30 Days of Truth: Someone who made your life hell, or treated you like shit

I found this meme here and here.

Eight: Someone who made your life hell, or treated you like shit

This is so the opposite of last week's that I'm having a hard time getting my head around it.

I was teased a lot when I was a little kid. First, I was the first black kid to go to my school. I think that if my mother knew how hard this actually was my first 5 years of school, we would have moved somewhere else. On top of that I wore leg-braces (braces I refused to wear, after a certain point, by the way, so I still am a little bow-legged and pigeon-toed...trust a life time of this is better than the years more of teasing I would have had to face).

I was teased so much and discriminated against, even in high school and college, so much that it took me a long time to accept my otherness. I mean black kids can be just as cruel to other black kids when they see them as not being truly 'black' (whatever that means).

There are people that weren't allowed to date me, there are people who tried to turn me into someone I am not, there are people who tried to steal my joy and my peace and my happiness. The thing is that over the years I forgotten the names, or never bothered to know the names of some of the people who made my life hard and, today, I'm not sure I'd even recognize them in a crowd. I am hopeful that some of the bitterness and anger they were feeling has been assuaged and that's about all the thoughts they get from me.

I am lucky that I came from a loving, Christ-filled home, so from day one I could respectfully turn the other cheek and I could genuinely forgive and forget. My family taught me to love myself way before I knew in my heart how to do so.

No one can make you feel something about yourself that you refuse to accept and the good Lord knows that, as one of his chosen people I am fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalms 139:14), so there really isn't an answer to this one, now is there!