For I endure scorn for your sake, and shame covers my face. -Psalm 69:7, NIV
A kid beside us smiles. An old woman kisses us in the forehead. Nothing.
It looks like nothing can take the pain away. Gush it over McDonalds. Play really stupid games with your really stupid friends (and unceremoniously admit so). Get a whip and start bashing each other’s heads.
You wouldn’t do that, wouldn’t you? Or...so I thought.
We don’t use whips anymore-unless we distastefully wish to make a career out of being a dominatrix. We don’t punish with chains, or rocks, or horrid and painful trampling horses. Those horrors seem so far away, so distant for us…at least for those who have read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. Seriously: we’re so civilized that when we look at these things happening in countries today, we scoff and change the channel in full-blown scorn. They’re the brutes, they’re the barbarians.
But what about us? We were born to be brutes and barbarians, uncivilized and stubborn jerks that leave a legacy of horrors and pain wherever we touch. Everything we touch turns to destruction-and then to dust. And before it turns to dust, we wreak shameless havoc. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Shameless.
How much damage can we puny humans do! Even Paul was exasperated in his exasperation; his heart was ready and willing, but his flesh wanted to sin. “What a wretched man I am!”, he said to the Romans. Think for a moment: have we spit on other’s hopes and dreams? How much have we collaborated with demons to destroy? Even more: how has this planet lasted long enough!?!?
But it makes no sense: with all the damage we have done to some, how can God still smile above?