Our Actions
Johnny Jones, 30 April 2004
Now that it's spring and the woods are greener every day, and hummingbirds come to my front porch flowers, I can admit it: I hate being cold. During January I complain and shiver and sip quantities of hot drinks. So one of my pastimes during wet winter weather is remembering summer days.
We were in a paddle boat on a hot Florida lake taking my 2-year old niece for a ride when I remembered the fish. While Bryan was fishing from the pier earlier I saw a little fish tied up in the water. Bryan said the fish had been there a couple of days. "Let's paddle over to the dock and let him go," I urged Chip.
When we got closer I saw two boys slinging something around on a string, laughing and wrapping it around a pole, then unwrapping it again. When we got closer I realized it was the little fish.
"Quit that, boys," I said in my teacher-voice. "Put that fish back down."
"Aw, what does it matter?" they shouted back to me. "He's dead anyway."
"Maybe he is now," I replied, "but he wasn't a few minutes ago. Let him go."
They did, in return for the paddle boat. Then we untied the fish and released him.
What did it matter? It's not that I'm on an animal rights kick. I'm not against hunting or fishing. But we are also to protect and care for animals, not torture them. In my mind, the issue was not as much what the boys were doing to the fish as what their actions with the fish were doing to the boys. What sort of spirit were their actions creating?
That scene put me in mind of Philip Yancey's Open Windows. Survivors of concentration camps pointed to an astounding finding. While the inmates retained their compassion and sense of humanity, the guards lost theirs. Cruelty indelibly marks the perpetrator. Listen to the words of a victim of torture speak about this:
"I have experienced the fate of a victim. I have seen the torturer's face at close quarters. It was in a worse condition than my own bleeding, livid face. The torturer's face was distorted by a kind of twitching that had nothing human about it....In this situation, I turned out to be the lucky one. I was humiliated. I did not humiliate others. I was simply bearing a profoundly unhappy humanity in my aching entrails. Whereas the men who humiliate you must first humiliate the notion of humanity within themselves. Never mind if they strut around in their uniforms, swollen with the knowledge that they can control the suffering, sleeplessness, hunger, and despair of their fellow human beings, intoxicated with the power in their hands....They have to pay very dearly for my torments.
"I wasn't the one in the worse position. I was simply a man who moaned because he was in great pain. I prefer that. At this moment I am deprived of the joy of seeing children going to school or playing in the parks. Whereas they have to look their own children in the face."
Biblical imperatives such as Ephesians 4:32 teach us, "Be kind and compassionate to one another," and 1 Thessalonians. 5:15 "Always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else." These passages are not just for women or wimps. They're for everyone.
Don't read this as an anti-war screed. A man can be a warrior, and still be compassionate. In fact, compassion was one of the motivations for the spike in enlistments in our Armed Services after 9/11 -- compassion for the victims; a desire to see it doesn't happen again. Fighting to protect someone else is not the same as torturing the innocent. In fact, one of the definitions of love is that it "always protects." It is my compassion for our children that led me to Mama-bear-dom when they were little. I would have gladly given my life for theirs. We parents are like that!
Compssion does not run counter to a desire to protect -- on the coldest Missouri January or the warmest Florida summer.
