I’ve often read this and wondered how and where this has ever occurred. I have seen the meek steamrolled, taken advantage of, anything but inheriting the earth. Quite frankly it’s rather maddening and puts the lines between your eyes on a pensive evening at home alone.
Last year after the Nickel Mines shooting was publicized worldwide. I saw a little bit of how “the meek inherits the earth” might be true. I remember being in the check-out line at the local gas station, a dirty unkempt corner between downtown, the interstate and my neighborhood. My eyes scanned the magazine rack and I stopped in my tracks. There on the cover of People were my people. What were they doing on there? I felt the shock run through my body. It would have been just as shocking to see my mother’s face on there—a place reserved for the faces of vanity of the most worldly sort. But it wasn’t even their faces depicted there. It was the backs of two teen girls walking together across a field.
It makes one wonder, why where the laws of the universe altered for this moment.
Since the incident, “the meek inherit the earth has become even more evident, at least from what is reported in the silent almost hidden stories. Atheism turned into hope for faith for one in the global audience. Read the article here. Among others in the audience were an Iranian delegation and leaders from the World Council of Churches. That is just crazy to the little Beachy girl inside me, who is accustomed to being forgotten and ignored by the world.
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I have been spending a lot of time in 1 Peter recently. I find it the most dislocating of all the NT epistles. Peter writes,
9But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
11Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. 12Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
The world sees the good deeds (the forgiveness) and will glorify God. I think you're right to say you say a little bit of what that inheritance will look like observing the world's response to the Amish community's forgiveness.
I like to think that I would be able to react that well that quickly... but I don't know. Perhaps I buy too much into that "vent your anger, work towards forgiveness" idea you confront above.
It is a hard habit to break.
I hear you Dan. And I appreciate your comments. I do find your musings on DNA dispositions which contribute to response actions, intriguing back on your blog. I'm sure it factors in in significant ways. But I am like those who downplay the role of DNA quite a lot, for other reasons. My undergraduate was in the sciences and I noticed the scientific community's fixation on materialism. I was always drawn to the evidence that pointed beyond scientific laws.
One study was interesting. Scientists came to study a lion population in the remote Antarctic. There was already a fringe scientist present, who predicted that the lion population in the region would turn violent according to the expectation of the incoming group, despite the fact that the lions had never harmed a human yet. It was a very distinct case of the observer changing the observed.
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