Can prayer stop a bully?

Oh no. There it was again. As my friends and I left the cafeteria, the familiar name-calling started up behind us. The next thing we knew, we were being forcefully pushed out of the way by the group of girls who’d been bullying us all year. As we stumbled, they laughed and continued down the hall.

At the time, we were in eighth grade, and the adults in our school didn’t seem to be aware of the well-timed taunts and shoves by this group of girls. And rather than telling on them, my friends and I just sort of put up with it.

Our parents, Sunday School teachers, and youth pastors assured us that it was OK to report these incidents, and I know if we'd been scared rather than just frustrated, they would have insisted on our reporting the problem and even gone with us to talk to school authorities. But my friends and I were way more annoyed, so what the adults in our lives really encouraged us to do was pray. The subject came up one day at lunch, and despite some initial eye-rolling, my friends and I agreed that prayer probably was the best solution.