To change the world, begin with yourself

People who go around smiling and happy all the time really get to me. The way I’ve got it figured, a little worry is healthy.

My friend Brenda gets after me for glooming and dooming about the mess the world’s in. I have got to make some suggestion for fixing things, she says. By golly, folks, I don’t know what to do, do you?

There’s a “be positive” ethic going around that troubles me. It’s like there’s some kind of holy responsibility to be positive about everything. I’ll be honest. I think being positive all the time is part of what’s wrong with the world.

We get so busy being positive we lose sight of the proper alarm we should feel about some of the horrors abounding about us. Oh, there’s always hope, but hope exists because there’s a need for it.

We’ve been told a lot lately by a variety of media means that the Western world is partying, mindless of our heinous and evil circumstances. We’re drunk on decadence, we’re told, thinking we’re invincible, that the day of reckoning is too far off to be bothered with.

One commentator on the social mores of Americans said we lack but one perversion which was rampant in the days of the fall of Rome. I’ll not mention this particularly disgusting thing. God forbid that I should give anybody any ideas.

I wonder if they smoked pot and jumped to acid rock.

Jesus warned us about complacency. Watch out! He said. You don’t know the hour when the Master will return.

Sometimes I sit on my front porch smoking a cigarette and I look up and see the billowing clouds in the sky. I think to myself, I could look up there a couple of minutes from now and see the Son of Man coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

I see myself quickly flicking away my cigarette and fanning the smoke. Gracious. Caught in the act. Doomed. Accountable. He’s not going to be concerned about whether I planned to do His will. He won’t be counting the times I said Lord, Lord. He’s interested in him who does the will of His Father.

Then I figure, though – nah, He’s not coming right now. So far, I’ve been right.

I’ve lived in this community for about eight years. However, not being a native, I don’t know a lot of people in the obituaries. Just the same, I skim them each day, looking at the ages. Do you do that?

Seems like a lot more people my age are in there than there used to be.

So the world’s in a mess and we’re complacent about it. But we really don’t know what to do about it anyway. There’s hope, but we’ve got these character defects we can’t seem to let go of. We’re hoping we have more time to get straightened out, but we keep seeing people our age in the obits.

All in all, there’s a yearning inside us that’s roughly akin to the old bluegrass song lyric: “Everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

Somebody said about the speed of light: “186,000 miles a second: It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.” So it is with the law governing this vapor of a life we live here: We may think it won’t end, but it will.

The problems I can fix are the ones inside me. At least I can try. I think being worried that I ought to be getting started is a good negative emotion.

God has given us a great gift. It’s called a conscience. It lets me know pretty clearly what to do. I may not be able to fix the world, but by changing me – being obedient to God’s law which He has written in my heart – at least one smidgen of a smidgen of the world will be a better place.

Lord, don’t let me be caught red-handed.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor in August of 1986