What single word can you think of that unites these four words?
- Katniss
- Archer
- Hunter
- Tie
A few weeks ago, when my family got together, one evening we were playing a game in a hotel lobby. The game was to determine which single word best unites a set of words – the four words above were a set I had to solve.
It was a fun game because it forced you to use all the information. Usually, you could immediately tie a few of the words together, but a few didn’t make sense. Then it clicked and the rest of the words made sense. In the above set, the first three words made you think about the Hunger Games, but multiple words apply, but how does tie fit in? Once you see it, the answer is obvious.
In one round, I stared at the words for way too long and couldn’t figure it out. I instinctively knew my guess was wrong, but I went with it anyways – I had one word that didn’t quite fit. Each word is a piece of evidence leading to the solution.
I was thinking about this concept two weeks ago when I ended my post by asking, “How can this darkness and beauty coexist?”
I wrote about the darkness last week and have addressed it many times in other posts.
- So we can’t escape the pain and destruction in the world, because we are the problem.
- We often ask the question, “How can a loving God allow all the suffering and pain in the world?” But God has simply given us what we want. We want to live apart from God and rule ourselves, so God doesn’t force us to submit to Him. But since God is the only one fit to rule, there naturally will be problems. So when we reject God, the pain and suffering of the world is inevitable.
- If we’re honest, we all have times when we care more about being right than about attaining the best outcome even if being right has serious, negative implications. This is a problem, especially when we think about The Good Place. How can we coexist in paradise for eternity if we care more about being right than about what’s best? Simply put, we can’t.
- The reality is that in our current state, we are not fit to live in the Good Place. Our happiness would only come at the expense of those around us – our selfishness would ruin everything. If we want heaven to be a reality, if we want there to be a Good Place, then we need to be fundamentally transformed.
- You and I share the same humanity with Adolf Hitler, Ted Bundy, the September 11th hijackers as well as with every child abductor, pedophile, and murderer.
We as humans are selfish, and it causes lots of pain and destruction – this is a piece of evidence we can’t ignore. There is other evidence we can’t ignore either.
The world also has incredible beauty, and humans do incredible things. We see it in the miracle of childbirth. We see it when parents of disabled children pour their lives into taking care of their child despite knowing that their child will never be able to return the favor. We see it in the technology we have invented and the cities we’ve built. (For example, I have sleep apnea so I’m frequently tired. I will hopefully undergo surgery to fix the issue and drastically improve my life. 50 years ago, this surgery didn’t exist. Apart from a miracle, I would have been stuck being tired for the rest of my life, but because of the ingenuity of humanity, we can solve these problems.)
Make no doubt about it, humans do incredible things and in life we experience incredible joy and love. This is another piece of evidence our worldview needs to address.
So again, I challenge you again to think about this question, “How can this darkness and beauty coexist?”