I was watching the first “Iron Man”
movie earlier today. It was just at the scene where the Taliban
look-a-likes were about to start shooting innocent men while they
rounded up the women and children when Iron Man shows up and starts
taking out bad guys. Then the question popped into my head, “well,
what would YOU do in that situation?” (yes, like I would ever be in
that situation) “Would YOU, professing turn the other cheek and
non-violence, just let them kill and rape while expressing peaceful
platitudes of non-violence?” It's a question that demands a
response, and it's geared in such a way that it must be answered
either yes or no. Then some paraphrase of the Scripture pops into my
head saying “if you can do something about it and you don't do it,
you sin.” It wasn't the exact form of the Scripture, but it might
have been close enough.
I was conflicted and I wrestled with
it. As I was wrestling with it, I realized, that was the temptation.
The temptation was to say, “Yes, if I was in the situation, I would
do this,” or “no, if I was in that situation I wouldn't do that.”
The temptation was to do, or plan to do, something myself; to be
ready to give a response from myself.
Living most of my life with Asperger's,
whether I was aware of what it was or not, I did a fair amount of
role-playing or acting out any given social situation in my head. I
relied heavily on this so that when I came into that situation I
would know what the correct response to give would be. I wasn't able
to react with natural emotions, facial expressions, or body language,
so I had to have a ready store of them in my head. The old I became,
the better I got with them, but they still weren't quite natural
enough to pass for the real thing.
The one exception to this was when the
Lord took control and worked through me with other people, especially
after I was ordained as a priest. When His Grace empowered me, my
reactions could be natural, caring, and entirely appropriate. It was
the only time I seemed normal. When I wasn't functioning in this
role, if I attempted to just “wing it”, I was just as awkward and
somewhat inappropriate as I had always been, whether I meant to be or
not.
The basis of any temptation, and if
temptation itself, is to do “something.” We're tempted to quickly
role-play and then act out our role-play based on our understanding
of the situation around us. When we do this, we abandon trusting in
His Grace empowering us and Him acting through us. When we tell God,
“I've got this, I can handle this”, this is when we submit to the
sin disorder. When we think we don't need Him for something, we open
up a weakness which can be exploited by the enemy to our ruin, and he
is an expert and opening up those weaknesses.
What would I do if murderous terrorists
were running rampant and I was in the middle of it? After I came to
this understanding of what this question was, I realized that the
correct answer is “I don't know. 'I' should do nothing. I would
have to see what God would do through me in that moment, should it
ever come.”
Some of the greatest set-ups for
spiritual failure are when we look to potential future events and
seek to answer the question “what are 'you' going to do about it?”
