When your Bully becomes your Quorum President

Bullies aren’t just the kids that beat you up or take your lunch money; sometimes they are just the ones who constantly put you down.

My son enjoyed playing sports while growing up. He played a few years of soccer, a year of baseball and almost every year he played basketball and football. For Jr. Jazz, we always tried to get kids in the neighborhood and in his classes to be on the same team. For most years, we were not a great team. There was another team, that also went to his school and was in our same stake; and they were very good. Some of these players even had personal coaches. These kids were good, but their parent took it a bit too far sometimes. One of them even got banned from going to the games. Ha-ha, come on this is little league. Over the years this good team somehow convinced our better players to come join them. Of course, who doesn’t want to be on a good team; I get it.  Well these kids knew they were good and on more than one occasion would tell kids on our team either how good they were or how bad our team was. This happened a lot during elementary grades. But for some reason, one of the kids kept belittling my son for his team all through middle school too. My son also says that he did other stuff during middle school, but he doesn't want to talk about it; so I am not sure exactly how far this kid went to torment him.

This same kid also tripped my son after he had an operation and was on crutches. One time he apologized to him and said that he was just mad that in third grade that my son won an election and he lost; or something like that.

Well wouldn’t you know it, this kid moves into our ward around ninth grade. And then becomes the Priest Quorum 1^st assistant.  While he was serving in this calling he came over to our house to check on my son after he a had surgery. “Hey, Bill, President Smith (YM President/Priest Advisor) told me to come check on you”. Yeah, so another one of those assignments; thanks for caring.

Also, during this time, my son was part of a group chat with friends from school. A little bit later, this same kid and his friends join the group chat through mutual friends. On a few occasions, he kicks my son from the group chat. I’m sure he was trying to be funny; maybe. After a while my son gave up and just stayed away. One thing I have noticed, a lot of “friends” really don’t stick up for each other anymore. I was surprised that people in this chat didn’t stand up and say, stop it. But today, everyone is worried about how they fit in and don’t want to mess that up.

My son didn’t go to too many Priest activities because of sports, work or just didn’t get along with the quorum that well. Well one day they played pickle-ball and my son decided to go. He had a good time but he had to leave a little early so he could go to one of his friends’ homes to see him open his mission call. When he gets there, he says sorry he was late and that he was at an ym activity.  Well this same kid is there and again, maybe thinking he is funny, but says “yeah, right. You never go to the activities.”

It is very difficult when someone who has harassed you, now becomes a leader of your church group. This was a very difficult thing for my son to work through. He says, why would I want to go to a church or bring someone into this church where we have people who act like this, serve as leaders and then go a missions all while pretending to be to nice/good kid.