Resisting Evil: part two.

“Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” – MLK

All too often I find myself looking at the world through extremes. Polar sides of the spectrum. What some smart people call reducing things down to their lowest common denominator. Or binary reductions.

If I’m not careful, things for me can quickly become sacred OR secular, spiritual OR non-spiritual. I think alot of this has to do with our basic categories for heaven and hell as they relate to an after-life. I probably shouldn’t get into all of that now, but for the most part I think this view tends to put a very high focus on looking inward at ourselves at the expense of looking outwards towards other. It’s what Dallas Willard calls “sin management”. We spend so much time trying to manage sin, get “better”, and get closer to “perfection” that I think we miss things outside of us.

In other words, we get so concerned with becoming “good” individually that we forget that we should be just as concerned with the world become “good” globally. Or we’re so concerned with resisting “evil things” in our own life that we forget about the “evil things” in the world globally. Much more could be said about this dynamic of the individual and the community and how we’re influenced by capitalist and democratic societies, in contrast to the community of God in the Old and New Testaments . . . but I probably shouldn’t get into that either right now.

My point is that I am having to almost force myself out of these types of polarizations. I’m being forced to realize that my faith is not my faith, but my faith is our faith. My world is not my world, but our world. And vice versa. A young boy enlisted into the army in Uganda is as much my problem as it his. A young girl sold into the sex slave in Thailand is as much my problem as it is her.

This gets really, really difficult for me because it takes very little for me to block everyone else out. I mean I have trouble just being nice to the people I like. I drown out the world with entertainment. Spending money on things I don’t need. Staying busy. Talking myself in circles. Paying the bills. It’s all rather silly from a stilled perspective on a random day like today. But it will probably be lost again in 45 minutes or tomorrow or the next. That’s part of the problem of our Western situation. But again . . . I probably shouldn’t go into that right now.

Read this by Ariah Fine.

Then forget about it like I will more than likely do in a few minutes.

God have mercy on me your crippled saint. God have mercy on us for we are sick. God have mercy on me for I am the one shattered. God hae mercy on us for we are one. God have mercy on me for I am detached as no one.

Tags: Ariah Fine, Global