Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: Day's End (01/01/14)
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TITLE: Vanity and Math are Apparently Incompatible | Previous Challenge Entry
By Karen Locklear
01/08/14 -
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Magically, deriving from the evils of the dark powers in the girls’ locker room, while I was otherwise distracted by the drama of eighties hair, my math homework somehow grew legs and ran off.
At first I thought I was just flaky and left it at home. And then I began to worry God decided to punish me for the ridiculousness which was my life in 1987. But alas, eventually I came to the shocking conclusion:
Someone was stealing my math homework.
Of all the things to steal this seemed ridiculous. I’m not even good at math.
Once I thought about it, the answer was obvious: her P.E. locker was next to mine. And although I locked up my stuff during class, I didn’t see any reason to hire an armed guard to watch a stupid math folder while I fiddled with my bangs and a giant bottle of Aquanet.
About the time I realized I wasn’t losing my mind and math homework, we were assigned a project which involved a huge number of Algebra-type word problems. And I knew because this person hadn’t spent much time working on hers in class mine would inevitably be five-finger discounted the second I turned my back.
And I was furious.
Because I felt helpless.
So in my twelve-year-old anger, I came up with a plan: I completed two copies of the project: one hidden away which I would turn in and another with answers completely out of left field placed neatly in the front of my math folder.
This took some man hours. But it got done, and leaving my math folder unattended, I wandered off quickly, without a care in the world.
Of all the moments of poetic justice in my life, this one was the best. The look of confusion on that girl’s face as I handed in the assignment assumed to be in her possession is still gelled in my memory 27 years later.
And the look of shock when she discovered a grade of 23 written in red at the top of her project packet and watching her position to see my “A” was glorious.
I love telling this story. How many of you are cheering me on in this glorious vision of junior high justice?
Guess what? Jesus wasn’t.
One of the more irritating and difficult parts of Christianity is we are expected not to pay evil for evil. We aren’t supposed to create dummy math projects to destroy the grade of the cheater.
God doesn’t like that story.
God wants a better one.
Personally, I’m all about natural consequences and creative displays of justice, the more dramatic the better, as long as it doesn’t apply to me.
After all, how do people learn if they aren’t held accountable for their sins in this world?
Again, Jesus disagrees. He says so in The Sermon on the Mount:
“You know that you have been taught, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to try to get even with a person who has done something to you. When someone slaps your right cheek, turn and let that person slap your other cheek. If someone sues you for your shirt, give up your coat as well. If a soldier forces you to carry his pack one mile, carry it two miles. When people ask you for something, give it to them” (Matthew 5:38-42).
Keep in mind, thou shalt not steal does indeed apply to math homework. But if our purpose as Christians is to, as Donald Miller would say, “save many lives”, then the answer is definitely not pay evil for evil.
Because here’s the problem with such: you cannot show Christ in a behavior which isn’t Christ-like. And so when these things happen, when you are out to defend what you perceive is yourself, suddenly the kingdom is all about you. And it’s not: the kingdom is about God.
The answer is thinking outside the box and to consider how Jesus operated, as hard as this may be. Jesus provided opportunities and relationships. At the end of the day, when people walked away from Him, there was this sense of, yes, there are other options. And, yes, I can live a different scenario and feel good about it.
And that is the purpose of our lives as Christians.
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God bless~
I'm worried, though, that the challenge topic is very difficult to find here.
Nevertheless, you're a gifted writer, and I hope to read many, many more entries of yours in the coming weeks.