"Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you" (Ephesians 4:31 to 32). Cruelty is not only found in war crimes and headlines. It also shows up in families, workplaces and even courtrooms, often in small and ordinary forms.
These three stories about cruelty, retold in our own words, show three of its faces: the quiet cruelty of leaving someone out, the casual cruelty of a joke at someone else's expense, and the frightening cruelty that ordinary people can be led into. The first story also shows what the opposite of cruelty looks like. Each ends with a takeaway for preaching or reflection.
Stories in this post:
- "Because I'm Yours": The Girl Who Was Always Left Behind
- The Sicilian Court Case: A Joke at Someone Else's Expense
- The Milgram Experiments: How Ordinary People Become Cruel
"Because I'm Yours": The Girl Who Was Always Left Behind
This true story is told by Timothy Paul Jones in a book he co-wrote with Daniel Montgomery. We retell it in our own words.
Timothy Paul Jones never imagined that taking a child to Disney World could be so hard, or that the trip would teach him so much about the outrageous grace of God.
Timothy and his wife had adopted a little girl who had already been adopted once before, by another family. He believes that first couple had the best of intentions, but they never truly made the adopted child part of their family alongside their biological children. After a couple of difficult years, they dissolved the adoption, and Timothy's family welcomed an eight-year-old girl into their home.
There was a painful pattern in her past. Whenever her previous family went on holiday to Disney World, they took their biological children with them, but they left their adopted daughter behind with a family friend. In her mind, at least, it always seemed to be because she had done something wrong that meant she could not go.
So by the time she came to her new family, she had seen plenty of pictures of Disney World. She had heard all about the rides and the characters and the parades. But when it came to walking through the gates of the Magic Kingdom, she had always been the one left outside. When Timothy learned this, he made plans to take her to Disney World the next time a speaking engagement took the family to the south-east of the United States.
Timothy thought he knew what to expect. From earlier trips with his other children, he knew that the prospect of meeting giant costumed mice and ducks could turn children into wriggling bundles of emotional overload. What he did not expect was the stream of downright devilish behaviour that the coming trip produced in his newest daughter.
In the month leading up to the trip, she stole food when simply asking would have got her a snack. She lied when telling the truth would have been easier. She muttered insults designed to hurt her older sister as deeply as possible. And as the days on the calendar ticked closer to the trip, her rebellions multiplied.
A couple of days before the family left for Florida, Timothy pulled her onto his lap to talk through her latest escapade. She looked at him and said flatly, "I know what you're going to do. You're not going to take me to Disney World, are you?"
The thought had not even crossed his mind. But suddenly her downward spiral made sense. She knew she could not earn her way into the Magic Kingdom. She had tried and failed that test before. So she was behaving in a way that kept her as far away as possible from the place she longed to go, as if to get the rejection over with.
Timothy admits that, in that moment, he was tempted to use her fear to his advantage. The easy reply would have been, "If you don't start behaving better, you're right, we won't take you." But by God's grace, he did not say it. Instead, he asked her a question. "Is this trip something we're doing as a family?"
She nodded, her brown eyes wide and brimming with tears.
"Are you part of this family?"
She nodded again.
"Then you're going with us. There may be some consequences to help you remember what's right and what's wrong, but you're part of our family, and we're not leaving you behind."
Timothy would love to say that her behaviour improved after that conversation. It did not. Her choices more or less spiralled out of control at every hotel and rest stop all the way to Florida. Even so, the family went to Disney World on the day they had promised. It was a typical Disney day: overpriced tickets, overpriced food and long queues, mixed with just enough manufactured magic to make you think about coming back someday.
That evening, in the hotel room, a very different child appeared. She was exhausted, thoughtful and a little tearful at times, but the month-long mask of rebellion had slipped away. At bedtime Timothy prayed with her, held her, and asked, "So how was your first day at Disney World?"
She closed her eyes and snuggled down into her stuffed unicorn. After a few moments, she opened her eyes just a little. "Daddy," she said, "I finally got to go to Disney World. But it wasn't because I was good; it's because I'm yours."
It wasn't because I was good; it's because I'm yours.
That, Timothy and his co-author write, is the message of outrageous grace. Grace is not a reward you achieve by being good; it is a gift you receive by belonging to God. It is God's goodness coming to find you even when all you have to offer him is defiance. It is the landowner who pays a full day's wage to workers who only did one hour (Matthew 20:1 to 16). It is the husband in Hosea who keeps his covenant with an unfaithful wife (Hosea 3). It is the shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to rescue the one that wandered off (Luke 15:1 to 7). It is the father who gives his best robe and ring to a son who wasted everything (Luke 15:11 to 32).
And the most amazing thing, they say, is that this is not merely what God would do. It is what he has done. In Christ, God says to everyone who trusts him: I could have chosen anyone, and I chose you, and nothing you say or do will change my love or my choice.
Takeaway: This little girl had been taught by cruelty that love must be earned and could be withdrawn. The opposite of that cruelty is not just politeness; it is grace that refuses to leave anyone behind. "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!" (1 John 3:1). Is there someone who has learned from experience that they will always be left out, and could you be the one who says, "You're coming with us"?
Source: Daniel Montgomery and Timothy Paul Jones, PROOF: Finding Freedom through the Intoxicating Joy of Irresistible Grace (2014), pages 81 to 84.
The Sicilian Court Case: A Joke at Someone Else's Expense
This story was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald in February 2000. We have not been able to locate the original report or an Italian source to confirm the details, so we retell it as it was reported.
