Last evening I was fortunate to be able to enjoy dinner with my colleagues Dave McEntire and Lee Newsome. At dinner we got to talking about folks who do really awful things to other folks – things like sexual assault, emotional abuse, injuries, and death. Sometimes the folks who do these things look, on the surface, to be just like you or me. You often hear folks say after-the-fact, “Gee, he seemed ‘normal’…I would have never guessed he would do something like this.”
We have an expectation of what evil will look like. We expect to be able to know it when we see it. Unfortunately, many a wolf arrives in sheep’s clothing and we are oblivious to the evil within. So these evil folks live amongst us – they work where we work, they shop where we shop, they worship where we worship – they appear to live the same life as we do and have the same general goals we do. But they don’t. They have darker agendas, agendas that regular folks cannot understand…agendas that result in other people being hurt.
I worry for our world when evil lives amongst us undetected. Who can you trust? How do you teach your children to live in such a world? Do you change the way you view others? Or do you just believe that most people are good and hope that you never have to experience anything different?
We live in a perilous world where evil can be hidden behind trusted family members and advisors. Evil doesn’t always announce it’s presence with a dark hat or sinister grin. Evil can cloak and ingratiate itself into the lives of regular folks.
Be careful out there folks – trust within reason, but remain tuned-in for signs that a wolf may be nearby. Maintain a healthy fear of the big bad wolf.
Day one thousand one hundred and thirty-five of the new forty – obla di obla da
Ms. C
