Jon

His name was Jon*

I was in fifth grade. I’d just become a Christian, and around the same time I’d started taking martial arts, and for reasons I’ve never fully understood, that combination was something he simply could not resist leaving alone. A small, scrawny girl who’d found Jesus and was learning to throw a punch.

One day after PE, I stayed behind in the girls’ locker room a few minutes longer than everyone else.

I remember the sound of the last group leaving, the heavy door swinging shut behind them, the eerie silence that followed afterwards. And then the door creaked open again, and it was him.

He stood in the doorway, blocking it. “Why don’t you just fight me if you want to leave?” he said. “Oh, that’s right. You’re a Bible thumper. Your God won’t let you.”

Then he grabbed me, shoved me into one of the lockers, and slammed it shut.

I heard the latch catch. I heard him flip the light switch. I heard his footsteps go out and the door close again, and then there was nothing but the dark and the smell of old metal and other people’s gym socks, and my own breathing very loud in my ears.

That was the worst of it, in fairness. Most of what he did after that was smaller. He tripped me in hallways. He broke or ruined my things. He made fun of me loudly in front of the class, again and again, for my faith and for whatever else he could find. It didn’t stop in elementary school– It followed me all the way through high school too.

In fact, the day I graduated, I felt joy I can still remember. I was free of him. I never had to see Jon again.

Then a few years later, I went home to visit.

Some old friends wanted to get together, so we met at the local bowling alley, the same one we’d all gone to as teenagers. Same sticky carpet, same smelly rented shoes, same crash of pins and the same bad canned music over the speakers. I walked up to the counter to get a soda, and when I turned around with the cup in my hand, there he was.

Jon.

He looked mostly the same. A little more facial hair. But his clothes were nicer than the ragged ones he’d worn in high school, and there was something more put-together about him. More polished, somehow.

He asked if we could talk for a minute.

I don’t remember everything I said, or whether I said much at all. What I do remember is the initial involuntary terror I felt in my gut when I saw him, followed by what he told me. Which is that he’d recently become a Christian. He apologized, not once but several times, deeply and without excuses, for the way he had treated me. He told me he’d come from a bad home, and that cruelty was all he’d ever known. And then he said the thing I’ve thought about nearly every week since.

He said that it was because of how I responded to him that he came to know the love of Christ.

He didn’t understand it, back then. He’d hit, and I hadn’t hit back. He’d mocked, and I hadn’t mocked back. He said that kind of love was so big, and so different from anything in his own house, that he eventually went looking for where it came from. He was still getting his life together, he said. There were a lot of broken pieces God was working on. But he’d prayed that someday he’d get the chance to tell me that what I did mattered, and that it had led him to God.

Then he thanked me and walked back to wherever he’d come from, and I stood there holding a soda I’d completely forgotten about.

I’ve thought a lot about that locker.

At 12 years old, in the dark, with the latch shut, screaming out for help and nobody coming, I don’t think I was having any lofty theological thoughts. I was scared. I was praying in the plain, frantic way children pray.

But looking back, I keep coming to Psalm 139. “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you” (139:11-12). I couldn’t see anything in that locker. God could see everything. He could see me. And, it turns out, He could see Jon, walking away down the hall toward a home I knew nothing about.

The strange part is that I could have fought him.

I was learning martial arts. That was half of what he mocked. And he was right that I didn’t fight back, though maybe not for the reason he thought.

I’ve written before about the difference Oswald Chambers draws between the person who doesn’t hit back out of fear and the one who doesn’t hit back because the life of Christ is in them, and how those two can look identical from the outside. I don’t want to pretend that 12-year-old me was perfectly the second one. Some of it was surely fear. The man was nearly twice the size of me, if not more. But some of it, I think, was a child who had just met Jesus and was trying, clumsily, to do what He’d do.

When Peter drew his sword in Gethsemane, Jesus told him to put it away, and then said something that has always stopped me: “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53). Christ wasn’t helpless. He had all the power in heaven at His disposal and chose not to use it. That restraint, power held back for love’s sake, is what Jon couldn’t make sense of. It’s what he went looking for.

Peter has a phrase for what happened at that bowling alley.

“Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:12).

The day of visitation. Peter doesn’t promise that the people speaking against you will come around while you’re watching. He says that someday, on a day God chooses, they will see, and they will glorify Him. For years I had no idea anyone was watching anything but my reactions to the next shove. Jon was watching. And his day of visitation came long after I’d stopped thinking about him at all.

Stephen never got his bowling alley conversation.

When Stephen was stoned outside Jerusalem, the men throwing the stones “laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul” (Acts 7:58). And as Stephen was dying, he prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (7:60).

Stephen didn’t live to see what became of the young man holding the coats. He never met Paul. He never read a single letter to the Romans or the Corinthians. Augustine once said that if Stephen had not prayed, the church would not have had Paul. I can’t prove that, and neither could Augustine. But I believe something like it, and I find it both comforting and humbling.

Most people who respond to cruelty with love never find out what it did. I’m aware that I was given an unusual mercy. I got to hear the end of the story, or at least the beginning of a new one.

Ecclesiastes says to cast your bread upon the waters, “for you will find it after many days” (11:1).

Many days. Not tomorrow. Not by graduation. Paul says much the same to the Galatians: “Let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9). The reaping is real. It just runs on God’s calendar, and His seasons are often longer than a school year, or 7 of them.

I want to be careful about what I take from this.

I don’t believe what Jon did to me was good. Shoving a child into a locker and turning out the lights is cruelty, and the fact that God later used my response doesn’t change what it was. Nor do I think the lesson is that every child being bullied should simply endure it in silence. If a ten-year-old came to me with this story today, I’d want her to tell an adult, and I’d want that adult to act. I was a kid with very few tools, doing my best. God took what I had and did something with it. That’s His grace, not a policy.

Also: It would be very easy to make this story about me, about how faithful I was, how my witness won him over.

But Paul is clear about whose work conversion is: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6-7). I was simply a frightened girl trying not to hit back. God did the rest, over years, through whatever other people and moments He used in Jon’s life that I’ll never know about.

The hardest part, if I’m candid, was receiving him.

When God told Ananias to go and lay hands on Saul, Ananias objected. “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints” (Acts 9:13). And when Saul tried to join the disciples in Jerusalem, “they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple” (9:26). It took Barnabas vouching for him before they’d let him in.

But I love what Ananias finally says when he walks into that house and puts his hands on the blinded man who had come to Damascus to arrest believers like him. “Brother Saul” (9:17). The first word out of his mouth is brother.

Standing in that bowling alley, with the pins crashing behind me, I had to decide whether Jon was still the boy at the locker room door or whether he was my brother now. I’d spent years being glad I’d never see him again. And here he was, asking for nothing except to tell me thank you.

I’d like to say I responded with perfect grace. I think I managed something close to it. But I’ve had a lot of time since to grow into the answer, and the answer, as best I can tell, is that he’s my brother. A brother with broken pieces God is still working on. Which, as it happens, describes me too.

I still think about that locker sometimes, the dark and the latch and the footsteps going away. But I think about the bowling alley more.

*name intentionally changed