Doing the right thing will cost you. This is true no matter who you are, but I especially noticed this reality with high school students where the number of people you can interact with is limited to the people in your school and/or class. Any student who is willing to leave their comfort zone to reach out to someone who has very few friends finds out that it can be social suicide. You quickly get labeled as “weird” if you try to be a friend to a person who everyone else ridicules.
Any student who is willing to do the right thing, even when everyone else is pushing them to do the wrong thing, is a hero in my book. It takes a lot of courage to do the right thing when your peers are pushing you toward the opposite direction. When I was a youth minister, I saw a few students willing to step up and reach out to others no matter the social pressure, and I was always impressed. I also saw a whole lot of students doing just the opposite – caving to the pressure to do the wrong thing.
How many of us have ever let someone push us down the wrong path, push us into doing something we knew we shouldn’t do, but we let them pressure us into doing the wrong thing anyway?
I had plenty of times where I did just that – let people push me into doing the wrong thing, even when I knew it might get me into trouble and knew for certain that God didn’t want me to do it. Why are we so weak when it comes to standing up for what is the right thing?
One of the areas where we can really mess this up is our striving to fit in. To make sure we fit in, we might find ways to make sure that those who don’t fit in very well are “made fun of” even more. We pick on those who have less friends than us, less money than us, less fashionable clothing than us just so that we can feel better about ourselves. And even if we don’t do it to their face, we find ourselves engaging in conversations behind their backs so that we lift ourselves up and put them down in the eyes of those around us. Why is it that just to fit in, we are willing to join in making fun of others?
Take a stand for what is right. It’ll cost you some social status. But I have found out that doing the right thing often will.