mallory the loser

when i was in about 5th or 6th grade i think, me and the girls from my sunday school class were invited over to our teacher's house for a fancy tea party. i don't remember a lot except that she had folded the cloth napkins into swans, which i found very impressive. anyway. after tea we did a craft together. we were making little angels or dolls of some sort.

now, amongst us girls there was one girl in particular who didn't quite fit in. looking back it makes me so sad. her mom would drop her and her sister off at church each week and they would have dried spaghetti on their faces, mismatched clothing, ratted hair. this particular girl, whom i will call 'mallory', also had a lazy eye and had to wear a patch more often then not. this did not lend itself to social acceptance. it really really shames me to think of the ways i may have left her out or worse, ignored her altogether. i think there is nothing worse then feeling invisible.

i know that the teachers always did their best to love and accept her. but this particular day i witnessed a facet of the human heart that was really saddening. everyone was doing their own thing and i still needed to draw the face on my little wooden doll head. my teacher's example doll had a darling face so i picked it up to copy it, but in doing so i accidentally got marker on it's face. panicked, i put the doll down and quickly moved away to finish my doll.

soon, it was time to leave. right about the time mallory was leaving, my teacher noticed her own doll's marked up face. i was terrified she would ask me if i had done it, so i was watching her out of the corner of my eye. now here is where it happened: i saw her pick up her doll and quietly say, 'oh no!'. then i saw her look out at mallory getting in her mom's car. she sighed and shook her head and looked down at the doll again.

i was shocked. my teacher had just assumed that mallory was the one who had marked up her doll! without even asking her! or anyone else! ........and i let her take the blame.

i don't think that my teacher was a bad person, in fact, i think she only did what many of us have already done. she assumed that the deed was done by the least attractive, sloppiest, slowest person. she credited a negative act to mallory just because mallory was already a loser.

i have a children's book called, "You Are Special", by Max Lucado. in it, Lucado tells the story of a village of wooden puppets where everyone sticks dot and star stickers on each other as a form of judgment. the stars were good, the dots were bad. he makes the observation in the story that sometimes, people would give other people dots just because they already had dots.
it doesn't really make sense, yet we do it.

But,
here's some truthhope for us:
"on the last day, Jesus will not look over us for medals, diplomas, or honors, but for scars." Brennan Manning