Although most people I grew up with might have described me as a pretty good kid, there was a short time when I was headed down the wrong path. Ironically, my wrong path commenced after an event in my childhood where I ended up doing the right thing, and I was ultimately saved by an event where I totally did the wrong thing.
It started one day during ninth-grade gym class, when we were asked to run perhaps ten warm-up laps—only because we started on one side of the gym and finished on the other side of the gym, we had to do either nine-and-a-half laps or ten-and-a-half laps. Because I was a bit of a brown-noser and fairly arrogant, while the rest of the class did the nine-and-a-half laps, I did ten-and-a-half laps and then argued that I was right and they were wrong.
The best athlete from our grade was in the class, and he was pretty pissed at me. He lived in the same small village that I did, and he challenged me to a fight after school in the village. I met up with him down at the far end of the village, in front of someone’s house. Immediately, he went after me to drop me to the ground. We wrestled around a bit, and I held my own and then some. After a short time, a woman came out of her house and yelled at us to stop. So, we agreed to go to the small ballpark in the village and finish things. On my way there, I suddenly had a surge of confidence and sensed that I was probably going to get the better of him; and so instead of continuing to fight, I offered him my hand and suggested that we call it a draw. He agreed, and we shook hands and left. That was actually the event that started me down the wrong path.
The next day in school, people came up to me and said things like, “Wow, I heard that you beat up ____.” I was puzzled by this because I thought that we had called it a draw. Later I saw the athlete himself telling someone in front of me that I had beaten him up. He wasn’t saying it like I had been a bully or a bad guy but like he had been really impressed with my fighting ability and that he had a whole new respect for me. And so, all of a sudden, and mostly in my mind, I went from nerdy little kid to a force to be reckoned with. I had always been a bit arrogant about my intelligence, but now I had something that could swell my pride to the greatest extreme.
Later that year, I tried out for basketball, made the team, and became a co-captain along with the athlete I had fought a few months prior. We weren’t that great as a basketball team, and I was not really helping matters. Although I was OK on defense, I didn’t score very much. No one singled me out as doing a bad job, but I didn’t feel great about my contributions. With several losses on the books and mounting frustration on the team, we played a team that we should have beaten easily but lost instead.
In the locker room after the game, one of my teammates complained that there was a particular player on the other team who was getting away with overly aggressive play. I asked who it was, and then I went straight into the other locker room and challenged that player to a fight outside. That was a ridiculously bold and stupid move. I have no idea how I got out of there without getting pummeled by twelve guys or yelled at by their coach, but that other kid and I walked out of the locker room and straight outside.
He didn’t say a word to me, but faced me reluctantly. He was actually quite a bit taller than I was, and I bet that he could have just extended his arm to my head and let me flail about like a cartoon character, but he just raised his half-fisted hands in a halfhearted gesture and let me hit him on the cheek. He didn’t try to return the punch, and he waited for me to strike again. When I didn’t do anything, he dropped his hands, turned and walked away.
Later, after everyone had showered, I saw the kid in the building with what might have been his parents. He was talking with them, but I don’t think that he said a word about what I did. Our games often had a deputy from the county sheriff’s office, and this was no different. I looked around and saw him in the building quietly monitoring things. And that’s when it hit me. As smart as I thought that I was, I had been really, really stupid. That kid could have said something to his parents, and the parents could have said something to the deputy, and then I would have gone from being a kid that never really got into trouble to a kid that got arrested for assault. By not fighting back and by not saying anything, that kid had given me an undeserved gift.
And the gift was much more than that. For the rest of my life, I never hit another person. Over the next year, I read the Bible cover to cover. I started going to church again, acknowledged Jesus, and got baptized on Halloween of my junior year. Of course, I still made some significant mistakes in my life; however, I knew for sure that the kid whom I had hit and who had turned his other cheek and said nothing to anyone had in fact redeemed me. I’m sure that he has no idea that his inaction had such a powerful and lasting effect on me, but it did.
When folks write about the value of turning the other cheek, they often focus on the value to the victim—how it can sometimes stop an assault or how it aligns the victim’s heart with the will of our loving and forgiving God. And biblical scholars sometimes point out a very nuanced and culture-specific understanding of turning the other cheek for which my experience might not quite qualify. And yet, the value for me as a lost sheep was undeniable and significant: in return for a violent act on my part, a humbly postured kid gave me an undeserved gift that has lasted a lifetime.
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