But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for He is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.
I really don’t know why I bother to read the newspaper. Column after column of rather dismal news. Daily detailing of both the ungrateful and the evil. (Yikes, ungrateful and evil are given equal weight here, both as requiring God’s mercy... both far from the mark of goodness.) Newsweek and The New York Times at least give a shade of perspective and the big sweep in history to their articles, a tiny sense that God is on the move. Not so the local news, mundane in all of its horrors- mothers shooting their toddlers and then setting the trailer on fire, so-and-so sentenced to six years in prison for child abuse or for smashing some hapless soul’s trust and absconding with their life savings, an apartment fire set by a lazy cigarette or even the announcement of road improvement on Grant that we all know is going to turn from weeks into months of flashing lights and backed up traffic. Not a drop of glory anywhere to be tasted.
Yet part of being the sons of the Most High is being aware. And the daily news makes me aware at some small level, much more so than if I simply trundled up and down Speedway listening to praise songs. May the LORD turn this awareness into tenderness and lovingkindness. Lovingkindness was a word Myles Coverdale had to make up when he was translating the Psalms, because it didn’t exist in the English language. It doesn’t exist outside of God. Who is kind to the ungrateful (me) and the evil alike. And may I offer up His mercy, cupful after cupful, to the thirsty whom I encounter today.
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