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About Jesus Steve Sweetman Bullying Because
of my poor vision, while in elementary school I
had to push my desk as close to the chalkboard as I could just to be
able to see to read what was directly in front of me. Anything
too far to the left or right, or too high, I still couldn't see to read.
I was a timid child. Moving
my desk for all those years was a daily embarrassment.
Children can be mean at times, but no child ever made fun of me.
One adult, however, did.
One
day while in grade 5, our regular teacher left school early. Another
teacher who didn't know me entered the classroom and saw me sitting
close to the chalkboard and assumed I was being punished for bad
behaviour. When asked why I
was sitting so close to the chalkboard, I told him I couldn't see well.
He didn't believe me and so he pretended to be blind.
He stumbled his way to the chalkboard and felt it with his hands
as if to feel his way around the room.
With his nose an inch or two from the chalkboard, the class broke
out in hysteric laughter. It
was quite the comedy sketch, but for me, at the age of 10, it wasn't
funny. I was totally
humiliated. Without an
apology, the teacher turned his attention to other things. That evening
he provided an apology to my dad after experiencing the wrath of my dad
on the phone. I'd call this
humiliation a form of bullying.
The
American media, and especially CNN, has spent considerable news time
covering gay teenagers being bullied.
CNN appears to have great compassion for these teens, as we all
should. The coverage has produced lots of heart felt emotion for these
kids. A sense of sadness for
the teenagers and disgust for the bullies created by the media exposure
is motivating some to demand
change. In the present
atmosphere of socialism, governments will attempt to legislate bullies
to change their behaviour. I
wish I had been in CNN's editing room when they decided to make this
subject a major news story. I
wonder if the same compassion displayed on television was evident in the
editing room. Somehow I
think compassion might not have been the motivating factor behind their
decision to air these stories.
Both
Christians and non-Christians agree that bullying gay teenagers is
wrong. In this moment of agreement
governments will attempt to pass legislation to end the bullying.
The legislation will define bullying to be an act of hatred,
making it a criminal offense. Further
defining will take place in a court of law when people are charged with
some kind of hate crime. In
light of this I quote from Romans 1:26 and 27.
"Because of this God gave them over to shameful lusts.
Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.
In the same way men also abandoned natural relations with women
and were inflamed with lust for one another.
Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in
themselves the due penalty for their perversion."
Although
I have no hatred towards gays, by merely writing these verses, I will
have committed, or already have committed, an act of hatred.
If I wasn't already a criminal, I'm either on my way to being
one, or I am one now. Many of us have been
bullied in the past. Some of
us have been bullied because of our faith in Jesus, although the news
media isn't covering such forms of bullying.
I wonder why? As each
day passes, Christians lose more freedom to express their religion as
we're taught in the Bible. Government
that was to be separate from the church in order to protect its freedoms
is now interfering with the church and limiting its freedom of
expression. I wish Larry King could
interview Thomas Jefferson on this matter.
He would certainly tell us what he really had in mind when he
coined the phrase "separation of church and state".
I would imagine many Americans would strongly oppose the
explanation from one of their most beloved presidents.
The first generation
church survived a dictatorial system of government, the likes of which
has not been seen as yet in our western democracies.
I say they survived, albeit in many cases survival was in prison
chains. Talking about
"separating" church and state, these prison chains
"separated" the sheep from the goats in the church back then,
and it will do the same when we in the western world lose our freedoms.
We may end up with a church without stain or wrinkle after-all.
(Ephesians 5:27)
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