I do believe that we, you and me, used to scream at God for allowing starving children to die, untill we realized that in starving children God was actually screaming at you and me. This is what happened when Jesus loudly spoke something about the final judgement. To the righteous person the King will say, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father. … I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was stranger and you received me in your homes, naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you took care of me. … I tell you, whenever you did this for one of the least important of these followers of mine, you did it for me.”
… that there is no fear in love,
but that perfect love casts out fear ….
Yet when men are ruled by fear,
they strive to prevent the very changes that will abate it.
Fear of change is, no doubt, in all of us,
but it most afficts the man who fears that any change
will lead to loss of his wealth and status.
When this fear becomes inordinate,
he will, if he has political power,
abrogate such things as
civil right and the rule of law, using the argument
that he abrogates them only to preserve them.
Life has taught me …. that active loving saves one
from a morbid preoccupation
with a shortcomings of society and the waywardness of men.
Life has not taught me …. to expect nothing,
but she has taught me not to expect success
to be the invitable result of my endeavours.
She has taught me to seek
sustenance from the endeavour itself,
but to leave the result to God.
To try to be self-deception, to try to see
with clear eyes oneself ang others and the world,
does not necessarily bring an undiluted kind of happiness.
Yet it is something I would not exchange
for any happiness built on any other foundation.
There is only one way in which
one can endure man’s inhumanity to man
and that is to try in one’s own life
to exemplify man’s humanity to man.
(rewritten by Januarius W, from Alan Paton).