exodus youth

The news about the four young men who committed suicide recently has left many of us angry and saddened at the inexcusable loss of these individuals to bullying. I’m sure all of us know bullying is a constant occurrence in schools.  It’s something sadly unavoidable for many teens.  It breaks my heart to hear of lives cut short because of constant harassment from peers.  These tragic deaths should give us pause and make us think of what we can do to prevent this from happening again.

Whether a person is gay identified or is perceived as gay, no one deserves to be treated as objects of amusement or habitual verbal or physical harassment.  Every single person has value and worth in the eyes of our Creator.  Each breath is a gift from God and He treasures all those He brought into this world. With that knowledge and understanding, we must stand up for all individuals who are bullied and degraded.

It’s easy to shrug it off and think it’s not a big deal, thinking the picked on have tough skin.  But, as we’ve seen with these recent deaths, that is hardly the case.  Words have power. They can cause confusion within our own minds, reinforce what we may already believe about ourselves, or help influence us to begin to believe something we hadn’t before.

It’s even easy to stay out of the way and dodge the crossfire of verbal and physical abuse.  You may not want to become an object of a bully’s torment.  But at what cost?  Are we willing to protect our own reputation and self-esteem at the expense of another’s pain and degradation?  Christ bore the utmost humiliation to save us from the very degradation we deserved.  He stood between a woman sentenced to stoning and her accusers.  Christ leveled the playing field between the two.

What right does someone have to bully another person, tell them they are worth nothing, and judge them for being different and not fitting into the mold of normality – whatever that is.  As Christ bore our sins and degradation we must be willing to sacrifice our own reputations for the sake of those who need our help.

Enough is enough.

It’s easy to pick on a kid who is alone, vulnerable, and weak.  But it’s much harder when that kid has others rallying behind him, standing up for his own humanity and worth.  We need to stand up for those who are being victimized, regardless of whether we agree with them or not.  He or she is a human being – created and valued by God.  We must defend his or her right to freedom and stand up to anyone who desires to exploit that freedom or suppress it.

Let truth, kindness, compassion, and love surround the attacked, not condemnation, judgment, hate, and deception.  We must be edifiers of the broken and abused.  It’s my hope that we can step away from complacency and breathe life into those who are constantly beaten down.  The harassed need encouragement, love, and friends who will stand up for them.

Bullying doesn’t have to be a norm, accepted as an inescapable reality in schools today.  YOU can make a difference in the culture and climate at your school and in the lives of those who are tripped, spit at, scoffed at, laughed at, judged, demeaned and ridiculed.

I grieve for these young lives cut short.  I grieve for the parents who love and stood by their teens, knowing what they faced at school daily.  I grieve for Tyler Clementi as he was humiliated across the Internet and for his parents who lost their son out of a roommate’s amusement.

I wonder if things would have been different for Asher Brown, Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, and Billy Lucas, if a few peers stood up for them and said, “Enough is enough!”

***Check out Randy Thomas’s post on this topic at the Exodus Blog.***