It can hit anywhere–on a sunny, blue day with birds chirping, flowers blooming, friends laughing, or a day with deep thunder and bright lightening. Without warning, I’m overcome by the evilness in this world.
It’s not so much about anything personal, nothing done to me.
Then again, it’s always personal, this evilness in the world.
I imagine the children who never got to be children, the dancers who were maimed, the architects whose hands were cut off. Did they ever know that they were children and dancers and architects? I look at my nieces and nephew and wonder who will protect them.
With Job, I cry, Why? With Habbakuk, I cry, How long?
Christus Victor, the early church father’s said while staring the lions in the mouth and hanging upside-down on crosses. Christ is victor over the evil that held us hostage. For the hope set before us, said the author of Hebrews.
And I realize that this is the heart of the book I recently began writing–what do you do with all this evilness in the world when you fight and you fight and you fight, and people still take lives and exploit the weak and crush the innocent.
It begins in a restored relationship with God, but it doesn’t stop there. That restored relationship spills out into restored relationships with other humans and with the earth. Only in Christ do we discover what it means to be fully human. Only in Christ do we defeat the power of death and evil in our lives and on earth. As we join in Christ’s death, so we join in His victory.
