I remember one day back in sixth grade my teacher accused me of lying, and gave me an “infraction slip”, it was the first time I ever was in “big” trouble, in front of the class; one other time in elementary school I got a “white” slip for not doing homework. The thing is, I did not lie, I had accidentally written the wrong date in my “book log”, it appeared I had read a book in one day, instead of the week it actually took, but the teacher insisted I was lying. It upset me so much I actually was visibly shaking and tearing up, but he did not care. A half hour later, when I was able to cool down and explain myself, he said this remark “your family must never trust you for you to act this way” thankfully he never sent the slip to “the office”. I am still not sure what he meant by the remark, but I was an emotional wreck the rest of the day. That day I did discover something though, I hated confrontation, I was wrongly accused and I wouldn’t even stand up for myself when I knew it was wrong.
Today I am not the same, I have this strange thrill with confrontations, not the “screaming and yelling” kind, which thankfully do not arise much in my life, but the “this is not right, so I am going to do something about it” kind. This clicked a few years ago when I was still figuring out who God was and who he wanted me to be, so my reaction was not God honoring. On a rather strange day, back in band class the music instructor and some of the upperclassman (which included myself, it was my junior year) were having a disagreement about how a piece should sound. Our instructor wanted to play it one way, while we felt it sounded better the way it was written to be played. He basically said to our senior trumpet player “Tim, do you think their’s a problem?” and he replied “no, not really, but