Paying the price

In a scene in Les Miserables, the escaped convict Jean Valjean, who has by now become a respectable mayor, comes to know that another person has been wrongly arrested for Valjean's own crimes.  As Valjean struggles with his conscience, he sings:

Why should I save his hide?  Why should I right this wrong, when I have come so far and struggled for so long?

 If I speak, I am condemned; If I stay silent, I am damned!

 I am the master of hundreds of workers. They all look to me.
How can I abandon them? How would they live if I am not free?

 How can I ever face my fellow men?  How can I ever face myself again?  My soul belongs to God, I know I made that bargain long ago.  He gave me hope when hope was gone; He gave me strength to journey on

 [Then appearing in court to confess his true identity] Who am I?  Who am I? I am Jean Valjean!

Like the escaped convict Jean Valjean made good, I made that bargain with God too.  Today, by God's grace - His undeserved mercy - this pardoned sinner has a family, a career and a ministry.

My family relies on me as a husband, father, son and provider.  I enjoy my work, I really do, and the daily opportunity to talk to people, get to know them, even make my small contribution to help them grow.  I love my church cell family - learning from each other's example, supporting each other in life's travails, and moving forward together in service, and to share Christ's love with the big wide world.

But each day, there are new challenges which God offers to me - the challenge to save others, to right wrongs.  But now that I am respectable, it seems ever more reasonable to ask, "Why should I... when I have come so far and struggled for so long?" or "I am the master of [family, career, ministry] they all look to me, how can I abandon them?"


Today, each of us are facing some God-given challenge or other.  Seek it out if you don't know what it is, because it is certainly there to be done, and done by you.  Ephesians 2:10 explains in no uncertain terms - "For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."

Perhaps He is calling you to stand up for a social issue, as I wrote in my previous post.  To rationally, sensibly, and most important, lovingly, speak the truth, and not to be kiasu, kiasi, and kia dai ji.  To choose not to leave the problem to our children, by which time it may be too late.

Or perhaps it is to courageously choose to do the right thing in your workplace on some ethical issue.  Or to speak to an old friend or family member about his or her life, and how God is calling out with love.  Or to make peace with an enemy.  Each of these things can cost us our reputation, our pride, our relationships, our livelihoods, and certainly our time and energy.  It's tempting to leave it to someone else to do these tough things.  Make it someone else's problem.

But as King David said in 1 Chronicles 21:24 "No, I insist on paying the full price...  I will not offer a burnt sacrifice that costs me nothing."

Why?  Because, as has been said before, if a man's principles cost his nothing, they aren't worth very much.  If it costs me nothing, the truth is that I'm probably not giving or doing enough, and the reason for that in turn, is probably because I'm not making it important enough to me.

Standing up for something is often painful, sometimes embarrassing.  It's not something I enjoy.  But it's a proper test for me as to whether I can walk the talk.

Philippians 2:2-3 says "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit.  Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of the others."  Today, as I consider "Why should I?" I remember this exhortation.  As this lovely prayer in the Living Life devotional says - may I always seek to make Your name extraordinary instead of my own.  In the midst of all my weaknesses and flaws and excuses, help me to live up to that Lord!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bullying? Stand up!

Image
When I was a kid, I remember being bullied a fair bit.  I was small for my age, bespectacled, shy.    The teachers didn't help by putting a target on my back by making me Vice Head Prefect.  I would get my stuff just taken away from me by bigger kids, dragged out into the field to be tickled until I collapsed (much less fun than it sounds), and pushed into the storm drains.  Not all the kids were full-blown bullies of course.  But I remember some of them standing by, and politely holding my spectacles (so they wouldn't be broken) while the bullies did their work on me. Most of this stopped when I got to secondary school, where a much larger proportion of my fellow students were now just as nerdy!  And of course I grew up too.  I don't really look back on those days with any kind of animosity, because I think it never occurred to me that it was unusual.  But I do think my experience made me a bit more sympathetic about people around me who...
Read more

Life as a pie chart

Image
Someone told me recently about a "life exercise" in which one compiles all the stuff that makes up your life, and puts it in a pie chart.  So let's say for me, something like this. The idea is to visually demonstrate to myself that, in the event I lose one of these things, then I can see that, hey life is not so bad, that wasn't such a big deal.  Say for example, if I suffered a blown ACL, and couldn't run or play basketball any more, like this: At first blush - I'd say, hey, I still have my wife, children, parents, career, church life - so, chin up, things are not so bad.  Pretty good life visualisation tool to bring some optimism back into play! ... But what if, a month later, something happens at work, and boom, career gets sidetracked, I lose my job, or get put in cold storage somewhere, like this: Oops, now only half my life is left!  With only half of life's meaning left to me, what do I do? And what if something happens to...
Read more

Family AND Team

Image
I heard an interesting viewpoint this weekend. A family is not inherently a team. Hmm.  Sometimes at work, often in church, and most of the time at home, you hear people say to each other that we are family. And often, we really are. We care for each other above and beyond transactional matters.  It matters to me when my colleagues and cell group members (and of course my actual family members) go through illnesses or family issues or work challenges. I root for their success at presentations and projects and relationships. I care about what they care about, even if it has little direct impact on my own life. In a way, a family is sort of an amalgam of people who support each other in pursuit of each member's personal goals. For example, as a father, I support my children in their academic, career and ministry goals. But where they go to school, the grades they get, and the careers and ministries they build - they're really their goals, not mine.  Ditto for my role as a c...
Read more