In February 2000, newspapers reported an astonishing hoax that had taken place on the Italian island of Sicily.
The ringleader was a judge. He decided to stage a fake court case for one purpose only: to have a laugh at the expense of a lawyer from the mainland. A date was fixed, the proceedings were announced, and a female prosecutor, reported as Iolanda Apostolica, was brought over from mainland Italy to argue the case.
Everyone was in on the joke except her. The whole point of the exercise was to spend the case laughing at her behind her back.
To make her humiliation even greater, the judge gave everyone involved in the case a false name taken from crude Sicilian slang. He himself was to be known as Judge Licazzi, the defence lawyer as Mr Crastello, and a court officer as Ms Sbardasciata. For anyone unfamiliar with the local dialect, those names meant roughly "testicles", "castrated" and "cretinous". So, throughout the proceedings, as the prosecutor earnestly argued what she believed was a genuine case, she was respectfully addressing His Honour Judge Testicles, defence counsel Mr Castrated and Court Officer Ms Cretinous, while the room struggled not to laugh.
The first sign she had that something was wrong came when a sympathetic colleague flashed her a sign that read, "They joke about you in court."
When she got home, she described her strange day to her boyfriend, Claudio. As it happened, he was a university lecturer in Rome who understood Sicilian slang. As soon as he heard the names, everything fell into place.
You can imagine how she felt: embarrassed, ashamed and humiliated.
The next day her boyfriend turned up at the court, walked up to the judge's bench, spat in the judge's eye and left a note that read, "A joke from Claudio Moffa."
Unbelievably, the judge then brought real charges against him. Claudio defended himself on the grounds that he had been restoring his girlfriend's honour. He lost, and was given a suspended prison sentence. At the time, the newspaper reported, the judge himself was facing disciplinary proceedings.
Takeaway: Cruelty often hides behind the words "it was only a joke." The judge and his colleagues had a laugh; a woman was humiliated in her professional life; and a moment of revenge only made things worse for everyone. "Like a maniac shooting flaming arrows of death is one who deceives their neighbour and says, 'I was only joking!'" (Proverbs 26:18 to 19). Who is on the receiving end of your jokes?
Source: Incident reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 18 February 2000.
The Milgram Experiments: How Ordinary People Become Cruel
In 1961, a young assistant professor at Yale University named Stanley Milgram began a now famous experiment on obedience. He wanted to know how far ordinary people would go in obeying an instruction to inflict pain on another human being.
Volunteers were recruited from the general public through newspaper advertisements and paid a small fee. When each volunteer arrived, he was introduced to another participant, and the two drew lots for roles. One would be the "teacher" and the other the "learner". In fact, the draw was rigged. The learner was always an actor working with Milgram, and the volunteer was always the teacher.
The learner was strapped into a chair in the next room and wired up to what looked like an electric shock generator. The teacher was told the study was about the effect of punishment on learning. He was to read out a series of word pairs and test the learner's memory. Every time the learner gave a wrong answer, the teacher was to punish him with an electric shock, starting at 15 volts and increasing the voltage by 15 volts with every mistake.
The shock generator had a long row of switches running all the way up to 450 volts. Labels above them moved from "Slight Shock" through "Intense Shock" to "Danger: Severe Shock", and the final switches were marked simply "XXX". No real shocks were ever given, but the volunteers did not know that. As the voltage rose, they heard the learner complain, then cry out, then scream in pain, plead to be released and mention a heart condition, and finally fall ominously silent. Whenever a teacher hesitated, an experimenter in a grey lab coat calmly told him to continue: "The experiment requires that you continue."
Before the study, experts had predicted that only a tiny fraction of people, perhaps those with psychopathic tendencies, would go all the way. Milgram was astonished by the results. In his best-known version of the experiment, around 65 per cent of the participants, ordinary men from New Haven and the surrounding area, kept going past the switches marked "Danger: Severe Shock" all the way to the maximum of 450 volts. Many sweated, trembled, laughed nervously and protested. But they kept pressing the switches.
What do the experiments prove? Some social psychologists question whether they simply show that people will blindly obey authority. After all, people disobey authority all the time: they defy their parents, break the speed limit and ignore their teachers. Lee Ross of Stanford University and his colleague Richard Nisbett argued in their book The Person and the Situation that the Milgram experiments show how powerful context is in shaping behaviour. To disobey, a participant had to step outside the whole situation and tell the experimenter that the experiment itself was illegitimate. Ross and Nisbett suggest that people often act the way they do because of where they are, not who they are. Put the same person in different circumstances, and they may behave in a completely different way.
Takeaway: Milgram's volunteers were not monsters. They were ordinary people who took one small step after another in a situation that made cruelty feel normal. That should humble all of us. The prophet Jeremiah observed, "The heart is deceitful above all things" (Jeremiah 17:9). Where are you being asked, a little at a time, to go along with something that hurts someone else, and what would it take to stop pressing the switch?
Source: Reported in The Good Weekend magazine, 2 December 2000; background from published accounts of Stanley Milgram's obedience studies and Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation (1991).
Final thoughts
A little girl who had learned that she would always be left out, a judge who turned a courtroom into a stage for mockery, and ordinary volunteers who kept pressing switches because they were told to. These stories about cruelty show how easily it creeps into ordinary life, and the first story shows the answer: a love that says, "You're coming with us."
Where could you choose kindness over cruelty this week, even in a small way?
More stories you may like:
- Best Stories About Grace
- Best Stories About Kindness and Compassion
- Stories About Racism and Prejudice
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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