Bullies have always been around us, ever since Cain and Abel were in the Garden. They scope out the crowd, looking for someone they can pick on. Something in their psyche demands that they lord their "strength" over another person. They have uncanny ways of figuring out what pushes somebody's buttons. Maybe it's that they feel inferior, or maybe it's that they really have no conscience and believe they are superior. Either way, they've been around since the fall of man.
When I was a kid, my Daddy (a gentle, merciful soul) told me a strange thing. He said that if someone ever hit me at school, I was supposed to turn around and whale the stuffin' out of them. I said, "They'll expel me from school!" He said, "No worries. I've got your back." In the next sentence he said, "But you are never to hit or hurt another person unless it's out of self-defense." Heaven help me if I'd have done that. Now all of that sounds very violent. I don't want to offend anyone's sensitivities, but we have lost boundaries in our culture that are allowing people to bully one another. There are reasons I was not bullied as a child. I was taught both things: to stand my ground and to be compassionate and kind. Standing strong meant respecting yourself and others, but also not encroaching on the rights of others. There seems to be a prohibition these days of defending ourselves when necessary. I especially believe that parents, even under the most stressful of situations, have to be vigilant about talking, shepherding and loving their children. It's only a minute and they are grown. We only have a bit of time to influence and teach them before peers and the world rush in to steal their hearts. There's no more important job than raising our children (if you have children. If you don't, please do what you can to help!) Computers, video games, social media, TV, phones -- all these and more have come in like a tsunami to plunder all of our attention. It's a challenge to be intentional about relationships now, because we're following the glow of our devices rather than talking and connecting to each other.
I'm not a spring chicken, but even as we were raising our four children, I saw how even the TV interrupts our relationships. As a teen, I wondered at the fact that a thirty-minute sitcom showed weeks or months of peoples' "lives" -- and how boring real life could seem in comparison to that. When our kids were at home, we limited access to our tiny black-and-white TV (I got a lot of flak for that). I shooed them outside when they got bored. They explored, played and got filthy, old-school-like. Maybe our air conditioning is really our problem. Nobody wants to go outside anymore and there are such interesting things on those screens. Our kids are grown, but I still have to fight my own proclivities to sit and stare. It's just so much easier than working at connecting with a human. God help us all.
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