I remember as a child listening to adults give their testimonies and stories that were inspiring and meant to reach out to me and teach me a lesson. I always felt guilty because I did not have one. But I grew up and learned that every person who walks this earth has a story to tell.
I can tell you a story of times when logically things should have gone one way and instead went another. If everything had gone the logical way, I might not be here today. Everyone has a story to tell.
Today is one about a young boy that I absolutely despised because he was as mean as they get. For years I endured his evilness each week at church. He would walk by and jab a pencil in my arm just for spite. No one liked him. They were polite because his mother was so sweet and his father was high up in the political circles.
It was the summer before our freshmen year at high school and I learned the most horrific thing imaginable. We would be going to the same school for high school. It was bad enough in middle school, but high school? I knew then that God had it in for me. In reality, God was preparing a very bitter pill for me to take that would change me forever.
He was his usual pain in the rear-end self. One day my mom told me that his mother had passed away. She had been battling cancer for a long time. I was sad for the whole family. Then she told me that I needed to send a sympathy card. Okay. I'll send one to his dad. Nope. I was to send one to him. Boy, did we have a fight. I was not going to send a card to that evil boy. In the end, I did what I was forced to do.
He was out of school a few days naturally. On the day he returned, I was sitting in my usual spot on the front steps reading or doing some homework. He pulled up in his father's car. His dad waved at me. I waved back and didn't think much of it until the boy began to walk very purposefully toward me.
He sat down. I didn't know what to say. I was just waiting on something negative to come out of his mouth. He was quite for a long time.
"We got thousands of cards," he said. "But only four were addressed to me." He looked me right in the eye and for the first time smiled at me. "Thank you."
From that day on we became friends. He was still a jerk a lot of the time, but I let him know that he was wrong. We became study partners in biology and world history. He let me use his laptop which were extremely new at the time. We stayed good friends all through high school.
I don't know where he is now, but I think of him differently than I did when I was younger. I learned that his meanness was because he did not know how to act seeing his own mother die before his very eyes. He watched cancer eat at her and destroy her. He lashed out the only way he knew.
I learned not to judge people too harshly until you get to know them. We are complex creatures and cannot be made into a two dimensional black and white entity. We are unique and wonderfully made. We just need to dig deeper to see that in some people.
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