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.