there were hundreds of them.

I knew I was in trouble. “How about if we get them tonight?”

“No, we aren’t going to start until every one of these has been scrubbed.”

There were about eight guys sitting there, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, getting paid for doing nothing, like they did every morning. There was never anything that had to be cleaned up in their area because my crew did a good job. Also, the stuff that he was asking us to do was picky little stuff that we shouldn’t have had to do anyway.

The plant manager and The Doctor were standing there beside me. I turned to those eight guys. “OK guys, sorry, but this time you’re going to have to help. Most days you are here, you get paid for not doing anything, but today’s going to be the exception. Everybody grab some steel wool and some scrubbing pads and solvent, and let’s just quickly go through these. If we hurry we can get this done by starting time.”

Those eight guys that were sitting there were not my crew. They were the day time killing room crew. They were scary people. Generally speaking, regular folks don’t work in the killing room. People in the killing room quit every day. They hired new people every day. You had to wear a breathing mask when you were in there, and it was hot. There was blood and filth flying all over. The people that worked in there were really rough, scary people.

I said as positively as I could that we needed to get to work so we could get done by 8:00. The killing room crew started to cuss, swear, complain and gripe. I figured that was par for the course and we’d just deal with it. I stayed there and encouraged them to get working. The Doctor and the plant manager left, and I was the only supervisor there. Some of the crew got a few cleaning things and walked over to start cleaning the racks. One guy, Rick, however, walked up and got right in my face and started screaming at me. He swore and yelled at me in the rudest, most profane, most violent way that I had ever experienced in my life.

He said that if my crew and I had done our job then there would not be a problem, that it was all my fault, and that he was not going to do any cleaning. I continued speaking respectfully to him and encouraged him to go along. He swore at me more, saying how horrible I was, and then he started in on my mother. I cannot convey to you how profane and violent his words were. He continued screaming. I was thinking, “This guy is out of control, what am I going to do?”

I needed to get the cleaning done, but those guys weren’t working. Rick was waging a serious personal attack against me. Then he told me what he was going to do to me, how he was going to beat me up, knock my teeth out, mash in my face, and so on. He was very, very agitated. Eventually, something inside of me kind of snapped. “Okay, go for it.”

He was shocked. “What?”

I answered, “If you’re so tough and you’re going to do all that stuff to me, go ahead. Give it your best shot.”

I wasn’t a great fighter, but I had been in a few fights, had played football and had even taken a few karate classes. I just figured that I was not going to stand there and take any more, and I would fight the guy if I had to. He started to swing at me and then he stopped and turned around and started pounding on the wall, really hard. I thought that was weird. Why did he say all this stuff to me and then start pounding on the wall? While he was screaming and hitting the wall, I just turned around and walked off. I came back a few minutes later and was surprised to see all the killing crew scrubbing the racks. About a half hour later I came back with The Doctor. He looked at the racks and decided it was good enough. The plant started production on time. I left and drove across town to go to class and be a normal college student and didn’t think anything more about it.

That night, work went pretty much as usual until about midnight. That’s when I realized that I had forgotten to put in the trucks. In back of the plant, there was an alley with an old street lamp next to an area enclosed by an eight foot high fence with razor wire around the top. Every night the trucks needed to be parked in that enclosure with the gate locked. Making sure that the trucks were pulled in and the gate was locked was part of my job. I usually did it right after I got there, before it was dark. But that particular night, I forgot. I remembered about midnight and went to take care of the trucks.

I walked through the plant and past a cleaning crew member who was in the killing room. I told him that I was heading out to do the trucks and I’d be back in a minute. I opened the big metal door and started to walk out. I saw movement out there and wondered what I should do. I could have gone back and got some of the guys to go out with me. I could have called the police, but what would I say? I thought whatever happened, I could handle it. I threw open the door and ran out, went across the way, jumped in a truck, started it up and pulled it in the gate. I did that with all four trucks, closed the gate and locked it, and was relieved that it was done.

Then I turned around and started to walk across the alley toward the back of the plant. At that moment, a guy came out of the shadows. He walked up and stood right in front of me. It was Rick, the guy from the killing room crew who had accosted me that morning. He was standing right there between me and the door. He just stood there and didn’t say anything for a while. I stood there and didn’t say anything either. Then other guys started coming out of the shadows. There were about ten of them. They came out and stood in a big circle around me. I just stood there.

Rick smirked. “You remember me?”

