*Click here to read the story behind my Spanish Blog
"But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you." Luke 6:27-31
During my childhood, my family moved to new states every few years. My siblings and I were used to uprooting and starting fresh in a new city, new neighborhood, and new church. My sister Kelly and I had become masters at packing, and we were able to box up our bedroom in a matter of hours.
When I was twelve years old, my family moved to Pennsylvania so that my parents could attend a missionary training school where we would live on a campus with other families taking the same training. After much prayerful consideration, my parents had decided that God was calling them to take this step towards becoming missionaries. I was thrilled. It was like a dream come true. I had read so many missionary stories and heard about tribes in the jungle who knew nothing of the gospel. I wanted nothing more than to go to a foreign field and share the good news of the gospel with people who hadn’t heard it.
The day we arrived at the missionary training campus in Pennsylvania, the first person we met was a Dutch girl named Mandy (*I have changed her name). Though she was four years younger than I, we soon became good friends. Despite our age difference and the fact that we had grown up on different continents, we soon found plenty that we had in common, and it was fun learning from each other about our languages and cultures. I was thrilled to have made a friend so quickly.
A couple days later several more families arrived, and soon our we had 3 more very good friends our age: Aurelie, Michelle, and Rachelle. All six of us became inseparable. We did everything together.
But then Mandy became insecure and jealous of our friendship with the other girls. She started coming up with ways to keep them away from Kelly and I, or convince them that she was a better friend than we. Her primary tactic was self-pity. She would tell them that we didn’t like her, pretending to be hurt by us. Kelly and I continued to invite her to play with us, but whenever the five of us were all together, she would vie for their attention, sometimes through pretending to be a victim and bursting into tears.
This was very painful for me. I had been so thrilled with the friendships I had formed in our new location, and now it felt like this would poison those relationships. I cried, and isolated myself at times, and begged God to make it better. I knew from God’s word, however, that even in the face of this trial I was called to love and persevere in kindness. I determined to be friendly with Mandy.
When the school year began, Mandy, Aurelie, Kelly, and I all rode a school bus to the same school together, and when seats on the bus were being assigned I encouraged Mandy to choose first and take a seat by Aurelie, opting to take a seat by myself in the back. Whenever the other girls invited us to watch a movie, ride bikes, or play in the woods, I would insist that we go invite Mandy to come as well. I wanted to demonstrate selfless love for her even though she repeatedly hurt me, and in this trial, I found a beautiful kinship with Christ, who Himself was rejected by men.
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. John 15:18-19
“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…” Isiah 53:3-4a
This was my first lesson in turning the other cheek, and it went on for a long, long time, never getting completely better the entire time we lived there. I learned a lot through dealing with Mandy, however. My parents were very encouraging and gave me a lot of counsel on how to handle the situation. In years to come I would look back on this trial as a test-run for similar situations of a higher caliber in which I would not have my parents at hand for immediate advice or encouragement.
Relationship with other people teach us so much. God made us for relationship, and so we crave it desperately, and yet experiences of rejection like my experience with Mandy prompt us to close ourselves off to others out of self-preservation. Because of sin we act in fear instead of love and we hurt one another. The question is, do we have a heavenly Father who can hold us together and meet our needs even in the face of human rejection? Is intimate union with Christ actually worth the pain to turn the other cheek and return evil with good?
“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Matthew 5:11-12
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