Article January 11, 2016 Issue

God cannot be bullied

Judy Cole

This article was adapted from a podcast on JSH-Online.com.

I learned an important lesson when I was in high school. I attended an inner-city high school, where racial tensions and fights were pretty commonplace, and it wasn’t unusual to be bullied with racial epithets or demands to fight without any prior instigation. I was in that situation one day while a teacher had briefly left the classroom, and a fellow student came to my desk and hit me while I sat reading. We were soon surrounded by other students taunting me to get me to fight back.

I quickly jumped up, expecting to have to defend myself. But I had attended a Christian Science Sunday School since I was in kindergarten, where I learned about the power and ever-presence of God, who is Love, and God’s requirements for me, as the Bible tells us in Matthew, to love God with all my heart, and with all my soul, and with all my mind, and to love my neighbor as myself, which Christ Jesus both taught and referred to as the first and second commandments (see Matthew 22:37–40).

I agreed with the idea that God loved all of us, not just me.