virtue:noun1. behavior showing high moral standards
On one of our lay overs coming home from India I found a book store.
I loved India and I love a good bookstore - score!
I purchased Ghandi's biography "My Experiments with Truth".
To be honest, he is a mystery to me, all four hundred and ninety-one pages of him.
I have found so much wisdom in his thinking.
You can't help but to deeply admire his self-discipline.
He wouldn't condone envy, but I did envy the compassion he showed to the poor no matter the cost.
Whole heartedly I agree when he says "poverty is the worst form of violence".
It is an unspoken violence, leaving deep imprints in how you see and feel about yourself.
I wonder about his salvation.
From what I could tell he couldn't really wrap his mind around Jesus.
India has so many "gods" and yet it still seems like they long for a Savior.
Yet, so much of what Ghandi did and said happen to be very Christ like.
He even went as far to say, "your Christ I like, but your Christians not so much".
I have been thinking about his list of virtues.
It seemed to have something missing.
Love.
Wouldn't it be dangerous to the human virtue to live and not be loved?
Shouldn't it say:
8. Life with out love
When he talks about his life I am not sure he ever talked about being loved.
He had great compassion and lived his life for justice.
When he talked about Jesus, I think he loved what he stood for yet struggled that he was all wrapped up in one package deal the included the Trinity.
Paul says, we can't add one thing to the gospel and if we do well, basically it isn't grace.
It is a gift with out works on our part.
He, like so many can't wrap their mind around the fact that one act of righteousness trumped 330 million gods.
If Ghandi wore regular clothes I am guessing the grace part made him squirm. I know it makes my skin not fit so well at times when I am busy thinking I can add to what was done with a few good deeds.
After all, who in this day in age had the ability to achieve change in an entire country, deny himself so much and literally change a good bit of the world.
On a personal level he seemed to struggle with relationships, yet he had the ability to move humanity as a whole. Like how do you do that?
Virtue, well, I guess he had that down.
Love, grace and a Savior?
I wonder.
2 comments:
8. Life with out love
Genius.
The reason he was effective as a leader is that he was facing down leaders that had Christianity as their guiding principle therefore they had mercy and restraint. If he had faced down a godless Stalin he would have been slaughtered as well as all that followed him.
Post a Comment