I’m standing just a few feet away, and there’s this boy, bigger than mine in every way, hanging on the swing my son is using, so my son can’t even move.
He’s glaring at my boy, so I walk closer.
“Get off,” he’s saying. “This is my swing.”
And my boy is trying to swing, oblivious to the bullying going on, so I step in and say, “What’s going on here?”
The boy looks me right in the eye, and he says, “This is my swing. He pushed me out of it and took it from me.”
I look at the boy, hefty and stout, and my boy, all skin and bones, and just when I’m thinking there’s no way, my son’s friend, who’s standing just beside us, speaks up. “Jadon had it first,” he says. He points to the bigger boy. “He was trying to take it away.”
I feel the anger burning my face and my neck, because this is my son, and he’s just been bullied on a first-grade field trip, so I grab Jadon’s hand and say, “Let’s go line up, Jadon,” because it’s time to go anyway, and I have nothing more to say to a bully.
I forget, in that anger-moment, about the opportunity I have to teach another love and honor and respect.
The other boy moves away, into another group, and I fume all the way back to my son’s group, all kinds of assumptions moving through my brain.
His parents are probably bullies.
They probably let him watch lots of violent TV.
They probably don’t teach him a better way.
And, just like that, I’ve turned into one of those people who assume and judge and condemn before I know even one of the facts. I forget to teach and I forget not to assume, and these are the values I champion, so who am I to be teaching them when I can’t remember what to do, how to spread kindness and love and grace in a heated moment?
Sometimes we can be the biggest bullies to ourselves. Because the thoughts that swarm my head sound a whole lot like this:
You sure did a great job teaching that bully a better way. Stupid. No one should ever listen to you.
Look at you and all your assumptions. Hypocrite.
You walked away instead of engaging, you who know all about this emotional and social intelligence. Pathetic.
The chorus plays on, and we’re walking to a fishing pier when I flash back to my dad, storming out the door of a church, flinging the “hypocrite” word behind him at all those church people I, up until then, loved, and he spoke with such derision that I never, ever, ever wanted to be them. I see me in high school, when I walked with goody-two-shoes standards while my insides were crumbling because perfection was just too hard and heavy, and those girls were good at pointing out all the places I’d failed, all those gaps between the way I wanted to live and the way I did. I see me in college, when a best friend betrayed, and she threw those words into the yawning chasm between us: “I just want them all to know you’re not perfect, that you’re a hypocrite.”
Shame can burn a heart black.
[Tweet “We practice every day what we believe, but we only move toward perfection. We never reach it.”]
And the promise that stands at the end of a day is that we always get a do-over.
So maybe I got so caught up in my emotions that I forgot to teach a bully a better way. That doesn’t mean I can’t do it next time. So maybe that tangle of emotions carried me too far into assumptions. That doesn’t mean I can’t claim victory now and call them what they are: lies. So maybe I didn’t practice what I preach this time. It doesn’t mean I won’t ever win.
After all, our mistakes can be our biggest teachers.
This is an excerpt from We Believe in Jesus. In Ourselves. In All People, Episode 4 of the Family on Purpose series. The episode, along with Episodes 5 and 6, will release May 4. Get a free guide to family values by joining the Family on Purpose list.
