Good - TopicsExpress

Good Instincts ------------------------------------------------------------ On an international flight, after waiting five long hours for takeoff, a voice announced that the flight was cancelled and we would have to deplane. It is a scene many know well, so I know better than to plead for sympathy. But in the aftermath of this announcement was a scene that captured my attention. A young girl, no older than ten, immediately cupped her face with her hands, visibly deflated by this news. In broken English, a woman nearby tried to comfort her and the story slowly unraveled. Apparently, the child had written an essay that had won an award, which promised a week at space camp in the United States. She was only halfway to her destination waiting anxiously for the second half when the flight was cancelled for the night and rescheduled for the morning. Since she was traveling alone, news of the cancelled flight meant an evening far from home, alone in a foreign city, and one less day of her much-anticipated camp. As the story was slowly drawn out, listeners around the cabin responded instinctively. A man immediately provided a cell phone for her to call home, a young mother offered to help her get to the hotel, and a flight attendant sat down beside her and offered to stay with her for the night and bring them both back in the morning for the next day’s flight. Perhaps you have been active in a similar scene—bringing help for the stranded motorist in the rain, responding with care for the family on the news whose house burned down, guiding a lost child in the grocery store back to his mom. What is it that pulls us toward action in such scenes? What is it that moves us with the desire to help, particularly if we are merely creatures operating with our own survival instincts? When perfect strangers reach out as if intuitively shouldn’t we pause to ask about the intuition? If there is no purpose that can be assigned to life beyond existence and survival, why would we move toward something or someone out of care or concern, injustice or need? A national radio program recently ran a segment discussing one company’s efforts with what they are calling “ethics rehabilitation” classes—classes meant to re-instill the ethics essential for effective business. I was fascinated by this call to a return to morality, as if the sense of ethics was naturally present within us in the first place. Quite often assumptions such as these go unquestioned, even as they seem to gently beckon us toward definitions bigger than the ones we provide. What is it that seems to recognize a need for some sort of moral framework, to distinguish right and wrong, good and evil? Why would we have a longing for goodness or beauty? Can it be truly explained if we are merely creatures surviving for our own right? In a letter to an ancient community, the apostle Paul hinted at a deeper reality moving us toward what we long to find but often do not, what we long to see corrected in ourselves, in our communities, in a world of injustice and disappointment. “Who hopes for what they already see?” he asks. These inward groanings for good, longings for beauty, our need for what is true, Paul describes as hopeful evidence for what we were made to see but see now only in part. It is the instinct that recognizes injustice and suffering are not the way things are supposed to be. It is the hope for what God intended and the awareness of what Christ is doing even now. We help the stranded child far away from her parents because we desire to see children cared for, because we hope for what is good and we hope to see goodness fully. Paul suggests that our recognition of the good in creation points us to the creator who first saw things and called them good. We were made to know the beautiful and the true because we were made by the creative and cultivating God of the Garden. We were created to taste and see in the truest sense of what it means to be human. Knowing this creator, who comes to us as human himself, we know not only the why and who behind the instinct, but the one who makes it whole again. Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.