A Ramble About "What are You Going to Do About It?"

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?”