“just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”
2 Peter 3:15-16
A cymbal could be a metaphor for life. Are you clanging?
When Christ sees a homosexual, a baby with down syndrome, a benefit fraudster and me…
…he doesn’t see another. He sees a brother.
In the past, I could almost convince myself that the human race is basically bad (with a rare out-of-sorts capability of being good), but I was driving along yesterday and lightning struck my brain. It gave me a nice tingling sensation.
I realised we’re all good people.
Take away our circumstances as well as everyone we know, and we’ve removed the two biggest things that can turn us from good, well-meaning people into not-so-good people. [Note: Our circumstances shape who we become, and therefore affect everything we do, in a positive or negative way, or in both a positive and negative way at different moments]
The riots last year were a prime example of people who were influenced both by their personal circumstance and by their peers. There was never going to be someone looting and jovially setting London ablaze on their own.
Do we lie, cheat and steal because others empower us to do so? I remember a common phrase that was thrown out between friends at school was, “Oh, he’s alright when he’s on his own, but when he’s with the others he’s a [insert word here]”
On the flipside, it’s kind of rewarding to see someone go into Greggs and buy 2 sausage rolls only to give them to the homeless man sitting outside. Giving a couple of light savoury-based snacks to someone I don’t even know wouldn’t have even come into my head before that.
I’m an impressionable creature.
If your memory was erased,
would the first thing you do be a good thing or a bad thing?
