Everyone needs a good, wise friend

I must say that I am incredibly grateful for good, wise friends who give you a good slap in the face precisely when you need one.
I went in to meet Ron, a friend I met at a previous job, full of self-pity and what I felt was justified anger towards God and who-knows-what else that deserved it.

You try coming into a coversation with that attitude facing someone who has just come through cancer and is telling the tale of how, just after surgery, he was praising God.

I have a long way to go, but I think I have been set back on the right path. So, I don’t know that you will ever see this, but thank you, Ron. You are truly a great man, and I am honored to be counted among your friends.

Exclusion and Embrace II

“A descent into the conflict-ridden underworld of evil reveals a strange but persistent anomaly. If we listen to what its inhabitants tell us about their enemies, we are overwhelmed by the ugliness and magnitude of wickedness. If we let these same enemies talk about themselves, however, the ugliness mutates into beauty and the wickedness into innocence; the magnitude remains the same. The clashing perspectives give rise to a glaring incongruity: in a world so manifestly drenched with evil everybody is innocent in their own eyes.”

Exclusion & Embrace p. 79

From a distance, the world may appear neatly divided into guilty perpetrators and innocent victims. The closer we get, however, the more the line between the guilty and the innocent blurs and we see an intractable maze of small and large hatreds, dishonesties, manipulations, and brutalities, each reinforcing the other.

p. 81

I’ll talk about these quotes in a future post.