Yesterday I wrote about the importance I am placing on embracing reality. Breaking through my natural inclination to avoid pain is hard work. I am a self-centered person, a work in process, and embracing reality is frankly painful.

Challenging Complacency

Complacency ignores reality.

Complacency minimizes others’ horrors.

Complacency marginalizes with “isms” like racism, sexism and age-ism.

If I believe that ignorance is bliss, and I don’t have to worry about what I don’t know about or see, I’m wrong.

Jesus Christ’s little brother James was inspired by God to write words that pierce my complacency: “Remember, it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it.” 1

Complacency justifies sin.

Complacency Looks The Other Way

Former child soldier Emmanuel Jal attacks that lie with these piercing words, “The worst people in life are not those who commit evil, but those who stand by and turn a blind eye.”2

Conquer Complacency

I know that there are several ways to conquer complacency including faith, hope and love.

This week God is lovingly conquering my complacency with peace.

Peace that calls me to care about others who are in distress.  Peace that lets me feel angry feelings but not resentment.  Peace  that invites me to pray for Sudan, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and other war-torn and scarred places.

Peace?

Jesus Christ offers us is a tangible reality rather than a nice ideal, or just something that happens in heaven or never-never land.

It’s peace “which transcends all understanding…which is so great we cannot understand it…which exceeds anything we can understand…that no one can completely understand… a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life.“

That’s the peace God is conquering my complacency with.

More tomorrow.

1 – James 4:17

2 – http://www.we-want-peace.com/

3 – Philippians 4:7 on several translations including NIV, NCV, NLT, CEV & The Message