Questions & Answers
Questions 405 (COD Page 1165)
Brother Branham, when some of...someone gets on me or “steps on my toes (This might be a good one.)–steps on my toes,” as the old saying is, my temper rises; how can I overcome this thing? I know the Lord will have to do it, but what can I do in my heart? I don’t want this thing.
94 Sweeten your temper with prayer, then make up your mind. There...I don’t guess there is too many people in this building ever had any more temper than I did to begin with. Oh, I–I had a mouth mashed all the time. And I–I–I’d taken a lot of my meals out of a straw.
95 My mother, as you know, was a half Indian, and my father was an Irishman, a Kentucky Irish at that. And every one of...Both of them had enough temper to fight a buzz saw. And all the time my mouth was mashed; I was little to begin with. And they’d just pick me up and knock me down. And I’d get up again; and they’d knock me down again till I just got too able...unable to get up anymore. That’s always. And then when I got able to get up, I got up again; they knocked me down again. So that’s just the way I had it.
96 I thought, “I can never be a Christian.” But when the Holy Spirit came into my life, that’s done it. No more...
97 I had a woman one time; I went to have to cut the lights off. And that day I had hair on top of my head.
She said, “You little, kinky-headed idiotic!”
I told her, I said, “Woman, you oughtn’t to curse like that.
Oh, don’t you fear God?”
She said, “You little, kinky-headed idiotic, if I wanted somebody to talk to me about things like that, I wouldn’t get a half-wit like you.”
“Whoo!” Then she called me a blankety, blankety name. Oh my, if that’d been a year farther! I always said, “A man that’d strike a woman wasn’t man enough to strike a man,” but I–I might have broke that at that time calling my mother a bad name like that. But you know what? It never even fazed me. I said, “I will pray for you.” Never bothered...I knowed right then something had happened to me. Yes, sir! Oh, my!
98 You know the evils that I done when I was a kid, fighting! Almost killed five man at one time. Took a rifle loaded with sixteen shots, and when them boys beat me because I was a Kentuckian, no other reason...I couldn’t even hold my head up. One would hold me by hands like this, and the other one’d stand there with a rock in his hand and pound me in the face, till I just lifeless. Nothing in the world...
99 They called me a “Kentucky squab,” because my mother, when she was young, she sure looked like an Indian (looking at her picture awhile ago), and they knowed she was a half Indian. And because I was Kentucky and her being a squaw, they called me a “squab, a Kentucky squab.” And I had nothing in the world to do into it; I couldn’t help because I was born in Kentucky.
100 I went down there to school, and I didn’t have no clothes to wear, and my hair hanging down my neck. And Pop...Mom took Pop’s old coat that he was married in, and cut it up and made me a pair of pants to wear to school my first time. And I...And she dressed me with a pair of white stockings on and a pair of tennis shoes. And they said, “If you don’t look like a ‘windy’ Kentuckian.” And–and all...and that...and then, that went on all my–all my school days.
101 And a couple of boys, because I walked down the road with some little girl and packed her books...They didn’t want me to do that, and they met me down there and beat me till I was simply unconscious. I told them, if they’d just let me go, I promise that I would go right straight home. And so they took...let me loose, kicked me four or five times, knocked me down, and scraped my face all over. And I went home, like this, up through the broom-sedge field.
102 I had a little .22 Winchester rifle laying up over the door. Reached up and got that rifle full of bullets, went right down through the locust thicket, and hid by the side of the road till these five or six boys come along there. Just waited till they come, and when they was coming there, talking, said, “That Kentuckian will realize where he’s at from this on,” going on like that.
103 I stepped up with the hammer pulled back on the rifle. I said, “Now, which one of you wants to die first, so you won’t watch the others?” They started squealing; I said, “Don’t squeal, ’cause you’re all going to die one by one.” And I meant it! And just then they started squealing. And I pulled up and snap! The gun snapped. I throwed another shell in. Snap, it snapped; another shell, snap, it snapped. And I pumped sixteen shells on the ground. Every one of them snapped. And them boys running, and screaming, and diving over the hill, and everything.
104 And after they left, I stood there. When I’d get so angry, till I–I–I wouldn’t cry, I would laugh like a idiot and tears run out of my eyes. Now, that’s a temper. If it hadn’t of been for God, I’d of been a murderer.
105 And I picked up them shells and put them back in the rifle, and, “Pow, pow”; they’d shoot just as good as ever. Talk about grace!