“Not one of those guys will help you when they fire you again, Marty!”

By Hieromonk Tikhon

When I was a younger man, I was a big fan of professional wrestling. I remember reading the autobiography of a very famous wrestler named Bret Hart, who was probably the most famous wrestler in the world in the mid-nineties. There was an account in that book that always stuck with me.

It was early February 1994, and the WWF (Bret’s wrestling promotion) was on tour in Austria. A wrestler named Marty Jannetty was working for the company, and he had a history of getting into trouble outside of the ring, already having been fired and rehired three times by the WWF by 1994. Marty was on “thin ice,” as they say.

In his book, Bret tells a story about a time that many of the other wrestlers—certainly not caring about Marty’s best interests—were encouraging him to do something that was going to get him in a lot of trouble. On a tour bus in Austria, on the very first day of the company’s big Austria-Germany tour, at the instigation of some of his fellow wrestlers, Marty decided it was a good idea to lock the local bus driver out of their tour bus and take off with it. The words that Bret spoke to Marty at that time always stuck with me:

“Marty Jannetty locked the driver out of the bus and was about to drive off with all of us. Many of the boys cheered him on, but when Marty looked at me for encouragement, all I could say was, ‘Not one of those guys will help you when they fire you again, Marty!’ He immediately put on the brakes. He shook my hand and thanked me, then opened the door for the driver and took his seat.”

This is such a relatable story. Who has never found himself getting carried away with something, with people around him spurring him on to do something he’ll later regret? Poor Marty momentarily forgot that he would face judgment for what he was doing.

All of us will face the consequences for what we did and didn’t do in this life. We have a Judge Who will judge us for every decision we make, both public and private, and the consequences of our unrepented sins will be, for us, inevitable. We may sometimes forget that we are being watched and will be judged, but the simple truth is that Christ sees everything we do, and we will be inescapably called to account for it.

Many of us have people around us—some who would appear to be very close to us—who, whilst sometimes encouraging us to do good, can also encourage us to do things we shouldn’t. Often these bad “encouragements” are subtle, masquerading as “love” or “compassion” for us, when they are really something nastier.

The most pernicious, and perhaps destructive, “encouragement” we receive is the pressure to not take church attendance seriously as a matter of life and death. Your spouse wants to sleep in. Your kids complain at you. Your friends and family want you to socialize with them at times when there are church services. “It’s no big deal,” they say. “Why do you need to be at church all the time?” “Don’t you have a family?” “What about us?”

But where will all of these “encouragers” be when you are standing alone, your soul having departed this body, before the Dread Judgment seat of Christ? What will these people say in your defense when you are judged for having acquiesced to them? In the words of Bret Hart: ‘Not one of those guys will help you when they fire you again, Marty!’ Those “encouragers” will be nowhere to be seen, and all you’ll be left with is the consequences of your decisions as your eternal lot.

Not everyone’s situation is the same, of course. We often need the people around us, and these people influence us in both positive and negative ways. And care needs to be taken in all things, especially in family dynamics. If you do feel that you are pressured to forsake the church in any way by people in your life, then the best thing to do is discuss it with your spiritual father. No one is equipped to give you better advice than him. Put your faith in your pastor as Christ’s chosen shepherd for your soul, do as he says, and all will be well. This is one of the infinite beauties of the Church—that She has the simplest solutions for those problems which are too complex for us to figure out by ourselves.

So do what your father tells you, and the next time you are tempted by someone to miss church, remember: “Not one of those guys will help you when you’re judged for it, Marty!”