The evil in me

The news from Afghanistan is tragic and distressing. For years we, the West, has pronounced that there is a better way to live and we have tried to help a country find it’s way to a different way of being a nation. Some of that has been for the very best reasons: we really believe there is a better way to live and treat people. Some of that has been for selfish reasons: a stable nation that doesn’t hate us is better for us! Whatever the reasons, we have now decided it is time to withdraw a military presence. It has cost many lives on all sides. It is tragic and distressing. What was supposed to bring change seems to have failed, for now the very regime we had hoped to silence, is back in power with a vengeance. Many more lives are at stake. Some, according to the British Foreign Minister, will not be able to get out in time to save tier lives. When I reflect on it I am truly at a loss as to what to think. I am not directly responsible for what is happening. I am not the cause of the trouble. I am not responsible for the tragedy the Taliban seem set on reaping on those who do not hold their beliefs or values. I can look at them and think they are evil. And, maybe there is truth in that. I can look at them and think I am not capable of anything like what they appear to be responsible for. But, I am reminded of a story I read about a man who had been a prisoner of war in a German concentration camp in World .War II. After the war, at the trial of a man who had been an officer in the camp, the man fainted when his oppressor was brought into the court. Everyone assumed he had fainted because seeing him triggered traumatic memories. But he later explained that when he saw the former concentration camp officer looking dishevelled and untidy being brought into the court, he realised how he was just a human being like himself. And that if one man, in many ways just like himself, was capable of such cruelty and hate, he realised how he too, might be capable of the very same thing. It is an extraordinary challenge to people like me, who might choose to believe only others are capable of evil and that there is no evil in me. It might even cause me to think about how my heart really is. Jeremiah 17:9 shouts at us: “The heart is the most deceitful of all things and desperately wicked. Who knows how bad it is?” (NLT) I have no desire to excuse the evil of others. But I might do well, in such tragic times, to examine my onw heart and ask some hard questions. How’s you heart?