Right and wrong, good and evil, yes and no; which path to take or which decision to make?
What would Jesus do? And what prompted this question?
The phrase itself has been around a relatively short time. Young people began using it among themselves, perhaps in response to questions they had within and to which they were unable to find suitable answers. It seems that in our world today we have more questions than answers, especially when it comes to choosing the correct path to walk or the proper action to take - when it comes to making a choice between good and evil.
Good and evil, living together in harmony in our world. Opposites, like North and South on the points of a compass, one hundred and eighty degrees one from the other. Black and white, darkness and light, we can't have one without the other.
We accept the fact, then, that evil does exist, just as goodness does. And, we probably all agree that evil is wrong and good is right. We may go so far as to say that evil is dark and goodness is light. It's here. It's all around us. How do we deal with it?
It would be nice if we could just flip a switch to the off position and evil would disappear. A computer program designed to detect evil and to make choices for us would certainly be nice. Anything that would make it easy to detect evil and to thwart the negative impact that making poor choices may have would be, well, a blessing.
It's not that easy, though, and we must learn to deal with evil on an individual basis. What does this mean? It means that there as many different ways to deal with evil as there are people in the world. Each of us has learned how to deal (or not deal) with evil in our own way.
How we deal with choosing between right and wrong, good and evil, is in part based upon our morals and our upbringing. We learn early in life the difference between good and evil and right and wrong and we are taught what choices we should make. The learning that we make comes from what we see and hear, from what we experience in life. It is not necessarily the result of formal teaching.
Making the right choice, though, is much more difficult than knowing which choice is the right choice. The problem that most of us deal with is not knowing the difference between good and evil, the difficulty lies within choosing good over evil.
Sound silly? It's not. It happens to each of us every day, more often then we realize. Visualize yourself approaching a busy intersection in a busy downtown area. You see the light turn yellow and you have plenty of time to stop. However, you know that if you stop you will more than likely be late for an important meeting. So choose, stop or speed up to go through the intersection knowing that the light will be red. Run the light knowing that others might be endangered or be late to that ever so important meeting. The choice is yours; deal with it.
You may ask yourself if running a red light is really evil. After all, people do it all the time. If you make it through the intersection safely, we call no foul, no harm. But what if someone was seriously injured or killed? Is running that red light now an evil act? It is to the family members of the victims.
What if you see someone drop a twenty dollar bill and you choose to pocket it rather than return it to the rightful owner, is that an evil act? You might not think so; it's only twenty dollars. What if it's a financial advisor who rips off his clients for millions of dollars, now is it evil? Does the dollar amount make a difference?
Many times we feel that the degree of damage done will determine whether or not the act was wrong or evil, at least in our minds. We lose sight of the black and white imagery that makes it so easy to tell the difference between right and wrong, good and evil. Many of us live within that gray area, where good and evil appear to blend one into the other and we make decisions that we later regret.
So how do we deal with the evil around us?
It's really simple. Treat others as you want to be treated. Do what you know is right, no matter how trivial the decision might seem. You may even want to ask yourself, what would Jesus do? And then do it.