I didn’t say anything.

“This morning you said you were ready to fight so I’m here to take care of that now.”

I still didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say or what to do. He said he was going to beat me up like he had threatened that morning. He suddenly swung his fist. I wasn’t really ready for it. He hit me on the jaw. My glasses and my plastic helmet flew off and bounced on the ground. He hit me pretty hard, but it didn’t knock me down.

You may not know this, but sometimes if you are playing football or something rough, and you get hit, it can knock you out or hurt you, but sometimes it just wakes you up. It’s like, “Oh, that’s what we’re doing here, I’m ready now.” That’s what happened then. I was instantly more alert and ready to fight to defend myself. I bent down a little. He aimed his foot at my crotch. I was ready and caught his ankle with crossed hands and lifted it high in the air as I lunged forward.

That caught him by surprise and put him off-balance with his foot in the air. I pushed up and forward with my whole strength, which lifted him right up off the ground and carried him backward a few feet. He landed hard on his back. When he hit the ground, it knocked his breath out. All the other guys moved toward me and I stepped back. He was lying there heaving, trying to catch his breath. The other guys looked at him, and then looked at me and back at him.

After a minute, he caught his breath and got up. “Oh, you think you’re a tough guy, eh?”

He took off his shirt, revealing heavy muscles, knife scars, and old bullet wounds. I did not know at the time that he was the leader of the worst criminal gang in the area. He had recently been released from the penitentiary on parole. He had been in prison for killing somebody. One of the conditions of his parole was that he get and keep a job. If he lost his job, he would be sent back to prison. That’s why he didn’t hit me that morning. He knew if he did, he would have lost his job and gone back to prison. I didn’t know anything about that. Everybody from that area knew who he was, but I had never heard of him. He and his gang carried knives and chains and guns in their cars and the police tried to avoid dealing with them. Do you know what happens if you “dis” or disrespect a gang leader? A gang leader’s life depends on him not taking any guff from anybody any time. Anybody who seriously challenges him has to be hurt or killed. That’s the way it works with gangs. Without knowing it, I was in way over my head.

Rick snarled, “Before, I was just going to beat you to a pulp for disrespecting me this morning, but now I’m going to kill you slowly.” Then he told me what he was going to cut off and all the horrible things he was going to do to me. He was kind of working his way around and getting ready. The other guys were laughing.

I was standing there thinking, “Oh no, I’m going to die. There’s nothing in my patriarchal blessing about this. I’m married, I’ve got a child. What am I going to do? I’m going to get killed here!” While he was carrying on, I prayed, big time. “Lord, I need your help, I need it now! I’m going to get killed! Quick, do something.” There did not seem to be an answer. I wondered, “Why is this happening to me?”

When I thought that, I heard a very clear and powerful voice in my mind that whispered, “Agree with thine adversary whiles thou art in the way with him…and verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” (Matthew 5:25-26) I recognized that those words were from the Sermon on the Mount. It hit me hard. It seemed strange that scriptures were coming into my mind just as I was about to be killed. Suddenly I understood how it applied to my situation. I realized that if I had handled things differently that morning, it would have resulted in a very different outcome that night.

For example, if I could go back to when Rick was screaming in my face, I could very easily have responded, “Rick, I understand how you feel. You don’t have to do this cleanup. Just go over there, sit down and relax. I’ll take care of it for you.” If I had said that, he would have gone over and sat down and had his smoke and his coffee, and he would have looked big to all the guys there. He might have been my buddy after that. He might even have defended me against others.

I knew that I had been too proud to agree with mine adversary quickly when I was in the way. Therefore, I was in a situation where I was going to have to pay the uttermost farthing. I thought, “I get it! I understand now.” I know that there are times when you have to defend yourself, but most of the time in a war of words, you don’t have to defend yourself. There are usually ways out of it if you will be humble, loving, kind, and agreeable. At that intense moment, it was like a big light went on. I thought, “Now I understand and I will never be the same as I was before, because now I see what Jesus was talking about.” And then I thought, “Well, that’s fine, but this is a little late for me to have this great spiritual insight.” Rick stepped toward me, and I thought, “Okay, this is it.”

Then all of a sudden, the big metal door on the back of the plant flew open and somebody came running out. The guys inside the plant had seen what was going on out back. They gathered up the whole crew to watch what was happening from the safety of the back door. Some wanted to come out to help me. Others argued against it. They knew who was out there and there was no way they were going to face them. They were having a big argument about whether or not they would come help me, and the guys who did not want to come out were winning.

