Free Stand Strong: You Can Overcome Bullying (and Other Stuff That Keeps You Down) by Nick Vujicic Page B

or family member needs encouragement right now? How can you reach out to that person?
    12 . What would it feel like to be part of the safety zone for another person?
    13 . How can your faith in God help you right now? What prayers work best for you when you are feeling stressed or scared?
    God has a plan for your life too. And that is your ultimate safety zone!
    Nick’s Notes for Chapter Five
    You can create a safety zone within your mind where you can go mentally and emotionally to soothe yourself and build strength when bullies come around or other challenges arise.
    Short-term thinking can make being bullied seem even worse, so when you go into your safety zone, find peace by looking ahead to better days and a future of unlimited opportunities. Things may seem bad right now, but this too shall pass.

When I was in my early teens, I thought of my bullies as enemies, people who wanted to hurt me with their words or actions. I never considered that a bully could be someone I thought of as a friend until I starting hanging out with Zeke. This was in high school when I was trying to fit in by acting tough, cursing all the time, and ignoring the other Christian kids in my school. For some reason, the opinions and friendship of the non-Christian, pot-smoking, foulmouthed kids were important to me. They weren’t terrible people. Some of them had very good hearts. Many of them had tough home lives and were trying to deal with problems they weren’t equipped to handle. So I’m not putting them down.
    I wish I could have helped them, but at that point, I needed help myself. I had lost my way, lost touch with my faith, and I was pretending to be some other guy who was really nothing like the real me.
    Some bullies are subtler than others. They don’t get in yourface and threaten you. Instead, they do their best to manipulate you to serve their own interests. Street gangs often work in this way. They identify someone who is isolated, from a broken family with little parental supervision, and they move to fill the emotional need to be supported and protected. Then, once they have recruited the needy or lost person, they manipulate their new member into doing their dirty work, which may include selling drugs, carrying weapons, beating people, robbery, and other crimes.
    These bully “friends” also may try to tell you who you are and what you should do. I let that happen to me for a while. I let others influence how I acted and what I thought of myself. I listened to them instead of that voice inside telling me,
This is wrong. You’re not like this
.
    I finally realized I’d wandered far from the real me when Zeke, an older classmate, offered me a cigarette. I may have started swearing to fit in, but I drew the line at ruining my health. It’s hard enough having no limbs, but there’s no way I could survive without good lungs.
    It struck me as odd that anyone would look at me or know me even a little and think I’d smoke a cigarette. It’s fairly obvious, or should be, that I’m not exactly built to be a smoker—unless they’ve come up with some sort of hands-free cigarette that I haven’t heard about!
    When Zeke first suggested that I smoke, I thought,
Hedoesn’t have a clue as to who I am
. A little later, it hit me that I really didn’t know who I was either; otherwise, I wouldn’t have wanted him as a friend.
    Again, I’m not putting Zeke down. He wasn’t a bad person. He just wasn’t the sort of person I needed to be hanging out with.
    People respond to you and treat you according to the way you act, not the way you think or feel.
    It wasn’t his fault. He assumed I’d like to smoke cigarettes because I’d been presenting myself as that kind of guy—the guy who cursed and acted tough. This was the first time I realized one of the key facts about relationships: people respond to you and treat you according to the way you act, not the way you think or feel.
    I may have thought I was still a straight-arrow