Bullying

Most people associate the word “bully” with seven year old boys taking other kids' lunch money.

But bullying is much worse than this. We may see signs of it at age seven but bullying has reached every level of the human condition.

Monthly teenagers all across the world are taking their own lives because of incessant bullying. Middle school girls are cutting themselves because they are told they are too fat, unpopular, and boyish. High school boys are physically beaten, emotionally tortured because they aren’t athletic enough or rather they choose to find identity in the arts. People groups bully their way into office, defy the sanctity of human life by pushing an agenda, promoting a plan, or just dictating a desire over loving their neighbor as themselves.

We see this happening in North Korea, Egypt, West Africa, Israel, and all across the world.

Did you know since the mid 70s in Argentina the government has run by such corrupt bullying system that every day there are children, teenagers, and even adult men who disappear by being kidnapped and tortured? The government takes them. Government trained soldiers break in, steal children, and then cover it up. Women, because of such a mass kidnapping of their sons, have begun a stand up to the violence by initiating a marching campaign once a week in the square of Plaza de Mayo. They are known worldwide as “Mothers of the Disappeared.” It’s a terrible situation.

Or how about in 1989 eight professors were bullied to the point of death in a Jesuit seminary in El Salvador. Their murdered bodies were placed in the courtyards while the rest of the women present were raped. And guess whose soldiers were found guilty of these murders: the soldiers trained at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia.

And that’s what bullying does. It preys on the weak.

Currently the American government is privately and secretly housing illegal immigrants across the nation in prisons. There are over 2000 of them now. Illegal immigrants are poured into unsanitary conditions until they are excommunicated from the country.

And when I look throughout history in search of bullies, I don’t have to look very far to realize one of the greatest bullies in history is Christianity itself. We started early in our history ostracizing those who thought differently, killing those who wouldn’t bow before our God. We’ve initiated wars, written books, declared doctrines one after another for thousands of years bullying our theology, bullying our agenda, killing those in our way, and “guilting” others into converting.

If we want Christianity to be a vibrant, realistic, life-changing option for the future then we must realize how we treat others and start being a people that no longer bullies.

We must start living our lives like Jesus, not like bullies.