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“Do not say
‘I’ll pay you back for this wrong!’ Wait for the Lord, and He will deliver
you.” – Proverbs 20:22
As a youth I recall hearing that
high school would be the best years of my life and finding the thought
enormously depressing. Now that I’ve counted a few dozen birthdays, I do
occasionally catch myself longing for my full head of hair and fat-free
physique, Ichabod Crane-like as it was. But I’m pleased to report that the
years have tried the claim and found it false.
An adage of aging is that we
become inflexible and unyielding, closed to perspectives not our own. I regard
this untrue as well, at least in relative terms. Not that I haven’t become set
in my ways after a fashion: I wear my hair short and unparted, take my coffee
with exactly one cream and one sugar, and always fall sleep on my back (left
side of the bed only). Woe to the clerk who hands me jeans other than Levi’s.
Still I’ve come to think that
the teen years are our most rigid. For instance when it comes to people, I now
look for character and pretty much that alone. Preferences in clothing, music,
hobbies, occupation, and sports dropped off my radar years ago, as it has for
many adults I know. Not so in the average American high school.
My credentials are good here,
though hardly unique. Today I stand over six feet tall and hit the scales at,
well, I hit the scales. But I was under 5 foot 6 inches and 130 pounds through
most of my school days, small enough to make convenient fodder for the more
troglodytic element among campus jocks. This was despite my own status as a
sports letterman – even the best 112-pounder on the wrestling team doesn’t
strike much fear into the heart of the average linebacker, and I wasn’t the
best.
Most of my close friends were of
similar build, and, not coincidentally, helped fill out the lower weight classes
on the wrestling team. While we had other common interests, our mutual aversion
of browbeating thugs in shoulder pads and jock straps made for no small bond.
Did I long for relief? You
betcha. That was part of what led me to wrestling and a brief bout with weight
lifting. I wanted to be bigger, stronger, enough to give even the worst bully
second thoughts. It didn’t occur to me until I sat down to write this column,
but I also owned a shotgun all during high school. Of course I knew that I had
it but never considered the two in the same context before, just as one
wouldn’t think to put mayonnaise on ice cream.
That sounds sadly naïve today
with the slaughter at Columbine High School in Colorado so fresh. This is not
the first campus massacre of late, but the cold calculation of it might make it
the most horrific, body count aside. The year spent planning, the detailed
threats on a web site that named intended victims, the report of giggles and
glee with each shot, have overwhelmed a nation that thought itself beyond
shocking.
Again we ask why, again we get
the same mixture of angst and answers, spiked with agendas ranging from gun
control to mandated counseling programs. Others suggest the solution lies in
God rather than government, an opinion I’ve made no secret of sharing. However
I feel I the need to clarify.
I don’t believe that not
following Christ inevitably makes one open fire on school children or commit
other violence for the simple reason that it’s observably untrue. Likewise I
have no quarrel with intervention programs, but when we force God out we leave a
void. Nature is said to abhor a vacuum and too often we fill it with ourselves,
sometimes to the exclusion of all else.
I know these
sentiments aren’t fashionable; they aren’t meant to be. I’ve been in the out
crowd before and survived it. But considering the self-indulgent nihilism that
is the style in some circles, it’s a burden worth bearing.
© 1997 – 2002 Brent Morrison
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