The littlest guy there was a high school student named John. He was the youngest guy on the crew. He was not what you’d call a tough guy, but he was courageous. “We’ve got to go out and help him now!” John slammed open the door and came running out. Some of the other fifteen guys grabbed the door and pulled it shut, staying inside. That one little guy, John, came running out, yelling, “I called the cops! I called the cops!” Rick turned to face John and demanded, “Who called the cops?”

Rick moved toward John and John was running toward him. I thought, “Oh no!” Just before they came together, John turned in midair and took off running as fast as he could down the alley. His turn in midair and his run down the alley reminded me of Wile E. Coyote. John worked up in the feather room and as he went under the streetlight, I could see feathers flying off of him. He looked like he was going about 100 miles an hour down that alley with Rick chasing him. Rick was big and slow and half-drunk, and I could see there was no way he was going to catch John. Two or three of the gang took off and followed Rick.

As I stood there watching John pull away from the pursuit, I asked myself, “Why didn’t you do that?” I had played halfback and fullback. I was a fast runner, faster than John. I asked myself again, “Why didn’t you do that?”

That same voice in my head gave me the answer, “Because of your pride.”

At that moment, something inside of me changed. I thought, “Never again will I be in a confrontation when I don’t have to be. Never again will I be too proud to run.”

I was standing there having my second great spiritual experience within a few minutes, when I noticed that there were still about six of those guys left around me. I looked at them, and they looked at me, and then they started closing up the circle and moving in toward me. I thought, “Oh, boy, here it comes.”

Just then I heard the siren. John really had called the police before he came out. The gang heard it and I heard it. We all listened as the siren came closer. They looked at me, and I looked at them, and then they took off. They started running the direction John and Rick and the other guys went.

Just then the back door of the plant flew open and my crew ran out. The police car pulled up. I called to my crew, “We’ve got to go help John.” I took off running and one of my crew followed me.

It wasn’t very long until we caught up with the slowest gang member. He turned around. “Two-on-one, huh?” He reached in his pocket and snapped out a switchblade. I looked at my coworker and he looked at me. Then we both turned and ran as fast as we could the other way. I had learned my lesson.

When we got back around the building, there were a couple of police cars and at least four cops there. They were busy arresting my crew. My crew had their hands up on the building and on the car. I ran up to the police. “No, no! They went that way! This is my crew.”

I explained that some of the gang were chasing one of our guys. I told them which way they went and that some of them had jumped in a car and sped away. The cops jumped in their cars, turned on their sirens again and tore off in that direction. I was left standing there with the rest of my crew. We went in and locked the back door and went into the lunchroom to sit and wait.

Eventually, the cops came back and took a statement from us. They didn’t catch any of the gang, but they would do whatever they could. They did not know what happened to John, so we continued to wait and watch for him. About a half hour later, John walked in. He had run and run, and no one came close to catching him. Eventually, he circled around and came back.

In less than a year, I started teaching seminary full-time. One of my students happened to be a little guy named John. He was a good student, but I would have given him an “A” even if he wasn’t. He had saved my life and had proved himself to be a young man of courage.

That night, Rick and his gang got away from the cops and re-grouped. They went looking for the next guy on Rick’s list of enemies. They found him in a bar and killed him. They were observed and the police arrested Rick. The next day he was taken back to prison.

Everything at work was normal after that, which is why I’m still here to tell the story. I learned some things that night that I’ve applied many times since then. I’m not perfect at it, but I’m way better than I used to be. If you understand what Jesus taught in Matthew chapter five and if you understand the true story I just shared, it could save your life.

Men and young men, if you’re walking down the street with your girlfriend or your wife, and some guy starts shouting obscenities at her, what are you going to do? You are going to look the other way and pretend you didn’t hear and keep on walking. You don’t know who you are dealing with, and Jesus has already told you how to handle it.

This same principle applies every single day in normal life. It applies in the family, workplace, at school, and with friends. We can do a lot to smooth our way through life by picking our battles carefully.

Discussion Questions

1. How do you think you might benefit from studying the Sermon on the Mount?

2. Why do you suppose I included so many details about the turkey plant? How could such a distasteful job or context possibly relate to your life?

3. In this chapter I told about revelations that came during a time of great distress. What applications might this have in your life?

4. What are the most important things you learned from this chapter and how will you apply them?