By Name · Week 2 · Tuesday · BULLIES
She is in seventh grade, and for about two weeks her friend group has been pulling away from her in small ways. Plans she hears about afterward. Inside jokes that stop when she sits down.
Then one night the group chat she is still in gets renamed. The new name is about her. Somebody screenshots an old post of hers, from last year, and adds a caption, and one by one everybody reacts with laughing faces.
Nobody has said anything to her face. They do not have to.
She told her mom she was fine
She stops eating breakfast. She is in her room more. When her mom asks, she says she is fine, she is just tired, it’s nothing.
If you were in seventh grade once, you remember why. Telling feels like making it real. It feels like it will make everything worse.
For if one falls down, his companion can lift him up; but pity the one who falls without another to help him up!Ecclesiastes 4:10 (BSB)
On Sunday we looked at how Nehemiah posted his people at the low places in the wall.
So I stationed men behind the lowest sections of the wall, at the vulnerable areas. I stationed them by families with their swords, spears, and bows.Nehemiah 4:13 (BSB)
The point I keep coming back to is who stood there. Families. Nobody was left at a low place by themselves. A twelve-year-old with that group chat open on her phone at midnight is standing at a low place.
She handed her mom the phone
One night in the kitchen, she just handed her mom the phone and said, look.
Her mom read every screenshot. Then she read them again. She wanted to text the other moms right then, and the words she wanted to use were not kind. She did not send them. She put the phone face down and sat with her daughter at the counter for a long time, and told her she was glad she said something.
In the morning she called the school counselor. She sent the screenshots. The counselor took it seriously. That week she met with the girls, one at a time and then together, and she called their parents.
What it cost: the girls know she told. For about a week she ate lunch in the library because it was easier than the cafeteria. And the one friend she had been sure of, the one she thought would stay, stopped talking to her.
Telling did not make it all better. It made it something she was not carrying by herself.
The chat did not need her answer. It needed a grown-up.
If you are a kid reading this, the person you tell does not have to be your mom. It can be a teacher, a coach, a counselor, a friend’s parent. Tell somebody. And if you are the grown-up somebody hands a phone to, take it seriously, and do something.
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