Closer to the Prize at the End of the Road

On Friday, I purchased Gary Haugen's book "Good News About Injustice" at the bookstore. Haugen is a man who has seen the worst that human beings can do to each other, but instead of becoming cyncial and believing that there is no way to bring light into the darkness of this world, Haugen used his gifts as a lawyer to found the International Justice Mission in 1994. Many of you know about the work that IJM does around the world and if you do not, visit their website at www.ijm.org.

Haugen has sifted through mass Tutsi graves in Rwanda with the United Nations genocide investigation, and he has stood up to police brutality against children in South Africa. He is a man who has come to learn what it is to live courageously. In the preface of "Good News About Injustice", Haugen says that courage is the one gift that he would give to his children as they go out into the world. He uses a section of "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis to illustrate his point.

Lewis wrote "Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky."

Life is full of these choices each and every day. Sometimes the decisions are placed before me in broad detail and I have plenty of time to decide, but sometimes the decisions are made by my character. When I do not have enough time to really think through something, I go with my instinct. The key is forming myself into the kind of person who makes the instinctive decisions that are bold and Christ-like because that is who I am at the core of my being. This process is often painful because the closer you get to an area, the more you are aware of the pain and shame that exists there, but it is worthwhile to endure the momentary pain and refining in order to become someone that looks increasingly like Jesus Christ.