Hurt

I was ten days out from my next fight and toward the end of a hard training camp.  For some reason I remember that it was a Wednesday.  I was a young fighter about to fight my fourth or fifth amateur match and I had been working hard to get ready.  I wanted to win this one.  My coach was a solid fighter who would later go on to fight on the highest of MMA stages.  But that night he was the only one near my weight class to show for practice.  So, his undivided attention was focused purely on me.

We were hammering through hard rounds, starting with kickboxing rounds then adding takedowns.  By the fourth or fifth repetition we were working full MMA rounds.  The goal was to get me ten hard rounds before calling it a night.  He was better than me (that’s why he was my coach) and he was much stronger.  I began to feel the fatigue, but I knew that it was my job to suffer in moments such as these.  That’s how I would prepare for the approaching night when I would be fighting a true opponent.

I popped off a couple of jabs and followed with a right hand.  He sidestepped and countered with a hook that I managed to block just before it found the edge of my chin.  That hook wasn’t the end of his combination.  He was already following with a short cross that grazed my face just enough to move me off balance.  In that moment he stepped in and clinched.

We started pummeling for dominant position, grinding through a series of arm-drags and neck-clinches.  I was trying to hold him off, but he was a really good wrestler.  I could feel him getting closer to success with every movement.  And then he was there—he found the body-lock.  He had managed to follow his underhook past my defense and encircle my torso with both hands, squeezing from the position he had earned.  I knew the technique was locked in—I knew I was caught—but I was obligated to fight.  I tried to twist my body and frame off his face, but he squeezed harder, driving his head and shoulders over my chest and bending my body off balance.

That’s when I felt it.  His hands were exactly where they were supposed to be, the sharp-edged bone of his wrist stoppered just at the edge of my rib.  I felt the space between my two ribs shift as his arms compressed, then I felt the pop.  The tissue had shifted violently in a way that I knew it wasn’t supposed to shift.

I was a young Army medic at the time and just smart enough to know that he had damaged the intercostal tissue between my ribs—in that short moment my brain processed the damage.  I wasn’t terribly educated in the way of trauma medicine, but I knew enough to know that there was nothing that anyone could do to fix that injury—the only cure was time. 

I didn’t have time.  I had a fight in ten days.

All these thoughts sped through my brain in that instant, in that instant when I knew that I was hurt.  I was somewhere between round six and eight—the goal was to finish at ten.  I had a fight coming up, and I couldn’t afford to not finish my training camp.  My pride wouldn’t let me pull out of the match.  There was nothing anyone could do to heal my ribs—no medicine, no treatment, no ointment.  There probably wasn’t anything I could do to make them worse, either.  It was just pain.  I wasn’t going to let the pain stop me.

I think every fighter, at some point in time, has injured their ribs.  We all know that it’s an excruciating pain but that it’s a pain we can do nothing about.  I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop the pain.  I knew that I was just going to have to accept it.  In that that is familiar to fighters, I knew that it was going to hurt.  I knew it was going to hurt a lot.  But at that moment I was moving.  My heart rate was elevated, my respirations were accelerated, and my adrenaline was up.  It was going to hurt.  It was going to hurt when I stopped, so I wasn’t going to stop.  I had more rounds to go.  I was going to do ten rounds, and I was going to be ready to fight in ten days.

I’d been hurt before.  I could fight hurt.  It was only pain.

I’m not a young man anymore.  I wake up every day to pains I’ve been dealing with for years—my collarbone, my knees, my hip.  Sometimes I wake up to new pain and can’t remember where it came from.  I can’t quite recall which of the youngsters wrecked me at practice the night before, but whoever it was left a pretty good memory.

To be honest, there is a large part of me that loves that pain.  The pain means that I am still in the fight.  I know that progress requires sacrifice and sacrifice brings pain.  It hurts because I am learning, and I’m not done learning yet.  My stiff knees tell me that I’ve been practicing my leg-lock defense, my tweaked neck reminds me that I escaped that triangle choke, my overall soreness gives me some pride in the fact that I didn’t quit when I felt like it—instead I sparred for another hour.  The pain reminds me that I overcame myself.  It reminds me that I proved to myself that I was stronger than my traitorous brain wanted me to be.

I take a certain delight in that.

I think I like the physical pain because I understand it.  I know where it comes from and what caused it.  In some ways it is a thing I can control.  I can observe its origin and know that it is a productive pain.  It is a pain that has a purpose. 

