A Slap in the Face, Using More Than Just a Hand

We work pretty hard here for a solid eight hours a day, typically doing repetitive manual labor. So absolutely no one on the team is ever opposed to driving out to Sheng Jin after dinner to get second dinner at a pizza place and wander the beach for a little bit. During our first experience at this pizza place, our team leader, Chris, made friends with a boy who was super jazzed about playing soccer with him. It was amazing to see them hit it off right away and bond, even without knowing each other’s language. Well, the boy knew a few English words, but I’m not allowed to write them on this blog or when I get home I’m going to get my mouth washed out with soap.

They played for a while until we got our food, and then a post dinner game got started pretty quickly with half the team. I was really enjoying watching the match, which was getting pretty intense, until the ball got kicked towards me and caught under my chair. The boy ran towards me to grab the ball and, being the tease that I am, I quickly grabbed it and hid it behind my back as my face playfully morphed into faux surprise. My face just as quickly turned into actual surprise, mixed with a bit of horror, after he wound up and slapped me across the face to express his displeasure with my antics.

The slap didn’t actually hurt, so I was a little upset with myself when a torrent of emotions came crashing down, and I had to try really really hard not to cry. For those of you reading this that know me pretty well, you know that crying isn’t typically my first instinct when it comes to anything that hurts physically or emotionally. That’s the nice way of saying I’m emotionally constipated. My spirit was filled with confusion that didn’t just go away in the morning when I woke up or after a couple of hours of turning up dirt and weeding in the garden.

After a while of meditating on the experience and talking it out with a teammate, I came to an unexpected conclusion–I was afraid. I was afraid of what kind of a man this boy was going to become. In many places, boys aren’t taught that women are just as worthy of respect as they are. They learn that women are weak, don’t have a say, and aren’t threatening, and therefore learn that they can take whatever they want and never have consequences for the methods that they use. It’s not going to be funny some day when habits that started as slapping a stranger turn into punching a wife because she was non-compliant. It’s not going to be funny when as a man, “no” doesn’t mean anything to him when it comes from the mouth of a woman.

It bothers me that the vulnerable and mistreated women, who have no idea of their worth as a daughter of Christ–that I want to work with some day–are going to bear scars from men that societies didn’t teach as boys that the words women and girls speak have weight and meaning. It bothers me that the children I want to work with some day are raised with perverted perceptions of how to treat the opposite sex and themselves. Through this experience, which took only an instant, God has opened my eyes to passions he has placed on my heart. He has given me a sensitivity to injustice that I think many societies lack, including ours in America. This kind of thing doesn’t happen exclusively in third world countries. How can we stand by when injustice creeps into our lives disguised as innocence?