Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Not to just say but we must do!

I read this in an article today. The article was written by a friend named Shane Claiborne. He talked about how he was confronted with a situation were he and another boy were being assaulted by a group of eight boys. The account went like this, it started with them being verbally abused by this mob and here is the actions they took,

"It's always hard on the spot like that to know exactly what Jesus would do. I told Cassim, "Let's go say hi." He looked at me skeptically. We turned back and walked towards them (knowing full well that if we had run we may have made it to the post office). "Hey, I'm Shane. And this is my friend Cassim. We live around the corner," I said with my hand out. They weren't really sure what to do with that. A couple of them shook my hand and introduced themselves. Others snickered. One or two refused the handshake. We said, "Nice to meet you guys," and headed on our walk.

With the wind taken out of their sail a bit, they regrouped, and then continued to build momentum towards a violent brawl. They ran after us, throwing some rocks and bottles, and I noticed two of them now carried a couple of broomsticks from the trash. We picked up the pace a bit, and then I looked at Cassim and said, "No, don't run." We turned back, and before we knew it, one of them clocked Cassim on the side of the head with a stick. I said firmly, "Why would you do that? We haven't done anything to hurt you." They laughed. Then they started hitting me with the broomstick until it broke over my back. At this point I decided to bust out a can of holy anger. I looked them in the eyes and said as forcefully as I could, "You are created in the image of God ... every single one of you. And you were made for something better than this. and I are followers of Jesus and we do not fight, but we will love you no matter what you do to us." That wasn't exactly what they expected or hoped for. They looked at each other, startled a bit ... for the first time, they were completely quiet. And then they scurried off in every direction."


I look at this and it makes me think "what if we put into action what we know God wants us to do?" This is something I know would make huge differences in all of us as well as those around us. So maybe we need to look at doing what we know. I know if you are like me, when you read what shane did you think, man that is a fairy tale ending and that would not happen to me if that is what I did. Which then begs this question that hit me as I sat there and thought this, "are we not then saying God can't do it for me?" Are we not then ultimately questioning what God can do for us? WOW! Not a nice way to look at that thought huh?
So then the only answer I can come up with right now is to just do what I know God wants me to do and leave what happens up to who ultimately has the control anyway.





GOD!!!



I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.

- Martin Luther King Jr., in " A Time to Break the Silence," delivered April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church, New York City.

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