The Account with Persecution

My childhood was truly persecution in the textbook sense. So much so that when I first read Paul’s accounts of beatings and imprisonment and being run out of cities, I didn’t register them as extreme. I thought that was simply what following God looked like.

My parents hated God.

Not in the vague, indifferent way of people who never think about Him, but actively, deliberately, as an enemy to be fought. And I was the front on which they fought Him. They threw out my Bibles when they found them. They forbade me from going to church. They punished me for a faith I couldn’t seem to stop having. I gave my life to Christ at ten years old, in defiance of everything my home was arranged to prevent, and none of their opposition stopped me. If anything, it did the opposite. It watered what they were trying to kill.

Oswald Chambers, in his devotional for today, writes on Matthew 5:39: “if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” He says something that stopped me cold: that this verse reveals the humiliation of being a Christian. And that there’s a vast difference between the coward who doesn’t hit back out of fear and the Christian who doesn’t hit back because he is manifesting the life of the Son of God. Though, Chambers notes, in the eyes of the world the two look identical.

That distinction is the one I’ve spent most of my life failing to make. And it started in that house.

Here is something I’ve only recently been honest with myself about: the extremity of my childhood persecution felt, on some level, like validation.

If my parents had been lukewarm believers, mildly disappointed in my faith, my path would have felt less certain. But their outright hatred of God, their active campaign against Him….that seemed to confirm I was on the right side of something cosmic. I was suffering the way the prophets suffered, the way Paul suffered, the way Christ Himself said His followers would. “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you” (Matthew 5:11). The reviling felt like evidence that I was blessed.

There is truth in this. Jesus did say His followers would be hated, that a servant is not greater than his master, and if they persecuted Him they would persecute us (John 15:20). Suffering for the faith is real, and enduring it is genuinely holy. I don’t want to dismiss what I actually endured or pretend it wasn’t real persecution. It was.

But something got tangled in me during those years, and it took decades to see it. I learned to read my suffering as proof of my rightness. And once you’ve learned that equation, that suffering equals validation, it becomes very hard to tell the difference between suffering for righteousness and suffering that has nothing holy about it at all. The equation flattens everything. All pain becomes evidence. All opposition becomes confirmation. And that is a dangerous way to move through the world.

The church I could sometimes sneak away to made it worse, though they meant well.

What I absorbed there was that I was godly when I was suffering. That being walked on was holiness, and standing up for myself was its opposite.

Turn the other cheek. Go the second mile. Be reviled and bless in return. These are real commands of Christ, and I took them in as a child takes in everything: whole, uncritical, without the categories to sort them properly. What I learned was that being abused was spiritual and defending myself was carnal. That the more I absorbed without resistance, the more Christlike I was. That my worth to God rose in proportion to how much I let myself be trampled.

This is a distortion, and it does real damage, and I want to name it carefully because Chambers himself guards against it.

He says the one who doesn’t hit back out of fear is a coward, and the one who doesn’t hit back out of the life of Christ is a disciple. And though they look the same from outside, they are opposites. A child enduring abuse because she believes God requires her silence is not the same as a disciple freely choosing the second mile out of the security of grace. One is bondage wearing the costume of holiness. The other is freedom.

Scripture bears this out if you actually read it rather than absorbing a caricature. Jesus turned the other cheek at His trial, and also asked, when a guard struck Him… ” If I have spoken wrongly, bear witness about the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” (John 18:23). He did not simply crumple. Paul submitted to beatings and also invoked his Roman citizenship, refused to be quietly dismissed, stood on his rights when it served the gospel (Acts 16:37, Acts 22:25). Turning the other cheek was never the same as having no spine. It was the deliberate, free relinquishment of retaliation by someone who could have retaliated. Not the learned helplessness of someone taught that her powerlessness was piety.

I did not know that difference for a very long time. I thought being walked on was it.

The strangest fruit of all this came when I left home for Bible school. Free at last from the persecution of my childhood, I did something I can only now see clearly: I went looking for more of it.

Because all Christians are supposed to be persecuted, aren’t they? That’s what I believed, and what my roommates believed too. That being persecuted for the gospel was a mark of godliness, almost a credential. And so I set out to earn it. I was loud about my faith. I announced it, brandished it, wore it in a way calculated to provoke. And it worked, in the sense that it invited offense. People were put off. I collected the reactions like proof of faithfulness.

But here is what I missed entirely: the offense I generated built no bridges. It connected no one to God.

It was persecution I had manufactured through my own abrasiveness, and then read as some kind of spiritual achievement. I had confused being offensive with the gospel being offensive. And those are not the same thing at all.

Paul did say the cross is a stumbling block, foolishness to those perishing (1 Corinthians 1:23). The gospel genuinely offends. But Paul also became all things to all people, that by all means he might save some (1 Corinthians 9:22). He entered the Areopagus and quoted their poets, met them where they stood, built the bridge before he spoke the harder truth (Acts 17:22-28). The offense of the gospel is supposed to come from its content, not from the disciple’s abrasiveness. I had it backwards. I thought if I was generating friction, I was being faithful. Really I was just being difficult and calling it a cross.

The whole point of spreading the gospel is connection.

That is, reconciliation, bridges built between people and God. And I was doing the opposite, driving people away and interpreting their retreat as my reward.

So Chambers’ distinction has become, for me, the work of a lifetime: learning to tell the difference between the coward and the disciple, between manufactured suffering and real persecution, between bondage that masquerades as holiness and the freely chosen second mile.

The second mile only means something when the first mile was truly required and the second is genuinely optional. Chambers says the Sermon on the Mount isn’t “do your duty”. It’s “do what isn’t your duty.” The turned cheek is holy precisely because it is chosen from a position of freedom, not extracted from a position of helplessness. A person who has never been taught she’s allowed to protect herself cannot freely turn the other cheek. She can only submit, which is a different and lesser thing, and often a wounded one.

What I’m learning now, decades into this walk, is that God never asked me to read all my suffering as validation.

He never required me to be trampled to be loved. The persecution of my childhood was real and I endured it and God was with me in it….but its extremity was never the proof of my belonging that I made it into. My belonging was settled at the cross, not measured by how much I could absorb.

And I’m learning that the disposition Chambers describes. That is, using an insult as an occasion to exhibit the life of Christ rather than to resent, is only possible for someone who is secure enough not to need the fight and free enough to choose peace. It flows from grace as a floor, not from fear as a cage. The frightened child turning the other cheek because she believes God demands her silence, and the grounded disciple turning it because Christ’s life is in her,….. those look the same to the world, exactly as Chambers said. But God sees the difference. He always did.

I spent years unable to tell them apart. I’m still learning. The turned cheek was never meant to be the posture of someone who believes she deserves the blow. It was meant to be the free gift of someone who knows, all the way down, that she is beloved….. and can therefore absorb an insult without it touching who she is, because Someone already told her who she is, and it was never up for a vote.