When I first met the U Squad at Training Camp, I immediately trusted them. Somehow, even though I barely knew their names, I knew I was in a safe place. So I didn’t really have a problem spilling my guts to these perfect strangers, and that was good, because AIM wanted us to be open and vulnerable.
On the third or fourth day we were split into groups of three and asked to pray for each other. Now, we had just gone though a teaching on prayer ministry (there’s a lot more to it than I ever imagined, but this seminar was excellent) and this was our chance to try it. I was with Mallory and Enrica, who were both on my squad but I hadn’t really talked to them yet. However, I did have something to pray for.
We’d gone through a number of sessions during the first few days of camp, with topics including forgiveness, grief, and emotional healing. AIM’s reasoning behind this is that they want to help us be as emotionally and spiritually healthy as we can be before going on the field.
All of these sessions had brought to mind one particular subject for me: the bullying that I had endured all through my middle school years.
I remember being afraid to go to class. I remember always being on my guard. I remember learning how not to show emotion.
They would take my books while I was reading, and make fun of me for doing so. They would try to hug or grab me, knowing how much I didn’t like it. They spread rumors about me. They openly mocked me in class.
They made me feel less than human.
I became cold. I became hard-hearted. I became brutally sarcastic because sometimes that was my only defense.
And at some point I got the idea in my head that it was my fault. That maybe if I’d changed a little, or ignored them better, or acted a little less nerdy, they would have left me alone. I was never good enough for their approval, and they made it known they didn’t like me.
Even though all of this was over a decade ago, I realized I still had things to grieve, I still needed to heal, and I still needed to forgive.
All this time I had thought that since everything was so long ago, I didn’t need to worry about forgiveness, right?
Wrong.
About a month before Training Camp I was at the gym, where I saw one of the guys who terrorized me almost every day in sixth grade. I immediately tensed up, hoping he wouldn’t see me, and if he did, that he wouldn’t recognize me. Nothing happened, but my reaction told me that clearly I had some unresolved emotions to deal with here. Of course we were different people now than ten years ago, but the trigger was still there.
I told Enrica and Mallory this, and I also told them a piece of the story from middle school that I usually keep to myself. On some days, when other kids were just so mean and the bullying got so bad I could hardly stand it, I wondered how hard it would be to just end it all. My parents kept a lot of old medications in a cabinet and I knew where they were. As I would walk to track practice every day, I thought about it.
Just the fact that the idea had entered my mind terrified me, but I couldn’t tell anyone. I imagined that if I said anything to my parents or a teacher, they would send me to therapy and never let me out of their sight again. So I kept my mouth shut, and made it out of middle school alive.
Until camp and more so now, I had only told a few trusted friends these details. Enrica and Mallory asked me a few clarifying questions and talked me through a few things, which led me to the understanding that I had a lot of people to forgive. My classmates, for bullying me; my teachers, for not doing anything to stop it; myself, for believing that somehow I deserved it.
And I realized that I had been angry with God. During the sessions on grief and emotional healing, we were asked to envision where Jesus was in our painful memories. We had heard stories of people who had “seen” Jesus protecting them or comforting them.
I didn’t see anything. Those bullies had gotten to me in every possible way – emotionally, physically, and possibly with some sexual harassment thrown in depending on how you define it. Where was Jesus? Standing on the sidelines just watching me go through hell?
Then Enrica asked me a question. “If you were sitting in a room with God right now, what would you want him to say?”
My answer flew out of my mouth before I could even register it. “That he loves me the way I am.”
The way I am.
The way I am.
No matter how far the bullying, teasing, and taunting went, for the way I dressed, my hobbies, or the music I listened to, I refused to be anyone other than who I was. These things were locked down somewhere far beyond anywhere the opinion of my peers could touch. As if God had said “Sarah, I made you this way. So no one gets to change that.”
Whoa. At the end of the day, the most important thing had been kept intact. And if this wasn’t enough, there’s still a little more to it. Enrica and Mallory asked if they could pray for me, and I said yes. They prayed for healing, forgiveness, and a few other things, but while they were praying, I had a vision.
Now I’ve been hesitant to call it a “vision,” because I had never had one before, and I wasn’t sure how people could discern what was a vision and what was just your imagination. But this was different than just my imagination getting away from me. A scene played out outside of my mind’s control – it just kind of showed up out of nowhere and all I could do was watch. So I’ll call it a vision unless there’s a better word.
In this scene I watched 11 or 12 year-old self walking towards the closet where my parents kept their old prescriptions. I reach to open the door, but just as I do, Jesus comes at me from the right and tackles me to the floor.
He says, “Not today, Sarah. Not today.”
Back at Training Camp, I opened my eyes, a little shell-shocked (not the first nor the last time that feeling had happened there). I had the answer to my question – where was Jesus when I was being bullied? Because he didn’t seem to be protecting me from the bullies.
No, he was protecting me from myself, who had the capability to do far worse damage than anyone else. I always thought that I was just lucky that, even though some days I wanted to end my life, I never made any kind of attempt or engaged in any kind of self-harm. But I now realize it was only the grace of God that kept me from doing that.
Jesus was there before I even really knew Him, which is why “Not today” remained “Not ever.”
