Thoughts for another day

Feb. 19, 2008

Today's verse: Ex. 23:2. Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; (KJV)
(Pls. read the above before you read further. Thanks)

I remember in school, we had this test in math. The paper was tough and therefore, the boys, with the exception of a few, were copying happily. The supervisor being gentle, ignored their actions. To their dismay, the principal suddenly emerged and landed on this chap who was happily noting word-to-word from the paper of the genius of the class in front of him. The parents were summoned and asked to justify the action of their son. Their answer was: ‘everybody was copying, therefore our son was also copying!’ The flabbergasted principal couldn’t refute it but told them their answer was hollow and warned the next time, the boy was caught copying, he’d be rusticated.

This incident came to mind in the context of our Verse today. You see many times we tend to copy others in doing things that serve our self-interest. Things that are wrong. For e.g. in Mumbai, where the queues for train tickets are long, we try to walk up to someone way ahead in the queue and request them to buy our tickets. When the others behind start yelling, our excuse is, ‘I’m getting late and even you could do the same…’ Jumping signals is quite common. The best is if a mob is beating up someone, we also join in to rain a few blows on the poor guy without even knowing his fault!

If we question ourselves whether what we did was right or wrong, we know the answer, for it stares in our face. But yet, we continue. Going late to office, doing our own work during office hours, robbing stationery, gossiping, taking bribes, talking dirty, etc, etc. all because everyone is doing it, no? Human beings may often gloss over these mistakes of ours because of the ‘everyone doing it’ factor, but not God. He is going to question our rationale for the action. Our answer, ‘everyone is doing it’ won’t hold water, because, then God will have to say, ‘Ok to hell you go as everyone else…’