BitterSweetLife

Amber Alerts & Human Psyches

As I drove down I-35 this morning, en route to my first graduate-level exam, a message lit up on Kansas City’s new Driver Alert system. The steel-framed electronic screen, mounted over the highway, was finally in use. Suddenly I was viewing my first live “Amber Alert”—breaking news of an abducted child.

The sinister message was surreal. The sun was shining. My CD player was jamming. Newly caffeinated, I was psyched for the approaching academic skirmish: my mind versus my professor’s. And then, Amber Alert. Somewhere in the city, a twisted person had taken someone’s child.

Really, it’s hard to imagine a more damnable atrocity. Theft, deception, lust, all intertwined, and at the cost of one who is truly helpless. I thought, It’s a cool, sunny morning, blue sky, cumulous clouds, light traffic…and evil waits just around the corner. Why?

Most of the time we don’t get past the trauma of it. We shake our heads, our stomachs reel, and we question no further. Wickedness, this profound moral sickness, shocks us. In the words of journalist Hannah Arendt, “the fearsome, word and thought-defying banality of evil” is wrenching. And yet it lurks so close by, perhaps on the same city block. Perhaps around the corner of a soul. Why?

The mystery of evil. May I suggest that this is a question we cannot answer without divine assistance? Consider a much older source: “If you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it.” (Genesis 4:7) Sin. Societal pressures and environmental influences can’t explain it. Family dysfunction doesn’t sum it up. Apart from God’s explanation, the breathtaking complexity—and casual regularity—of evil remains a mystery.

Even more so when honest self-examination shows us the threads and splinters of evil in our own thoughts: Envy, anger, “little” deceptions, lust—who’s to say just how insidious these impulses might become, given time and room to move… This is a grim picture. But fortunately, evil is not the only element that lingers nearby:

“He himself gives life to all things…that they might seek God, if perhaps they might feel after him and find him, thought he is not far from each one of us.” - Acts 17:27

Evil and Christ, diametrically opposed, wait at your elbow. At the end of the day, you’ll have found one or the other.