A few weeks following my release from the hospital after my injury, my friend Carol brought me a gift.
The book, Man’s Search For Meaning, chronicled author Viktor Frankl’s experience in a Nazi concentration camp. His basic conclusion: the Nazis could take away everything but his freedom to choose his attitude. He alone could decide his response to these horrific circumstances.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Carol was trying to send me a message. She wanted me to understand I hadn’t lost everything. I retained the freedom to choose my attitude and create meaning from a terrible set of circumstances.
I wasn’t ready to hear it, but Carol’s gift planted a seed that’s still attempting to bloom.
A few years later, I encountered a book called Night, by Elie Weisel. Both men were Holocaust survivors, but Weisel’s message took a different track:
Never Forget.
Night also planted a seed, one that flowered in 2013 when Becky and I decided to partner with Project Rescue and the kids at the Home of Hope. Weisel was Jewish, but he clearly echoed Jesus’ teachings in yesterday’s quote:
The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference.
Jesus reserved his harshest rebukes for the self-righteous Jewish religious leaders who knew the Scriptures and meticulously tithed small items while neglecting “… the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy, and faithfulness.”
He called them hypocrites who “… strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”
We are, as Frankl observed, free to choose our attitude when confronted with injustice. We are free to turn away. But turning away – indifference – is, as Elie Weisel observed, the opposite of love. That’s why Jesus reserved his harshest criticism for those who knew better.
I wonder. If Jesus wandered into town today, where would he find the folks who know the Scriptures inside-out and still choose to respond with indifference?