It is the only kind of pain that I can grasp.

There are many days when my soul hurts or when my heart hurts.  To be honest, I don’t know I can define the difference between the two.  There is an evasive, almost esoteric, aspect of my invisible persona that experiences extreme discomfort (pain) and I don’t even have the vocabulary to call it what it is.  It hurts…it just hurts.

Maybe that doesn’t make sense.  It doesn’t make sense because I don’t know how to make it make sense.  Sometimes I hurt and I don’t know why.  Sometimes I hurt and I know exactly why.  Sometimes I hurt because I hurt someone else.  Sometimes I hurt because someone hurt me.  Most of the time I hurt in a way that I can’t put words to (and I hate things I can’t put words to) and from time to time I hurt in a way that makes me yell out loud at nothing in particular.

Sometimes all I know is that I hurt.

Those who mourn are blessed, for they will be comforted. (Matthew 5:4) 

As a fighter I learned not to show my hurt and to hide it from the judges—never let your opponent know they did damage.  The pain can’t always be hidden, but most of the time (I believe) it can.  I put on a strong face and just keep moving forward.  I can move through pain.  It’s only pain.

Yet the righteous person will hold to his way, and the one whose hands are clean will grow stronger. (Job 17:9) 

I’m pretty accommodating when people damage me, whether it be physical, emotional, or spiritual.  I’m the sort of guy who takes a step back and shrugs it off, pretending like there’s no hurt there.  I like to show a strong face for the judges, and, if I’m honest, I’m often obsessed with the idea that others might be judging me, which means I’m surrounded my judges.  If I let people know that they’ve hurt me I give them a strange sort of power.  The knowledge that they can hurt me might point them toward how to do it again.

I remember working with a young white belt at one of my friends’ Jiu-jitsu academies.  It was only his second day and he was learning his first guard pass.  He was actually doing pretty well for a new guy.  We drilled it over and over again.  When it came to start sparring I did that thing that instructors frequently do—I replicated the drilling sequence in a live action scenario.  I gave him a chance to pass my guard using the pass he had just learned.

Impressively, he recognized that I was feeding him the technique and he opted to give it a try.  But there’s something extra to live rounds—he was a little bit amped up.  He started to cut through my guard just like I hoped he would, but somewhere along the way he lost his balance.  He slipped from his postured position and fell toward the mat, the corner of his forehead cracking against the edge of my orbital bone.

I felt the cut immediately—I smelled the blood.  I knew I was lacerated and felt the blood starting to trickle, then flow, down the side of my face like a horror movie.  He was immediately apologetic—terrified even.  He knew he had done damage and he hated it.  I told him that it wasn’t a big deal, even as I cupped both of my hands to catch the blood before it hit the mat.

But it was a big deal.  I was going to be off the mats for a while now.  From what I could feel (I’d been cut enough times in my career), I was probably going to need sutures.  He hadn’t done it on purpose, but he had been careless.  There was a moment when I wanted to be angry at him for losing control of his body in space.  I wanted to give him a sharp piece of my mind and let him know what his error had cost me.

But he was a white belt.  He didn’t know any better.  It was his job to struggle.  If I assailed him with hostility and made him feel less than nothing he would  never come back.  He would never step on the mats again.  If he never stepped on the mats again he would never get to experience the joy of what the art could to for him—what it had done for me.

Now we who are strong have an obligation to bear the weaknesses of those without strength, and not to please ourselves. (Romans 15:1) 

As I mentioned, I have a lot of tolerance for those who hurt me.  I’m very accommodating.  I don’t know if that’s a strength or a weakness.  I am genuinely concerned about the feelings of others.  I don’t want them to feel poorly for hurting me.  There are many times when the people in my life do, indeed, deserve to feel bad for hurting me.  I’m not so good at communicating the difference.  I am genuinely afraid of the damage I can do when I choose to react, even when it might be merited.

I’m a pretty decent fighter.  I’m not a small man.  The other day I was trying to flow-roll with a large blue belt.  He saw an opportunity and decided to dive on a toe-hold that was not at all consistent with the pace we were rolling at.  He really wanted it.  He strained and twisted to the point where I could feel it in my knee.  I think I was close to injury but I managed to peel his hands away.  In that moment, knowing that our flow-roll was no longer a friendly thing, I truly considered deploying my full skillset.  He had taken my merciful pace for granted.  I thought about performing a retaliatory murder right there on the mats.  But I didn’t.  I just kept flowing as if nothing had happened.

