Devotional Thoughts: Overcoming Evil

I learned years ago that when I counteract evil with evil everything escalates. It’s takes a strong person to stop this process. There was a girl who seemed to hate me in high school. I’d never had a conversation with her but I heard she was saying some terrible things about me. She rode the bus with me. I sat towards the front and would always turn around to talk to my friend. I exited the bus one day and when she walked past me she cussed at me saying I was looking at her. I said nothing.

I started praying for her. What’s she suffered in life to make her pick a random person to target with her anger?

A few days later our bus was late in the afternoon so we were all standing around waiting. She approached me saying she was going to hit me (this was said in a much more aggressive way than that). I told her if she hit me I wouldn’t hit her back. I said, “I’m a Christian and I believe God loves you.” She looked at me shocked and just walked away. My brother was there and told me later that if she hit me he was ready to hit her! It wasn’t in my brother’s nature to hit a girl!

Evil will escalate until we confront it with good. We can only do this with God’s strength. God loves that angry person. They’re hurting. Something John Rogers, my former boss, used to say is, “hurting people hurt people.”