“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21)
Ah, I love today’s passage from Romans, with all its pointed little nuggets of instruction for living well. It was hard to pick just one, when they’re all so good. Seems to me you could sit and meditate on each of these verses all day long all by itself!
But I like the way this one exhorts us to action in response to evil, instead of the easier and more tempting option of pulling into our safe shells. In battle terms, it’s not telling you to simply stay on the defensive, huddle in your fortress and keep evil at bay with a few well-placed arrows. It’s telling you to sally forth on the offensive, right into the battlefield, and win back the ground that evil is taking.
Of course, using the correct weapon (“good”) is key here. There are a lot of well-meaning people who somehow get the idea that they are somehow justified in combating evil WITH evil. It starts, for example, when we’re little, thinking that slapping the little sister who took our toy is going to somehow “solve” the problem. When we’re adults, we justify: “I can make a snide/gossipy/sarcastic/hurtful remark about THAT person behind their back, because they did THIS to me!” It actually multiplies the problem instead of eradicating it, but that’s where Satan too often has us blinded and fooled.
Let’s take the challenge of this verse and not let him get by with that anymore!
P.S. See this original post for info about this photo challenge and more about this reading plan I’m using this summer for the book of Romans (and I’d love to have you join in!)!
About the photo: Look what I found while picking strawberries!
This is the story of a search for morel mushrooms.
Twice I went looking…
Twice I returned empty-handed.
But, in process of closely examining large stretches of forest floor in vain, I did make a lot of other wonderful discoveries.
Once, I sat quietly staring into a stand of fiddleheads so long, a grouse thought I’d left and started drumming his log within ten feet of me. For just a minute, I thought my heart was palpitating—until I realized that he was really just that close. Then he exploded suddenly off into the woods when I tried to shift to a spot with a better view, which is, incidentally, when my heart rate did increase.
I nearly stepped on the elaborate den of some creature (I’d like to imagine it a fox den, but it more likely belongs to far less charming skunks), and happened upon a wolf track, perfectly dried and preserved in last week’s mud.
I chanced upon a place where jack-in-the-pulpits preached in a woodland meadow to spears of blue flag leaves…
…and another where the wild plums were wreathed in clouds of frilly white.
I didn’t find what I was looking for—but I did find so much more.
It’s the best part of spring, that brief period of time when life begins to reemerge from the bare branches and brown earth. The world is exploding almost visibly with life, and I hardly dare blink lest I miss something. Everywhere I look there are buds bursting open, leaves unfolding, new scenes unfolding and an unending number of discoveries to make.
Then, there are the woodsy pilgrimages to make, traditions dating to my childhood, like going in search of the dainty lavender and white hepaticas that are so absolutely quintessential of a Minnesota spring.
And, if I’m paying attention and watching my step as I go, there is almost always something new to discover. Something unexpected, like the strange forms of emerging horsetail at the edge of a gravel country road. Or a pair of sandhill cranes, flapping their half-graceful, half-ungainly way out of the maze of last year’s cornstalks. Or a fisher bounding across a lonely, narrow, backwoods road, stopping just long enough to glance back at us curiously.
Beauty in the expected and familiar; beauty in the unexpected and unfamiliar. Truly,
Rejoicing Hills 