I think he deserved my wrath, but he didn’t get any of it.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Try to do what is honorable in everyone's eyes.  If possible, on your part, live at peace with everyone. (Romans 12:17-18) 

Maybe I’m too accommodating to those who hurt me—maybe I’m not accommodating enough.  I do know that my level of tolerance for those who hurt me does have a limit, and when I’ve had enough I can return fire rather effectively.  There is a streak of malice inside of me that I don’t always manage to keep hidden.

It was supposed to be a night for cooperative kickboxing rounds, but dude hadn’t gotten the message.  I think he was trying to knock me out.  I think he was trying to knock me out because someone had told me that he had told them that he wanted to knock me out.  I knew I was in danger and I knew he had breached the agreement.  I would be lying if I didn’t admit I was angry. So, I went weapons hot.

He was a decent fighter, but he was all hands—he didn’t kick and he moved slow.  He kept trying to throw unfettered right hands my face.  Every one of them had malice on the edge.  I stayed out of range, just south of the end of every punch.  And I kicked.  Every time he threw I angled away and dialed in a hard leg kick.  Despite the shinguards  I was wearing the kicks started to take a toll.  He started to move stiffly, but he wouldn’t stop trying to hurt me.  I had (and still have) a reputation for being a “nice guy”, but, in my world, he had given me permission to treat him like an enemy. 

I chewed up his lead leg to the point where bruising started to visibly show.  It made his timing even worse and that made my kicks more effective—he was guarding and I was not.  Then I missed one of my kicks.  It didn’t find his leg.  I found the horn of his hip, the iliac crest.  My shin collided with the bone of his hip and a noise like a car wreck echoed across the entire gym.   He froze, I froze—everyone in the gym froze and stared in our direction.

I watched his face as it struggled to comport itself.  He took off his gloves, grabbed his gear, and walked out the door without a word while everyone watched.  I didn’t see him for several more weeks.

I know that the potential for harm lives in me, too.  If I find myself pushed to a certain limit it’s easy for me lash out.  It’s easy for me to seek retaliation, and it’s not that hard for me to be effective with my retaliation.

I’m a trained negotiator.  I’m overly observant.  I know how to interrogate and I know how to interview.  I’ve grown very adept at assessing sensitive points in others.  I know well how to  put an emotional finger on an exposed wound and leave deeper injuries that might not ever be repaired.  I know that because I know that I have done it before.  I’m not proud of it.  I don’t like it about myself.  That’s why I contend so hard to keep it hidden behind my falsely (frequently) smiling face.  I’m accommodating because of the damage I know I can do.

Now finally, all of you should be like-minded and sympathetic, should love believers, and be compassionate and humble, not paying back evil for evil or insult for insult but, on the contrary, giving a blessing, since you were called for this, so that you can inherit a blessing.  For the one who wants to love life and to see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit, and he must turn away from evil and do what is good. He must seek peace and pursue it, because the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and His ears are open to their request. But the face of the Lord is against those who do what is evil. (1 Peter 3:8-12) 

There’s a lot to hurt for in this crazy world.  Every day I get to watch the suffering of others in social media bursts.  This great big Earth has become pointedly smaller.  I’m the sort of guy who sees those things and wants to go change them, but I don’t have that many frequent flyer miles racked up or that kind of bank account.  I work the sort of job that daily inserts me into the suffering of others.  I get to meet individuals at their worst.  Nobody calls me because they’re having a good time.

I have to ask myself what I want to do with the hurt.  Do I want to consume it, stuff it down and put a smile on my face?  I think that’s my natural proclivity.  Or maybe what I really want is to repay the hurt with equal or greater hurt—take the gloves off and let others know that there is truly a consequence for doing me harm.  Maybe I want both.  Maybe I want neither.  Maybe I want something somewhere in between.

It is far more likely, however, that what I want isn’t really what’s important.  Because the things I want don’t necessarily lead to the things I need.  What I need is something different, altogether.  What I need is to find a way to live in deep community with those around me, trusting them with the ability to do me harm while they trust me with the same.  Only with that trust do we each eventually grow to a steadier posture with one another.

And let us be concerned about one another in order to promote love and good works, not staying away from our worship meetings, as some habitually do, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day drawing near. (Hebrews 10:24-25)