Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Our boorish neighbors often leave their dirty towels on the fence that separates our property from the one they are renting. Many times, with help from a gust of wind, they fall into our yard.

“What happened to the towel?” Christina asks me.

“I put it back on the fence.”

“I throw them away.” She tells me with a malicious grin on her face. Her eyes dance and burn with an evil flame. For some reason that scares me this morning. I’m not scared of her, just scared of the parasite that’s claimed her. Christina is not an evil person, but evil has a way of shifting from action to action. Would that gleam fill her eye if our neighbors were more considerate instead of the selfish people they present to the world?

I realize that wars exist because of this very same principle. One side adopts that which they ultimately oppose on the other side. They act out of fear or hate or anger. The actions do not exist within the person initially. The evil within the actions of others jumps from their lives into our own, and then we act in a similar fashion not realizing what we have become. We justify it in many different ways. Their wrong makes our wrongs right. In order to save ourselves from evil we must crush it, destroy it, wipe it off the face of the earth! Unfortunately it can never be destroyed if we act with malice. Crushing and destroying others, no matter how bad they are, is just as horrible because they have lasting negative effects on others. It’s like a virus that cannot be removed from the tainted heart. We’ve become a very sick race of beings.

The reason I was scared when I saw that look in Christina’s eye was because there have been times when I did the exact same thing for the exact same reason. I’ve thrown their towels away when I found them amongst the weeds on our side of the fence and I know that I did it with the same disgust boiling the blood in my body, with a blaze burning in my eye. It scared me because I did it all with a song of righteousness in my heart and had no idea that it was simply the laugh of the devil in disguise.

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