the face of evil
A few who have posted links to this blog have noted that it's a bit graphic. I do apologize if some find it a bit much. I don't know how else to communicate this reality. it is an ugly world out there.
I've been in the U.S. for two weeks. I stopped writing for a while because it was just too depressing. Two of our women that we love very dearly, as daughters, were really going through difficult times. One, who was one of the rape victims mentioned earlier, had just about given up hope, and was seeing herself as ugly, dirty and evil, and was essentially acting out those feelings. She's now in a rehab program in Chiang Mai, and so far is doing well. The other is the one whose mom pimped her. She fell into major drug use and is now away from The Well. The next few months for her are going to be really rough.
So I'm hating evil a whole lot right now. But we have to face it. We can't build walls to keep it out--it will come find us. And when we avoid evil we inevitably avoid its victims, people such as these dear ones that out of hopelessness and ugliness fall into evil themselves, against their own desires and better judgment.
To face evil we have only to face the cross. in seeing it as the symbol of salvation we forget it also represents the worst of what people are capable of doing to each other. Jesus looked evil in the face, let it beat him down and brutally kill Him. Only after that did He stand up and laugh at it.
When we face evil it will beat us up as well. Not that anything we've done here holds a matchstick to what Jesus did. But we do feel beat up sometimes. I even thought of deleting or updating the "Better than the NBA" post I wrote a while back. Then I decided that it was a losing season, and those are bound to happen, and that's ok. We've had our opportunities to laugh as well, times when we've seen evil trampled. But even in those times we know that soon we will be facing another, sometimes uglier monster. We'd like to think that one day we'll have killed them all and can relax at the beach, enjoy a retirement. But that's not going to happen.
We're taking it pretty easy here, and will head back July 10, ready to jump back in, guns blazing. Well, maybe not like that, but I hope it's ok if we pretend just a bit.
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