Evil

"This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed" Lam. 3:21-22

Sickness, accidents, disease, sudden impoverishment, drought, crop failure, old age, betrayal, and heartache: these are the things life is made of at times. Or is it that these are the things life is made of most of the time? Is life mostly good with a few streaks of the bad thrown in for good measure? Or is life a struggle at best and only a rare, lucky few float along relatively unscathed?

Tuesday’s newspaper was especially wrenching with stories of murder confessions and convictions, bitterness and unforgiveness, headline divorces, governmental breakdowns, lawsuits, and political pandering on wholesale levels. Is this the norm that we must grow to expect in a fallen world with a few good stories that break through now and again or did I wake up to a bumper crop of especially bad news?I suppose you could entitle this essay, “Is the cup half full or half empty?” But then why does it matter?

It is my business to look at so many young and innocent faces every day and wonder just what we should tell them about life. What is it like, really? To protect and shield them from the evil in the world is every parent’s natural impulse, mine included. Why sully their blissful world with the dirt and dreadful savagery of mankind at its worst? But still there is much of the evil of the world that manages to sneak through our carefully arranged shields or, worse yet, brazenly shatters our stoutest defenses. Grandmas and grandpas get weak, sick, and die. Thieves break through and steal leaving a path of destruction in their wake. Friends fall and break their bones with a pain that is hideous to behold. And little sisters can suffer a wasting disease through no fault of their own.

So do we embrace life with dread and fear for the worst knowing that at anytime the sky will come crashing down? Or do we rejoice in each day’s mercies and celebrate all the good that comes our way being careful not to project a morbid fear of the future even if we come dangerously close to putting on the proverbial rose-colored glasses? In a thousand little ways, we will communicate one or the other to our children, our neighbors, our spouses, and the wayfaring stranger. We can easily be betrayed by our fears or our blissful optimistic obstinacy.

I choose to think of life in terms of knees. They are amazing devices, so fragile to either trauma or age, but yet assigned to carry all that body weight, bone upon bone, fitted end to end, and still they provide mobility through great ranges of motion. They seemed almost doomed to fail. A sudden jar or twist can tear the living bindings irrevocably. There is, to me, no satisfactory explanation of why they should be able to do all that is expected of them. And yet they do, year upon year, in one of God’s greatest displays of organic engineering. I have had my share of minor knee injuries, but instead of cursing my misfortune, I have learned to marvel at how well they perform in spite of the forces arrayed against them. It is not that they are so prone to misfortune that causes me to wonder. It is rather that they work at all.

So, too, life. It is so fragile, so complex, and so prone to failure on every hand. That takes little to comprehend. The greater mystery is how we do as well as we do. It is cause for rejoicing when things go well. Normality is a blessing in any form. Lack of debilitating sickness is a positive. Good health is cause for rejoicing. I see the cup half-full. Anything else is undeserved gravy. Yet my gratefulness is rooted in the acknowledgement of the evil around us. I neither ignore it nor fear it. I glory in every small mercy.

Differences

“let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” –Gal. 6:9

Part of my job that I really enjoy is getting to watch the infinite variety of children in our school. As people, we have much in common: our humanity, our homo sapien-ness, our biological make-up that makes medical books possible. But leaving that behind, we are as different as snowflakes. Even within the same family, it does not take long before parents begin questioning the origins of their offspring. “How could this child have sprung from our loins?”

I see ‘bouncy tiggers’ that were born into sedate homes. Intellectual types give birth to athletes. A musician emerges from a non-musical family. I marveled the other day at the flexibility of a youngster who could not sit in a chair without sitting on one foot or the other or both. It was as natural and compulsive as could be for this bright student while everyone else sat in comfortable conformity. To force either the one or the group at large to exchange their posture for the other would be excruciating torture.

I watched a young boy work a math sheet the other day and his rate of speed was exceedingly slow. It made an expediter like myself want to grab the pencil from him and race across the page. The teacher assured me that he was bright and fully able to handle all his math facts. But he was never one to be in a hurry. That can be so frustrating to parents who like to move quickly, racing from one job to the next.

One parent has commented repeatedly how one of their two children will quickly report any infraction of the rules he may have committed while the other one is impetuously breaking the rules and quite willing to cover it up. The one is a dedicated, task-oriented, first-born people pleaser. The other is a free spirit that soars quite often into places it should not go, fearless of the consequences.

