I had a teacher in high school who was interested in his student’s lives. He attended various after-school events, from sports to drama, to show his support for his students. During one of my swim meets, he attended the event. Everything was fine until the starter pistol announced the start of the first race. My teacher jumped as if startled at the sound of the gun going off. It was a strange response until he told me his story.

He was a foot soldier in the Army during World War II. He fought on the front lines of major European campaigns. The swim meet he attended was twenty years after the end of the war but he was still reacting to the sound of gunshots. He experienced the horrors of war where the reality of someone trying to kill you was in your face and personal. He had faced death and survived but was still reacting to the sound of a gunshot like it was twenty years prior when he heard the shot of an incoming German bullet. 

There is always a reason why people respond to the sound of something that causes them to react with fear. It can take time for healing to take place, sometimes a lifetime, or never. A person who has been sexually assaulted will react differently to sexual abuse than a person who has never experienced such an event. The same is true for someone whose trust was betrayed in a business deal gone wrong, or a kid who was bullied in school.

We live in a world where there are all kinds of responses taking place to certain issues we do not understand because we have not lived through the issue ourselves. It is wise and loving to hold off our judgment of those reactions and wait for the Lord as to how we can love a person who is still held captive to a response of fear. Those who have that kind of loving patience may, at some point, be trusted with the details of a person’s pain that will offer an understanding of their unusual response.

After my teacher told me his story, I admired his willingness to sit through my swim meet and suffer again the pain of his past. His expression of love and his willingness to suffer those painful memories, helped me learn to be patient with people’s unusual reactions and wait until I heard the rest of their story before judging their response.