Evil. We see all kinds of evil in this world, from situations in families, to institutions, to political events, to the treatment of people in many circumstances around the world. There is only one word for it: evil.
How we deal with it can be challenging. I get daily texts from one organization fighting against the evils they perceive in the world. I hear from another organization representing the families who encountered losses in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. They are fighting evil.
There are the border battles. There is evil on all sides in many of these ongoing issues.
I had a conversation a while back with one of our daughters about gun rights. She was overcome with the grief she felt at the impossibility to make a difference!
It can be overwhelming. But what we do have control over is this: how we choose to make a difference. Will we choose to respond with love in every situation? Will we choose to make anything we say no matter how we might disagree express the character and attitude of the God we serve? And how might we love the person God places in front of us well? That’s one thing we have control over. We also have to believe in this life that the choices we make do have consequences. In the true story of the book of Esther, her choices do make a difference for a nation.
FB arguments bother me so hotly, for they are totally avoidable as long as we always treat the comments from others on FB as if from REAL people with hearts and souls and feelings and minds. The minute we dehumanize our audience, we will participate in evil by how we treat them, write at them, and deal with them. This seems to happen all the time on FB but also personally by how we look at those who are from other races.
We can make assumptions based on fear.
For example, were I to write this:
“He met her in a bar and offered to drive her home. He said he knew a shortcut, and got her home in time for her to watch the 10 pm News.”
I imagine you had a different ending in mind, as in, “she was on the 10 pm news…” because of making an assumption out of fear.
The book of Esther is this magnificent account of what happens when someone chooses to act rather than making an assumption out of fear. It is this beautiful tale of how one woman changed the future of her race.
She is facing off with evil, but does so demonstrating an unspoken confidence in God’s goodness. None of us may need to face such evil. But we can choose to act to make a difference in the world in which God has placed us by taking action similar to Esther, we can choose to realize that no matter the evil, that God might just have placed us in our sphere of influence for “such a time as this,” for us to act.