A Good Man is Hard to Find
June 14, 2006
We have been discussing Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" the last 2 weeks at our Artist Breakfast Fellowship. This was my first experience with this story. I have attached it for you so that you can get the essence of what we are discussing. Our Christian worldview begins with us believing that people are by nature sinful. It is only by God's grace and Him working through us that any good can result from our actions. But those without a Christian world view would feel very differently about good and bad. How do those without this world view explain why some people are good and some are bad? We talked about common grace and the ability for beauty and good things to happen in our world without people having the knowledge of God or a relationship with Christ. One interesting thought was why do so many good things happen at all in this world if we truly recognize our own depravity? That is the real question, someone said. These questions are never resolved in an hour over a muffin, but the discussion brought to me a sense of really feeling humbled about how big our God truly is. Left to myself, I don't think I would add up to much good. You may think that I am being self-deprecating, but honestly, if there is not a Divine One and a Creator of all, why doesn't this world just spin out of control? Why don't more people murder, steal, abuse others? I don't think our justice system is scary enough to ward off all the evil...