This story dramatizes the quality of Jesus and effect of his atonement that I most admire.
[Part 1]
[Part 2]
Part 3 (800 words):
…On her hike the next day, Amanda replayed the scenes from her dream, still amazed to have seen Jesus suffering her burdens just as she had suffered them. It was more than walking a mile in her shoes: he’d walked the entire distance she had, not just in her shoes but with her own tired and aching feet. Who would do that for someone just to understand them? And yet, she also wondered why he chose those particular events. They were among the worst, but there were other bad times…ones she was glad to have skipped.
The next night Amanda’s dream began in another familiar lunchtime spot, but this one made her insides freeze. She saw herself crouching against a side wall of the junior high building while Tara and her cronies began their bullying routine. The insults and kicking and hair-pulling happened almost every day for the first month of seventh grade until Amanda finally refused to get up for school. Her parents thought she was exaggerating. If her family hadn’t moved to a different state the month after that, who knows how she would have coped.
The encounter almost got to the part where Amanda always broke down and cried, when here came the Savior, striding towards them. A thrill of justice ran through her. Now they’ll get it! As he approached she resisted the urge to yell, “Knock their heads off!”
But instead of confronting her tormentors, Jesus walked to a spot at the wall a few yards away, crouched against it, and gave a whistle. With triumphant jeering the girls converged upon him, shoving his head and kicking at his shins. Amanda scrambled away to hide around the corner of the building. When he caught her horrified gaze, she saw tears welling up in his eyes. “You can go now,” he called over their insults and taunting. “You’re free.”
“I can’t leave you alone with them!” Amanda hissed back. She wanted so badly to run over and rescue him—to pull him away, to punch and kick and bash the girls until they ran off howling.
“Please trust me,” he managed to say between slaps and kicks. “Stay and we both suffer. Walk away, we’re at peace.”
Amanda forced herself toward home, stricken by the fear and humiliation in his face. What kept her walking, though, was his voice. Even as the girls kicked and hit him, even when it hurt him to talk, he’d spoken to her with absolute sureness. He was right where he wanted to be. Amanda’s pain subsided to a twinge of sadness as this peace of his settled in her heart.
As with the night before, this dream shifted among the moments of Amanda’s life when she had been most hurt by others’ cruelty: the ridicule of a teacher, the teasing of classmates, the shouting and hitting from her parents. She still hoped at some instinctive level that, as the Savior, he’d avenge her. She imagined him picking up whoever was harming her, throttling them, and hurling them over the horizon like in old cartoons. But in every situation he simply took her place. “You can go now,” he called once the aggressors had left her to attack him. “You’re free.”
The dream ended with a simple lunch of figs, cheese, and flat bread at the old hillside restaurant. Amanda waited for Jesus to say something, but he just sat there, looking toward the sea, then at her with a peaceful smile.
She reached across the table with both hands and covered his hand with her own. “Thank you for taking my place,” she began, “but why didn’t you just stop them? Wouldn’t I feel more free knowing that you wouldn’t let people hurt me anymore?”
His words were slow and gentle in reply. “If you focus on stopping them, or on paying them back, a part of you is still suffering at their hands. I wanted to show you how to walk away from them.”
“But why did you have to take my place?”
He took a drink of water from a cup. “I didn’t have to. I did it because I wanted you to know that I understand you completely. And that I love you completely. And also to help you let go of the pain you still carry. That’s what true friends want.”
The following day, Thursday, Amanda wrote and read distractedly, snacking from a big bag of granola mix. She fixed a Cup O Noodles for dinner with a cheap oatmeal creme pie for dessert. That night she stayed up as long as she could, afraid to go to sleep. The Savior’s words to understand you completely kept surfacing in her mind, and they made her feel more fear than curiosity. What else would she have to relive?
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