OVERCOMING EVIL

My heart is broken. I am so very sad, and so very angry, and so very at a loss. I so very badly want to find the words – string them together, wrap them around, bring understanding, bring healing. Those words do not exist. I am overwhelmed with feelings of disgust and grief and awe over the combination of events of this Friday. I hugged my children’s principal this morning – I wrapped my arms tight around her and I felt her heart, strong as a shield standing in front of my children. She loves my children. She would protect them. She would lose her life to protect them. I know that she would. There is something so staggeringly beautiful and sorrowful about that, I cannot do anything but weep over it. She is not a soldier; she is an Elementary School principal.

I cannot believe this is the world my children live in – where we collect assault rifles like stamps, where babies are targets, where we would consider giving guns to teachers and turning our schools into the O.K. Corral.

I cannot believe this is the world my children live in – where a mother would throw her much loved, much needed body over some other mother’s child to protect them, where women and children show such courage and nobility of spirit that I feel maybe I have seen the face of God.

What kind of a world is this that we are living in? Sometimes I think we have never been more magnificent and we have never been more insane.

There aren’t enough fingers on our hands to point at all the things to blame – guns, mental illness, sensationalist media, violent video games, broken families, absent fathers, a culture that celebrates violence and that rewards those who entertain us with it.

I believe this, with all my heart – we are all, under the right circumstances, capable of anything. With the right combination of factors, in a perfect storm, if the circumstances of our lives were different, we are all capable of anything. We are capable of murdering innocents, we are capable of becoming heroes, we are capable of saying, it’s too much to bear, it’s someone else’s child, turning our heads and putting it out of our minds.

We will never solve the problem of evil, or root out the source of the sickness that is in this world. It is inside of us.

But we have to decide, each of us for ourselves, how we are going to respond when we are confronted with it in others. What will we choose to do, when the most hideous evil imaginable touches us? Who will we choose to be when we are confronted with violence and pure insanity – when it breaks our heart, tortures our mind, lays our spirit low into the dust?

I do not believe that you can end violence with more violence. The most that you can hope to do with violence is to keep bodies alive. Violence cannot subdue or overcome the spirit, whether it is a spirit of violence or a spirit of heroism.

In my life, in my home, I have decided that the answer to pain, sorrow and injustice is to overcome evil with good. I have decided that life is sacred – sacred enough to sacrifice my life for – but that I do not love my own so much that I would take a life to preserve it. I give thanks for men and women who can, and do – who carry that burden in their jobs, to serve and to protect. I am not called to that. I need to honour them, to make their calling, their sacrifices and their courage meaningful, by using all the powers of life and freedom to overcome evil with good. To bury it alive. To drown it. To so completely overwhelm it, that the good that covers it is exponentially greater than the evil underneath it. I believe this.

We had a season in our lives where people kept stealing from us. We had bikes stolen, we had money stolen from ATM machines, we had wallets stolen out of desk drawers – over and over again, we felt the hurt of thievery. It was beyond discouraging. I started thinking a lot about how much people suck, and about how hard it is to work and work and work for something, and see somebody just come along, reach out their hand and take it. I started thinking about how much certain people needed to just get a job, and how I never wanted to give anything to anyone ever again.

The words came to me. Overcome evil with good. I decided that I would try. The next time somebody stole a bike from us, we bought another bike – and we bought a bike for somebody else who didn’t have one. In my heart I purposed that every time somebody stole from me, I would give to someone else in a greater measure, so that every single act of thievery would result in a greater giving that otherwise would not have happened. I would not just pay it forward – I would overcome it forward.

I have adopted this for my life. I make the choice that whatever injury is done to me, I will not respond with injury. I am choosing – I am trying very, very hard to choose – to respond with pouring out of myself the things that are the valorous and helpful and noble parts of my humanity. Courage. Compassion. Forgiveness. Sacrifice. Empathy. Service. Encouragement. Sharing. Redemptive grace. I will spend money to do this. I will give time to do this. I will break my own heart, if need be, to do this. I believe in this.

I am choosing to not self-preserve.  

I am choosing to believe that there are things more sacred than life, and that we sacrifice them to our own peril – to the peril of our children.

How do the mothers and fathers, the siblings or the children of the victims of Sandy Hook ever find a way to overcome evil with good? I do not know. I do not know. It is simply too great of an evil to overcome it alone. When you are broken and defeated, you just cannot.

Like hired mourners, we must do it with them and for them.

Let us dig down into ourselves to find the noblest parts of our humanity, to pull those things out of ourselves, and pour them all over our communities. Let us prove that the good that we are capable of is greater – far greater – than the evil that we are capable of.

I read that somebody was going to perform twenty-eight random acts of kindness in response to the twenty-eight deaths. I think this is beautiful. I think we need to find ways to perform acts of kindness that are not only random, but focused, purposeful, deliberate, pre-meditated, costly. Let us kindle our anger, and keep it kindled, so that we do not slide into resignation. Let us actively and purposefully move ourselves towards change.

As Ghandi lived and taught to us, We must be the change we want to see in the world. 

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.  Romans 12:21