By Jade Angelo Gascon
Executive Assistant, On Eagle’s Wings Foundation

Because of the internet, we can now chat, laugh, get angry and attracted (among others) with people we haven’t even physically met.

In my case, I felt a containable amount of dislike to a member of our youth church in Australia. It started when Word War I erupted between us. On an online forum maintained by our youth church, we publicly argued about some church systems we couldn’t find common ground on.

We handled the Word War like true gentlemen in their early 20s—idealistic and I’m never wrong, get out of my way. He was eloquent, I was correct. He was disputatious, I was indisputable. Some of our church leaders felt that the issue we couldn’t agree on was too sensitive to be brought up on a public online forum. So in the end, neither he nor I won—the forum discussion thread got deleted.

From that moment on, I’ve never bothered to communicate with Mr. Wise Guy again though I didn’t really loathe him supremely. He just struck me as too rabid and sporadically imprudent.

But then he bothered. He sent me friendly email messages that initially made me feel uneasy. Raw human instinct made me want to consult Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” first before responding to him. Why is my “mortal enemy” sending me these friendly messages?

Because he was reaching out. Sincerely reaching out.

I replied to his messages, somehow embarrassed that I wasn’t the one who reached out first. And without me personally meeting him yet, I discovered through our exchange that Mr. Wise Guy was, after all, Mr. Nice Guy. If we were samurais, I should have deserved death by harakiri because of my shamefully towering pride. My indifference to what I thought was a petty sort of hate toward a brother in Christ led me to be careless with the emotions I harbored. An unpleasant mixture of pride and apathy silently poisoned me.

I’m glad to say we’re now good online buddies. His humility led me to humility as well. It hit me hard in the face. It was too genuine to be ignored, too hard to do to be feigned. I must admit that I thought there was nothing wrong about me until his display of kindness dismantled my lofty perception of myself.