Points for discussion

Today’s quotes from our quote guy at work (yeah, they are usually on Mondays but he posted them today with a “half-price” label – hee!) were centered around dealing with wickedness and sin (happy, I know!).

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.--Confucius

Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.--William Shakespeare

You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy.--Hebrews 1:9

Keep five yards from a carriage, ten yards from a horse, and a hundred yards from an elephant; but the distance one should keep from a
wicked man cannot be measured.--Indian Proverb

Reading these thoughts about wickedness gets me thinking about my own way of doing things. I try to keep my distance from the shady characters I encounter in life, and I try to surround myself with people who I think really have it together. The underlying reason for this is that I am a real sucker for peer pressure. If you are thinking “oh, that’s not true, Erin does what she wants,” well, that may be true, but if you think about the major aspects of my life, I actually do things that my friends are doing. Brian was going to Grad School so I went, too. When people were buying houses, I bought one, too. People were running marathons so I decided to do that. And so on. Knowing my own tendency to cave under pressure, it’s just better for me to pick people who live their lives the way I think is best, and to surround myself with them, because if I were hanging out with a bunch of snowboarding hippies, well, I’d be doing that instead. And I was, when those were the friends I had.

But I am torn when I think of the notion that listening to the wicked is the beginning of wickedness, or that mercy emboldens sin. If we all turn away from the wicked, then who can bring the light to them? And certainly, Jesus hung out with the sinners, and he must have listened to them at times, and he certainly showed mercy to them. So, where does one draw the line?

**The hyperlinks are links to Stuff White People Like. Featured post coming up tomorrow regarding this blog, even though Heidi stole my idea for this and beat me to posting it while I was busy actually doing the SWPL.