Romancing Evil

I recently read the book Christy, by Catherine Marshall. It is one of my favorites. The heroine is a young women during the turn of the 20th century who leaves her well to do home in the big city to teach, in a rural, Appalachian town. She moves to the town, trekking seven miles through deep snow and unseen roads only to find an impoverished people group with harsh customs and mean words. Her Anne of Green Gables "romantical" expectation is completely slashed open as she discovers the world to be nothing as she imagined.

Christy and I are kindred spirits. We both have "fits of passion" and can "come on too strong." We judge quickly, we care deeply, and our hearts are easily broken. Oh, and Alice Henderson is our hero. Near the beginning of her story, Christy's "mentor" Alice Henderson speaks hard words into her life. And they have found a way to leak off the page and into my heart as well ...

     "You see Christy, evil is real - and powerful. It has to be fought, not explained away, not fled.               And God is against evil all the way. So each of us has to decide where we stand, how we're going to live our lives. We can try to persuade ourselves and wink at evil. We can say that it isn't so bad after all, maybe even try to call it fun by clothing it in silks and velvets. We can compromise with it, keep quiet about it and say it's none of our business. Or we can work on God's side, listen for His orders on strategy against the evil, no matter how horrible it is, and know that He can transform it."

Christy, of course, choose to stay in the mountains and face evil. She choose to work on God's side and listen for His orders on strategy against evil. No matter how horrible it was. No matter the ugliness and the disparity and the cruelty.

I, like Christy, grew up in a beautiful home. Safe from the world and ignorant to many of it's evils. Over the past eight years, I have traveled the world, experiencing pain and desperation and ugliness and some of the worst of evils. I can not un-see what I have seen. I can not un-know what I now know. The world is evil, and it will continue in this until the King returns to call us home. There are days I dream of running from it all, to an island away from it all... but even there I would not be able to escape what I have seen and what I know.

We are in this evil world, and we are to be shining beacons of light. Until the father calls us home to that perfected forever.