Reality Bites

Life lesson number one, “life isn’t fair” is followed closely by life lesson number two, “people aren’t good--and neither am a I”.

This isn’t just cynicism or the result of a bad morning without caffein. This is unfortunately Reality 101 and I was reminded today how few of us “get it” and how badly we need to.
When Americans recently read a CNN story about a newly-discovered atrocity of Nazi war crimes committed against American GI prisoners, what struck me about readers’ responses was not that they were angry, outraged or even tearful but that they were surprisingly surprised. And I have to ask, “why?”.

When in all of human history has humanity ever behaved itself? Have I missed something or was there ever a time we were “good”? Do my fellow readers somehow manage to gloss over the near-daily headlines of ongoing genocide in some African-country-or-another? Do they somehow miss the murderous oppression of another third-world psycho-regime or do brutalities of person against person in our own backyards somehow escape their notice?

Yet my well-meaning fellow readers typed words of incredulity and passed swift judgment that the “guilty” be located and killed on the spot. It is easy to condemn “the monsters” and “those bastards” because their crimes seem so much greater than our own. We simply don’t see that in the bigger picture “they” are also “us” and more importantly, “me”. Instead, we ask silly questions like “how can this happen? rather than asking ourselves why we still let this happen.

Maybe it’s because we cling to that Pollyanna-Wish-Think that we are all good at heart. And as long as we tell ourselves this is so, we cannot prepare ourselves for such shocking realities of Evil and we deny ourselves the intellectual honesty required to admit that we are just as bad.

Yes, I said the unthinkable. “We are just as bad.” Because whether our actions lead to the killing of another human being or whether our inaction leads to the permission of another to do so, it all points to the same reality that we are all broken. We all have told lies. We all have hated another human being. We all have thought more highly of ourselves than we deserve to justify our white lies or our big ones. And some have killed and others have looked away. In the end, we are all broken.

But here is my solace and here is my hope. Apparently our brokeness comes as no surprise to the One who made us. In Romans we read “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” which is also another way of saying “All of you are screwed up and can’t come even close to the perfection that is required to live in God’s paradise home” (my version).

So what can we do about it? The good news is we do nothing. We can’t.

Let’s face it, if we could do something, wars would have ended long ago, Green Peace would be out of a job and I would no longer lie about my weight. But what we can do is admit that we are broken to the One who has known it all along. Then we let God do for us what we can never do for ourselves. He has planned from the beginning to fix what was broken and to usher us into a world that will not disappoint.

An atheist C.S. Lewis reluctantly turned toward Christ when he realized a simple truth: when we long for something, it is because the object we long for is Real. When we are hungry, it means there must be something Real to satisfy that hunger: food. When we are lonely, there must be something Real to quench it: love. And when we long for a perfect world, it must be because there really is one waiting for us. And it is.

So life isn’t fair and we aren’t as good as we’d like to be. Reality bites--for now. But with Christ, in the end, it won’t. Maybe that’s actually Life Lesson number one.