The moral is that we cannot be held responsible for the children we bring into the world in any sense of personality, ability, temperament, or handicap. They are who they are. Some will write with perfect script from day one and others will fight legibility issues all their lives. Some will never be able to dribble a basketball and others exhibit the skill with no coaching whatsoever. The variety and genetic surprises are never-ending.

While we cannot control who they are from birth, we can shape their character. In fact, that is one thing which often characterizes a whole family. Your kids may all exhibit different giftedness, but I am always impressed by the character that children mimic in the same home. That kind of talk always makes parents nervous for they well know that their children are fully capable of embarrassing the family name at any one point in time. I have stories to tell as well as anyone. But to know your families over time, to be with your children day after day, to see them struggle and triumph in little different ways, I am pleased to say, is to see Godly homes and young lives being carefully built, line upon line, stone upon stone.

I grieve when I see beautiful and gifted children crash and burn as young adults for lack of Godly character. And I marvel at seeing children who are average in every way go on to build solid and productive lives because of the Christ-like character formed within them. The secret is not in the cards we are dealt but how we play them. Trite truth? Perhaps, but it is also a fountain of hope for all because the race is not to the swift, or the beautiful, or the rich and famous. Keep up the good work.

Evolution

“And the earth was without form and void…” - Gen. 1:2

I had made a daisy chain with my orange extension cord and brought it into a classroom last week for some last minute repairs on a table. Evidently not too many of the students have contractors for dads and had not seen one before. “What’s that?” they all wanted to know. I proceeded to give a lesson on why the theory of evolution does not make much sense. Extension cords and garden hoses are my number one evidence for the Biblical account of creation as opposed to evolutionary theory. Somehow the students were still a bit puzzled with the connection. So what happens when you toss an extension cord in a box and then pull it out to use it? “It gets all tangled,” they answered correctly. What happens when you carefully roll up an extension cord or a garden hose, lay it nicely in a corner, and then grab it to use it? “It still gets all tangled up,” came the response again. That is why I make a daisy chain with my extension cord for though it looks ugly and bulky, if you pull from the end, it comes out straight with no tangles. But it takes extra work and careful technique to reset the daisy chain when you are through.

Macro evolutionary theory says that given enough time, order can come from chaos. My experience is that order reverts to chaos; even after special efforts at making loop-de-loops with all my cords and hoses. Think about the last time you pulled out that camera with the long strap out of your purse. If it comes out clean without a knot or a snag, you consider yourself blessed. And the smaller the string, the more grave and perfidious the tangle. Fishermen know that the only cure for a back-lashed fishing line is a pair of scissors. Even the most routine movements, casts, or reeling can create mind-boggling puzzles sure to cross the eyes of the most clear-sighted and test the patience of the most saintly. And how many times have I attempted to move an appliance or tool with even the most modest of power cords and, daring fate, I left the free trailing cord drag along behind only to see it snag on the most unlikely places.

My argument is simple. Anyone who believes in the theory of evolution and that order can come out of chaos has never seriously worked with either garden hoses or extension cords. I went through a phase in which I flirted with evolutionary thought. I used to think that perhaps the cord would untangle if I shook it enough. In my old age, I now am resigned to the fact that the more I shake them, they worse they get. Intelligence is required. I have to analyze the knot and take the time to untangle one twist at a time.

And only God could bring order out of nothingness. Chaos is the norm. We, as complex and intricately designed creatures, are the exception. There is no other satisfactory explanation. Bringing order out of chaos is the work of God, the Divine initiative. To design, to build, to organize, to create, to repair, to restore is the incarnation of the Imago Dei, the image of God, within the heart of man.

Every morning when I see freshly scrubbed children in clean clothes carrying lunch boxes filled with carefully chosen edibles, I see order that is imposed on chaos. One child just last week was finishing her breakfast outside on the sidewalk and suddenly spilled orange juice all down her clean school outfit, and her school day had not even started; she hadn’t even made it in the door. Chaos is the bent of the world, especially for children. Order is the sweet smelling sacrifice, day by day, child by child, mess by mess, which we are able to offer up to the Creator, the supreme order-maker. I think He takes pleasure with every lunch that’s made, every toilet that’s cleaned, every dress that’s ironed, every closet that’s organized, and every lesson that’s learned. And at the end of the week, we should be able to look back upon the order we have imposed on chaos and say, “It is good. It is very good.”