Rumours of Grace: The magic of doing good

Last night I attended an event at a nearby church where I expected to see a number of friends and colleagues. One of them was missing and I shortly discovered that Paul had been recovering from a concussion for a year and a half. Ever since falling backwards on ice and hitting his head he has been able to do little. Phone calls and screen time are still out, it takes little mental activity for a severe headache to set in and he will not be driving again for some time.

As if that was not enough, Paul’s wife, Susan, is only lately feeling somewhat recovered from a concussion of her own. Up to the point of his injury, he had been helping her recover; now those roles are reversed.

Paul and Susan would rate in the books as good people. Paul himself has been serving his church as its minister and he reached out to the people in the community around him, he is a caring husband and a good dad as well.

Why do bad things happen to good people? This is a question people often ask.

It is true that bad things do happen to good people; however, there is a larger phenomenon that we can keep in mind: good things happen to good people.

In our world if we do bad, it is likely that more bad will result. Getting high or drunk, not showing up on time for work, lashing out at family members, cheating, immersing ourselves in entertainments that are dripping with profanity, gossip, stupidity and moral carelessness are tickets to more of the same. Ditto for any attempts to take revenge on people, or to talk down about them behind their backs.

On the other hand, when we do nice things, the result is usually better. We all believe this; if we didn’t, we would not bother with classes. We believe that course work and education are good and that they will lead to even more good as life continues. The same belief operates in families where parents work hard to model “good” and to teach “good” to their kids. If we didn’t believe that generally more “good” would result from this “good” (and hard) work of parenting, we wouldn’t do it.

The vision for life that emerges in the Christian Bible is greatly responsible for giving our society the sense that it is worthwhile pursuing good. There are many parts of this collection of documents that could be mentioned here. I’ll comment about just one of them: it is the Book of Proverbs.

Proverbs is a collection of collections of “wise sayings”. Their intent is to help young people understand life; it is an old collection from the Middle Eastern world and therefore is filled with illustrations and anecdotes that related directly to the people of that time and place; however, it keeps ringing true.

As it turns out, both the opportunities and the traps that lay before young people in that setting are remarkably similar to the ones we find today: opportunities to work hard, to live with integrity, to be truthful, to build friendships and the traps of laziness.

The whole document is founded on one key idea: in God’s world, when we do evil we are most likely going to reap a lot of it. The flip side of this is when we do good, more good is almost certainly bound to happen, it’s like magic. If you want good, do good and then you can relax a little. Life is likely to work for you. It’s kind of simple really. Though hard at times, doing good is worth trying.

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