When I grew up, I would always hear my dad share the story of what compelled him to put my sister and I into Taekwondo. When people would ask him what attracted him to this Korean style of Martial Arts, he would first explain to his audience with the best of his ability, that the fighting style consisted primarily of flying kicks and changing belt colors depending on rank. This was usually the beginning of the soliloquy. He would then examine the room and would begin to reflect on how one day I had come home from school and told him that I was being bullied. This would infuriate the hell out of me. For one, I never remembered being bullied by anyone. And for two, it made people consider that at one point I was weak, or maybe I still am, and I would begin to resent everyone he began to tell. They would nod their heads fervently as if to understand why it made sense to put the quiet black child into an activity that would instill confidence, but would also be an insured protectant against peers that were intent on engulfing me alive.
As I got older, I would start to roll my eyes when this story was told and try to incite a laugh in the room by beating my dad to the punch (both figuratively and literally, dad was hell-bent on having my sister and I demonstrate a few moves). I started realizing that humor fit comfortably in my conversational arsenal and at that moment I would always exclaim something like: “Dad, you’re being dramatic. I was never bullied, I stood up for the people being bullied.” That would usually change the narrative in the room, even though the one that I didn’t want to acknowledge still very much floated around somewhere inside of me. The narrative being that what my dad said was true. It was all true. I had come home one day, and yes at one point, I probably was bullied. Not probably, I was being bullied. All the signs were there, I was anxious and I was quiet, I hated parties, big groups, I would come home crying, and my dad would force my sister to let me play with her and her friends. But as you get older, these are all things that you either forget or make yourself forget. So like an uninvited fly in a bedroom, you just let it buzz around. Not fully acknowledging it’s presence, but not fully ignoring it either. Too lazy to get up and swat it, too human to act like it isn’t there. This truth was my fly, buzzing around my soul, landing on pockets of times I was easily offended and I didn’t know why, or places where I should feel safe but felt completely the opposite. The fly would buzz up again and then land and it started infecting everyone and everything, and then it started hatching more and more flies inside of me and as people got closer to me, they started to see them too. Or they started to smell the stench, the stench of self-loathing, the deep fear that one day that the truth of what I had gone through or am still going through would be exposed and thus would disrupt every chance of preserving any sort of mannequin I had created for them.
I needed a spider. Spiders trap flies. Flies are attracted to their webs, and it takes about an hour to spin them. So I started hunting for spiders everywhere. I kept jars in my backpack, I kept jars at home, in my bedroom, I kept jars at church, I kept jars everywhere that could provide a flat surface for a jar. If I collected enough spiders, they would spin enough webs. So that’s what I did, I grew up and became a spider hunter. Every hand that was extended to shake I examined those fingers as if they were a spider’s tentacles and would start to use people as spiders. I would compare who spun the best web to who spun the worst one. Who was quicker, and who was slow, who took their time to decorate their webs to ensure that the flies were undoubtedly attracted to an elaborate labyrinth or who quickly manufactured webs to make sure they collected enough flies as possible. The spiders were my friends, my significant others, my family, my coworkers, anyone who could create a web and prey upon the flies that buzzed around inside of me. I couldn’t have been bullied, I cannot be different, and if I am, what would that mean for me? So I spun webs to trap hard truths.
People began to grow weary, webs started to slow. And life will teach you that people after awhile are not meant to spin your webs for you, they already have enough flies to catch themselves. I wish I could end this blog by telling you that Jesus is perhaps the greatest exterminator I’ve ever come to know, and cleared out the inside of me, flies and all. That didn’t happen, and that hasn’t happened. He does help me realize that hard truths do not necessarily need to crystallize into believed lies. Instead, he’s forced me to open up all those jars of spiders that I hoped to trap the flies in, and just allow them to be my loved ones. He made me realize that I was making my loved ones pay a price, and carry out a work of grace that has already been established and has already been proven sufficient for me. Community and codependency can become drastically blurred lines. Instead He started teaching me to use those jars for a different purpose, we’re letting the people I love be free, it’s not their job to create webs for my pain, it’s my job to trap those flies in their own jars. To examine them with Jesus and to trust that through His magnifying glass, things look different. And maybe learn how to swat some along the way. I had been capturing the wrong insect all along. Learning to find meaning in our suffering, so that His suffering can completely edify our meanings.