Respect (story #8)

When I was 10 my family started meeting for a house church with several other families. One of those families had 6 boys. That may sound like chaos and sometimes it was, but through all the craziness of that many boys, one thing was drilled into them: to respect girls. I vividly remember that their family had a pond with a zipline over it. We used to zipline out over the middle of the pond, and then let go and swim back to the dock to do it again. Usually the momentum gave out and the zipline stopped dead in the middle of the pond. It became a challenge to try and see how long we could hold on before slipping with a splash into the water. It was even more challenging to hang on when all of the boys began shaking the zipline to try and make the person hanging on fall off. That game was a lot of fun and I began playing it too. After a couple times, the boys’ dad noticed that his sons were trying to shake a little girl off of the zipline. He told them to stop and they did. At the time, I was enjoying the game and was a little annoyed that they weren’t allowed to play rough with me. Though they were never allowed to treat me roughly they let me take part in everything that they did. Now I a grateful for the respect that they were required to show me. Those boys taught me what sort of respect I should expect from men and boys. Nowadays women are taught that it is weak not to be able to be treated as men, and female dignity is being done away with. Men are not learning to respect women. The facts are that women are different then men, but that doesn’t mean that us women have to sit around and knit, or drink tea (though I do like tea) and wear fancy clothes all the time. Also a well mannered man will not leave a woman out, he will treat her as an equal if not better. Men should open doors for women and be respectful. I am so grateful that I got to experience respectful boys that treated me as an equal, and enjoyed hanging out with me.