Tough guy St. Paul: '... live at peace with everyone'

"I wasn't bad but the bad boys didn't mess with me."

-- Cecil Long

I hope the reader will indulge my continued use of epigrams to begin this column. On this particular occasion, my thoughts turn to something my late father used to say about his toughness as a kid.

Dad was a four-year letterman in high school football, was elected "Mr. Football" -- what he said was a popularity contest -- as a senior, was a three-year letterman in wrestling and was a teenage dishwasher at a local restaurant. He also tooled around his impoverished western Pennsylvania hometown in a 1934 Plymouth, purchased for the princely sum of $75. Dad was elected senior class president but quit after a month. Not interested.

He was popular, in good shape, and one of nine children of a widow who cleaned houses to make ends meet. Dad's comment, which opens this missive, told me he didn't go looking for trouble, didn't start trouble, but if trouble found him -- he didn't shy away from it.

I knew all of this growing up about my dad, which brings me to Dale. "Dale" is a pseudonym for a bully who rode my school bus back in the early 1970s.

We lived on the outskirts of the county so the bus picked me up first, meaning I always had my choice of seats. I sat near the back on the left hand side and for a period of weeks that seemed like months, I dreaded the entry of Dale.

Dale, a 12th grader five years my senior, used to board, come back to where I was sitting and slap me in the face before sitting down. It wasn't violence meant to hurt me physically but to intimidate. He did this every school day. Enter, slap, sit down.

Every day I knew it was coming. Every day I did nothing about it.

I never told anybody about this daily bullying -- not the bus driver, not a teacher, not my mother, and certainly not my dad. I was ashamed at simply "taking it" day after day.

I remembered the quote attributed to Jesus, "If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also ... do not resist an evil person." (Matthew 5:39) Frankly, I don't know if was my own paralysis or Jesus' words that kept me from responding.

Eventually, anger fueled by humiliation overcame my fear one day. Dale followed his usual routine: enter, slap, sit down. And with a fury I didn't know was in my body, I stood up and punched Dale right in the face. Neither of us said a word but we stared daggers at each other for the entire trip to school.

Dale never slapped me again. In fact, he never sat near me again on the bus.

I'm not proud of my reaction to the bullying of that long-ago day. With youth Sunday school classes, I've used the teenage tete-a-tete as an illustration to talk about bullying and what a student should do if faced with similar intimidation. If you're wondering, I don't recommend a punch.

I just needed the humiliation to stop, and throwing a punch was the only thing I could think to do. Dale stopped, but he just as easily could have escalated the situation into a full-blown scrap, one I surely would have lost.

You and I can't control what happens to us. We can control how we react.

I close with one of the admonitions of St. Paul, a tough guy who found himself in several scrapes as Christianity's foremost first century evangelist: "If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone." (Romans 12:18)

Note Paul's qualifier -- "If it is possible ..."

Dr. Jeff Long, of Jackson, is executive director of the Chateau Girardeau Foundation and teaches religious studies at Southeast Missouri State University.