A Heart Like Jericho (The Walls Came Down)
by During the course of my childhood, I was a friend to several victims of child abuse. However, I had not witnessed it personally until that day. I would never be the same.
She struck him and cussed at him many more times before word reached my legs that I couldn’t possibly just stand there complacently any longer. I shook myself out of the daze, took my eyes off of the mirror and made my way to the door. I looked straight ahead, in an attempt to keep totally removed from the situation.
It was a little too late for that, though. Although I had merely stood at the sink with a glazed look on my face, I was a witness. Just like the mother’s hand striking her son, God sent a wrecking ball, at full force, straight at the walls I’d built around my soft heart and they were crumbling around me.
As I made my way to the exit – a journey of perhaps ten feet that seemed a lot more like ten miles – I had to pass the victim and his black-hearted parent. For a split second, I made eye contact with the young boy. That split second saw the total and complete destruction of the walls I’d built; it saw the shell around me annihilated and decimated.
In the course of that incredibly brief moment where I met the child’s eyes, I heard him screaming – pleading – for help, though not a word passed his mouth. The boy’s crying had slowed somewhat; he now sat on the cold floor with a spirit long since broken and a nose beginning to shed innocent blood.
Long after I walked out of that ladies room, long after I abandoned the items I’d been sent to get and simply ran for the door, long after I raced through the parking lot and fumbled with my car keys until I finally found the one that opened the door, I sat in my truck and shook.
During that time of sitting in my car and recovering from the disturbing situation I’d just witnessed, the child’s eyes appeared to me again – the first of many times that they would. A question rose from deep inside me: Why didn’t you do anything?
I had no answer. I still don’t. The excuse I gave myself is that I was too shocked at the time, but it somehow falls short of satisfying the question.
I have struggled a lot with the memory of that day. I cannot see myself forgiving the mother with the poisoned soul. There is no excuse she could possibly give me that would make things okay. While time has helped me come to a reasonably healthy psychological view of the event, it is something I will never forget. Nor is it something I believe I should completely forget.
When the walls start to go up around my heart again and apathy begins to take hold, a memory of the day is sure to lodge itself somewhere in my mind and remind me of what I did wrong.
Why didn’t you do anything? I’d ask myself again.
This time, I will.
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