Bullying

Stella Del'Oro - Ginter Botanical Garden, Richmond, VA

I led them with cords of human kindness

and ties of love.

Hosea 11:4

I have taught for the last three years at a local high school’s specialty center for music and art.  I love teaching voice and I love teaching kids, so it is in many ways the perfect job for me.  I teach a very tiny segment of the 2500 students who attend this high school, yet two years ago, I had to deal with a bullying situation in my very small classroom.  Halfway through the year, a boy and a girl from vastly different cultural and economic backgrounds decided to go after each other, and the results were astounding.  He became swaggering and sullen.  She turned inward and shut down completely.  Intervention from me, the leaders of the specialty center, and finally the principal eased the situation somewhat.  In my classroom?  The boy finally relented, relaxed, and became a productive student once more.  The girl came into class, put her head down at her computer station, and never raised it except to come up to sing when I called her name. 

Anderson Cooper of CNN recently did a program on schoolyard bullying.  A study was conducted at a top-ranked high school on Long Island, NY.  One girl, ranked highly as both a victim and an aggressor, said, “No matter what high school you go to, what age you are, what social group you’re in, you’ve been bullied and you’ve been a bully.  Once you start realizing that you can have… higher social power by putting other people down… that’s, like, how people are moving up and that’s how they’re gaining respect.”  Unfortunately, the research also discovered that 81% percent of aggressive incidents occur below the radar of adults and are never reported.

Kindness has become an irrelevant concept in our modern society.  In the corporate world, kindness is seen as a sign of weakness and aggression as an indication of strength. No one is willing to be walked on, and so we one-up the other guy to keep ahead of the game.  The emotional results can be devastating.  God calls upon us to show kindness to those around us through unconditional love.  How do we accomplish this when it is so foreign to our nature?  By standing strong in the Lord – passing on to others the awesome gift of love that has been showered down on us from above.