When viciousness and adorableness collide

(pretty much me in a fight. I’ll let you decide which one I am)

With good reason, God calls on His people not to fight back. Doing so is such a worldly response. It lacks the meekness and peace-loving nature that Christ maintained and misses out on the opportunity to reach someone by reacting in a way they don’t expect. Most people, when they attack you, assume you will fight back. That’s what “a man” would do. But that’s not what a “Christian” would do.

I remember a kid in my class in high school, who should have been two grades higher than me were it not for his unwillingness to pay attention to anything any teacher ever said at any time ever. This kid decided to pick on me and on one occasion, swung me around and threw me head-first into the concrete wall of my science class. Where was the teacher in all of this? She was on the other side of the room, chatting online with a friend.

I loved high school.

Anyway, I came home and told my dad what happened and his advice was so perfectly old school I wasn’t even surprised at his response:

“Son, you’re gonna have to fight that boy.”

Visions of full-body casts and extended hospital stays began dancing through my head. He was two feet taller than me and much more skilled in the hand-to-hand arts. There was no WAY I was fighting that cat.

So I did what I usually did: I DIDN’T take my dad’s advice. Instead I ignored the uncultured brute. And that only angered him more. So he attacked me more.

Yeah. My plan’s didn’t always work out swimmingly.

But lo and behold, after a few days of picking on what amounted to a living corpse that never fought back or even said a mean thing to him*, he got bored of me and moved on to his next victim.

I had won…or at least, “endured.” And I did so following a simple principle:

Not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.

1 Peter 3:9

When attacked, don’t attack back.

*I did get off a few brilliant quips and insults at his expense in the lunchroom, several hundred feet away. But don’t do that. That…defeats the entire purpose of this lesson.

Turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), that’s the lesson.