Imagine my surprise when I logged onto to Facebook this weekend and found a new friend request waiting my approval. My surprise wasn't the actual request, I do gain new friends from time to time. My utter shock was who it was from.
You know how Facebook has that section off to the right where people you might possibly know and want to connect with show up? A few weeks back I saw someone from my past. A girl I went to high school with, thankfully for a short period of time. Let me just give you my sob story straight up. I pretty much hated high school. I was picked on a lot, had a small circle of friends and had my self-esteem beaten to a pulp. One of the sad, pitiful things that would happen is I would change my walk-through-the-school route to avoid confrontations with some of these girls. In my 14 year old mind, they were out to get me. As an adult, I can't imagine trying to compensate now the way I did then, should I face such ugliness. But at the time, I tried everything I could to avoid these girls. It never seemed to work. They were everywhere. Like insects that could detect when I was coming. They'd sniff me out and next thing you know they would be hot on my heels taunting me with dumb words and provoking comments.
I could say I'm a lover, not a fighter. I don't know how much of the "lover" part is true, but the "not a fighter" is definitely accurate. So when this one particular girl, who seemed to have made it her life's quest to make my life miserable, caught up with me one day, I was fuming inside as she followed me down the halls. Problem was I didn't really have a course of action to get her to leave me alone. Do you know that more than half of the problem children face when they are bullied is their own bruised self-confidence? I can speak from personal testimony. If I felt more confident and self-assured, and carried myself that way, there is no way that I would have come across as easy to push around and dying to be tortured. But, as it was, that apparently was the label smacked across my forehead, "bother me...PLEASE." You would think, as much as girls picked on me, that I was begging for it. Well, this one day as this girl miraculously shows up behind me, saying God knows what in my ear, I recall having a moment of insanity and turning around and throwing my textbooks at her. Did I even hit her with them? Gosh, who knows. I probably missed altogether.
I already told you I was not an experienced fighter. And boy did she know that too. No sooner than I made my first move, she got the green light she was looking for. Friends, don't laugh. You should know I am laughing as I write this. Next thing I know I am on the ground with the bottom of a white Reebok Classic shoe coming towards my face. I hope I had enough sense to try to block that. You know fights happen fast, so as quickly as it started, it was stopped. I remember a teacher or two breaking it up and ushering us down the hall. Now you know for a kid there is a twisted sense of pride when you have been in a fist fight. Almost like, hey I am here, hear me roar! Well, there was no roaring going on with this bout. In fact, if I even wanted to feel a pinch of pride for at least doing something, there was a teacher who ruined it for me. As we arrived in the office he told the administrator about the fight, stating something to the affect of hardly being able to call it a fight; I took some pretty bad licks. What must that scene have looked like for a bystander. I am shaking my head just thinking about it. Clearly, I never forgot the situation, or the interpretation by the teacher.
Needless to say, we both got suspended. Mine brought no pride and plenty of humiliation. If you can't even walk away from a fight feeling like you had a fight rather than a beat-down, there ain't nothing to sing about. Friends, I didn't grow up having a relationship with God. Didn't know Jesus, and sure didn't know anything about prayer. Yet, in the middle of that school year, when this girl and her family up and moved to New York I felt like shouting in the hallway! Hallelujah, there is a God! I remember thinking thank you God for removing this girl from my life.
Imagine my thoughts when I saw this same girl's face over there on the left side of my facebook as someone I might now want to connect with. I might even have said "yeah right" directly to my computer screen. And then imagine my surprise when I see the girl has friend requested me. Is she crazy? She must be crazy. As I told The Hub of this turn of events, BBall Girl pipes up "maybe she wants to say sorry." People, you know you are not over something if a little poke about it evokes some drawn-back, tight lips and a snarl of an answer, "NO. She. Does. Not." Alright, so I'm hardly over it. She made my life miserable. What joy and satisfaction she got from persecuting me, I do not know. What would make a 9th grader act so immature, I couldn't guess. Did she know what damage she was doing to a young girl? Likely not. She was not alone. She wasn't my only bully. And there are millions more like her today. I wish I thought even one of my kids was on either side of this situation. I would be all over it like white on rice.
You want to know if I accepted the friend request. Up until this very moment I have not responded. As a Christian I feel that denying it says something about me that I don't want to say. As a human being, I don't want to be friends with this person. Besides, I knew her for a few months between September and whenever the Lord plucked her out of CHS that year. We were hardly acquaintances, much less friends. So, what to do, what to do. I'm leaving this one as a cliffhanger. As if I needed the prompting from God, He spoke directly to me yesterday in church. That sweet ole' pastor preached a message entitled "Pressing Past Your Pain." Talked up one wall and down another about how we have to get healing from those past troubles, so we can move on in victory with Jesus. Ahem. Alright, alright, I can take a hint.
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