I use to be a huge fan of horror movies. Especially those that depicted something that could, possibly, one day come true. To me, unbelievable stuff wasn’t scary at all, but that stuff that might happen…that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
I don’t watch them anymore though. First of all, living for the Lord leaves no room for such things. Secondly, we can see at length and on any given day of the week, enough horror shorts on Facebook alone to scare the living daylights out of anyone. Of course people are becoming immune to most of it, if it’s not right in their backdoor. Stories like that, which tend to pop up every day, after awhile will leave people only shaking their heads and saying “another one?”.
It got me to thinking recently. There was this one movie I use to watch, it was another one of the many of those set in a post-apocalyptic setting with some unknown disease running rampant and tearing the world apart. Only, in this movie, the disease was rage. And it was communicable. Very contagious.
In one of the scenes, they showed a bit of how they accomplished this. They sat monkeys in front of a wall of monitors, forced their eyes open and then played and replayed scenes of war, murder, mayhem, rioting, etc., etc., etc. Until finally, the monkeys themselves were full of rage, angry and insatiable.
I can’t remember now how that wound up getting transferred into humans…I think someone got bit. Of course. But that’s not the direction I was going anyway…
I was actually thinking how like that Facebook has become. We turn it on everyday, and we sometimes spend far too much time on there anyway, and we see those same kinds of things: murders, assault, kidnapping, rape, intolerance, racism, hate, genocide, hate, hate, and more hate. There’s no way that’s not going to strike a cord with us, but it also has the potential to set loose, not a righteous anger, but an anger that causes more hate, more turmoil, more unrest. It creates within us a vengeful spirit, a desire to see justice served up swiftly and right now. And people, that’s NOT what we need.
The Bible says this: Romans 12:21 “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.”
We hear a lot of people talking about the fact that violence just leads to more violence, and that we’re going to have to band together and show some love – ACROSS THE BOARD – to see anything change. And I believe that’s true. But so far, all I’ve seen is talk. There’s a lot, and I mean a LOT that we cannot do, but above all, let’s not allow what we SEE to direct how we feel. As hard as it may be to do, let’s pray, let’s love, because it has to stop somewhere.
All Out War! 