The Winds of Autumn by Janette Oke

Author:Janette Oke [Oke, Janette]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Revenge

I WAS STILL GETTING a great deal of ribbing at school. The fellas got a lot of laughs from it but they meant no harm. It wasn’t that way with Jack Berry. He had been my friend, a close friend. Now he rarely even spoke to me, just about me—and everything he had to say was mean and cutting.

I was really sorry about this. I didn’t like having an enemy. I’d never had one before. Was he sore, too, about not getting to go on the camping trip? I just didn’t know what to do.

I knew what the Bible said about enemies—that we are to love them, to do good to them. But, boy, it sure was hard to be nice to Jack Berry. He seemed to spend his nights thinking up mean things to say about me, and his days saying them.

I tried to ignore the insults but it sure got tough. Even the other fellas were beginning to get on me about the situation. They said I shouldn’t allow Jack to say those things, that I should stand up to him. I tried to shrug it off.

Willie was the only one who really understood how I was feeling.

“It’s tough, Josh,” he said. “Doing what you know Jesus would do is really tough sometimes.”

“Turning the other cheek” was what Willie said the Bible called it. Though he acknowledged that not defending myself was tough, that was exactly what Willie expected a follower of Jesus to do.

Then one Thursday everything all broke loose.

I had gone again to Camellia’s house and, after our tea and pastries—which I still didn’t manage too well—we spent some time studying. I would have stuck with it longer, but after a few minutes of working over the geometry text, Camellia started talking about other things.

She was bright, lively, exciting, and it was fun talking to her. It was easy for me to just let the book slide to the table and listen to the music of her voice. When I finally pulled myself away, gathered up my books and my coat and left her house, I was in a big hurry. I was later than I should have been and I had chores waiting for me at home.

I was just running by the darkened schoolyard, my breath puffing out ahead of me in cloudy little spurts of frost, when I heard an unexpected shuffling sound. Before I could even turn to look, someone grabbed me and a fist whirled through the air and hit me right in the face.

I hollered out with surprise and fright and my book went flying through the air and landed somewhere in the dark bushes just beyond me.

The fist hit me again, and this time pain streaked through my right eye. It made tears stream down my face so I couldn’t even see my assailant.

I had never fought before in my life, but suddenly I was fighting as if my very life depended upon it—for all I knew, maybe it did.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.