fighting evil

(I posted the thoughts below on Tuesday to Grace Announcements.)

Yesterday I was confronted with two kinds of evil. First, there was the horrendous news of the bombing in Boston. Then last night, I saw the insidious world of human trafficking exposed in the movie, "Not Today". My heart responded to both with the same question: what can I do?

Much of the damage and injury inflicted by the bombing were easily seen in the news footage and photos that have been coming out of Boston. People's lives were forever changed by losing loved ones or being physically harmed. And the movie helped to bring to light a world of suffering that could go unnoticed because of a lack of media attention. But the suffering is there and is affecting 23 million people in our world. We naturally want to do something to alleviate the suffering once it's brought to our attention.

The first responders in Boston were able to do something that at times could be recorded on video. Their actions were often heroic and life-saving. But what can the rest of us do? And the movie followed the fictionalized response of a college student who travels to India on a whim. But what if we're not in India?

As I'm writing this, construction workers are making a racket as they repair the church buildings. Earlier today, we started our staff meeting as usual with a time of contemplative prayer and reflection on God's Word. But our time of prayer was punctuated by the whine of power saws and sanders. It seemed an apt metaphor to me for the times that we live in: we are trying to do "God's work" but it keeps butting up against the chaos of the world we live in.

Christians are called to live in the chaotic place between God's kingdom and the current kingdom of this world. The places that need God's grace the most are the ones that are the most annoying, bothersome or even dangerous because they are so broken. But those are the places where we, as messengers of grace, are most needed. What are we supposed to do there?

We are enamored of heroic, life-saving actions and may even secretly envy those who are applauded for such actions, partly because they get to actually DO something. But most of us are called to do things that may never get the limelight.

When we were in Thailand, Joe told us that there are three ways to fight human trafficking. The work that ZOE does is mostly the rehabilitation of kids that have been rescued out of trafficking. It's courageous work that requires perseverance but it's not as glamorous as the intervention work done by the rescue teams that actually pluck kids out of trafficking situations. Still, there are the rewards of seeing a child who was brainwashed by traffickers begin to live in freedom and joy, in the knowledge that s/he is loved unconditionally.

But the work that receives the least acknowledgement is the work of prevention. This is the work that Bob Shim is directly involved in as he serves with the Sustainable Development Research Foundation. By raising the standard of living in villages that have relied on subsistence farming, people are brought out of desperate poverty and are less likely to listen to the lies of traffickers who tell them that their child will have a better life if the parent gives the child to the trafficker. This preventive work is hard. It can mean years of trying to figure out how to get a whole village to change its ways of farming, ways that have been handed down generation to generation for centuries. And those years are often frustrating and unheralded.

And that is the kind of work that most of us are called to do. We are not "first responders" to crisis but prevention workers who are called to fight covert and everyday evil. We are called to live lives that counter the gospel of wealth, or achievement, or education, or anything else that offers salvation without God. Our work is the daily grind of living out the life of God's kingdom in this world, without appreciation or even with opposition as we try to figure out ways to bring the needed message and live our own lives amid the chaos, lives that may be chaotic enough with all the pressures of school and work and extended family, not to mention life in the church community.

So what can we do? We can ground ourselves in God's Word and live in the Spirit. We can live as though people are more important than things. We can greet everyone we meet with peace. We can talk to God about people and then take the opportunities he gives us to talk to people about God. We can look for the ways that God is active around us and then cooperate with that work. It may not be the flashiest or most photogenic work. It may be mundane and unrecognized work. But if we are following Christ then that work is good enough because it is what God has given us to do.