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RUNNING AWAY‘Running away’ is something that almost everyone in the world is very familiar with. I do not think that I have ever met anybody in my entire life, who has not run away from something or someone at one time or another. I ran away from the Children's Home Society in Jacksonville, Florida many times when I lived in that darn orphanage. I have met all kinds of children who were lucky enough to have a mom and dad who also run away from home. Not to mention a whole bunch of husbands, fathers, wives and even some mothers too. It occurred to me what dangerous chances we take with our lives when we run away from something or someone. To say that running away is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire would be putting it lightly. If we could only look inside that crystal ball, just for a moment and see that running away can only be compared to sticking one's head into the mouth of a lion and only because we are searching for something better than what we are running away from. Running away should not have been called ‘running away’ anyway. It should be called ‘running to,’ because that is what most of us are really trying to accomplish when we run away from something. When we think we are running away, actually, we are just looking for something better to ‘run to.’ Searching to find something special to better ourselves or just find something different that will make us feel better about our situation or ourselves. No one that I have ever met has ever run away more times than I have. I would run away from anything and everything, because I did not know who or what I could trust. The orphanages, the reform schools, the jail, the prison, the United States Army, my friends, my pastor, my community, not to mention all five of my marriages. Now at age 54, I look back over the long, hard years, and as I lean over the sink and stare into my wrinkling face in the morning mirror, I have to wonder why I wasted so much of my life. I wish that I could have seen very early on that the terrible, horrible, evil thing, way off in the distance that I was ‘running away’ from and that the wonderful, good, kind thing way off in the distance that I was trying to ‘run to’ was only ‘me’ looking for ‘ME.’ |