Good In Even The Worst Of Us
Wednesday of the Third Week of Easter
My dear encountered couples:
There is good in everyone. Or at least we should keep ourselves open to the possibility that there is good in everyone. We are told in the Acts of the Apostles that after Stephen, the first martyr, was stoned to death, “Saul began to harass the church. He entered house after house, dragged men and women out, and threw them into jail.”
You know who Saul was. The man who became Paul, the most renowned evangelist and spreader of the faith in the early church, the one who composed all those epistles we read so often. If God had written Saul off as a man who was lost to the devil, we would never have had Paul.
But God saw good in him, great good that I feel sure was invisible to most everyone else. Did even any of the apostles suspect Saul might become one of the greatest saints of the Church? I can’t speak for them, but I doubt very much that they did. They probably saw him as one of the greatest threats to themselves and to the teachings of Christ.
The fact that Saul became Paul, the greatest evangelist for Christ during the 1st century of the Church should awaken us to the possibility that people we might think are devils can someday become brothers and sisters of Christ. If Saul who spread fear and threw the first Christians into prison had good hidden deep inside him, so can people who are now thorns in your side.
Pray for their goodness to come forth. Help it to come forth by your showing your goodness and patience to them. Not easy, I know. But we are God’s people, and one of the things God wants us to do is: Stay open to the possibility of good in even the worst of us!
