Here is the last excerpt from the booklet I wrote in 2010. Lord willing, next week I will share the very personal account I mentioned several weeks ago...or at least part of it. Of course, this has ALL been personal. But the other account deals with cruelty of a different type. God bless.
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But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
Matthew 5:44-45 (Words of Christ)
When I was nine years old, my family moved to California after my dad, serving in the military at the time, was transferred to the Los Angeles area. Shortly after we settled into our new home in an almost all-white neighborhood in Garden Grove, someone (or some people) burned a cross in the front yard. We actually slept through the cross burning, but it was to be the most hate-filled act in our four and a half or so years in Orange County. However, it wasn't the sole incident. My brothers and I endured stares, slurs and taunts. One boy with white supremacist tendencies spat on me at a dance when I was looking in another direction. (I ended up blaming a friend of his who was standing nearby, the perpetrator having left the vicinity by the time my arm brushed against the spittle on my blouse. One of my brothers was also at the dance and made the falsely accused boy apologize.) Other incidents took place, but the stares, slurs, taunts and spitting were the nicest of them.
For me, one family has always summed up the hatred I experienced in Garden Grove. Specifically, two brothers in that family went out of their way to try to make me feel miserable. From what I remember, there were more than two boys in the family and the clan included at least one girl who, apparently, was the opposite of the two brothers who hated me. One of my brothers knew her and never had a bad thing to say about her. I once had a front row seat when she smacked one of her two hateful brothers on the back of his head when he called me the "n" word while pedaling his bike past me with her as a passenger. (After she smacked him, she told him that she didn't want to hear him ever use that word again. When he protested that their dad used the same word, she basically told him that she didn't care and repeated the statement about him not using it himself. I think she may have also told him that it's an ugly word, but their conversation became less clear to me as they rode farther away.) One of the two brothers who hated me was in the same grade as me. His taunts were usually in the form of glares and sneers. He only seemed to work up the courage to call me slurs when the younger of the two-who was a year or two behind us in school-initiated the name-calling.
Over the years, the cross burning has crossed my mind every now and then. I didn't realize its full impact until 2006 or 2007 when, for the first time, I dreamed about it not long before my fortieth birthday. The fact that I first dreamed about it so long after it happened troubled me, especially since the dream occurred close to a milestone birthday. I had dreamed about other traumatic events in the past. It was as if my mind wouldn't deal with the terror of the cross burning until I was staring middle age in the face.
In the weeks and months after I had the cross burning dream, the two brothers who hated me came back to mind. I'd thought about them and their cruelty in earlier parts of my life, but I hadn't given them much thought in some time. When I'd think about them after the dream, I'd get really angry. Some of the anger was along the lines of "How dare those pieces of dirt think they were better than me!" (Hello, self-exaltation!) I found myself hoping that they were slaving away in a place like a mechanic's garage or some other workplace that involved grime. I also hoped that they were earning low wages. I only had ill feelings towards them.
Then, something wonderful happened. One of the times that my I-hope-you-are-laboring-and-Iiving-in-misery-you-spiteful-grease-monkeys desire came to mind, an altogether different thought followed it after I did a bit of crying. It was the hope that the two brothers' lives were going well. I wanted them to be happy so that they wouldn't feel a need to try to make anyone else's life miserable. I don't remember if I immediately expressed that hope as a prayer. I think I did, but I'm not sure. I am sure of one thing: the Lord was working on me. Only He could have softened my heart to want happiness for them.
If the two brothers are still alive, I hope and pray that they get saved if they are still lost. I don't want them to experience the hell that we all deserve. And I want them to have true joy while they live in this world.
