One Bite at a Time

“You couldn’t stop the earth quake, you can’t fix Los Angeles, and you’re not going to be able to heal him.”

I went and saw the movie “The Soloist” the other night, which turned out to be quite delightful. I don’t think I’ll ever purchase it for my own library, but I would recommend going and seeing it.

Jamie Fox plays the role of a music prodigy that becomes mentally ill while at college in Ohio. Eventually he finds himself homeless in the streets of Los Angeles where the character played by Robert Downy Jr. (a columnist) discovers him and finds inspiration to write a story about his situation.

At the climax of the movie everything completely falls apart with the soloist and Robert Downy Jr. finds himself sitting next to his ex-wife pouring out his heart. It is at this moment she replies, “You couldn’t stop the earth quake, you can’t fix Los Angeles, and you’re not going to be able to heal him.”

I think this is what overwhelms so many of us as a society. We see all the sickness, poverty, and injustices around us, and then we realize that the surface has just been scratched as we take notice of these problems being magnified in third world countries... we get to the point where we feel like we just can’t do anything about it.

King Solomon had a similar reflection in Ecclesiastes chapter 4. He presents a very similiar observation to the world and then provides two ways in which we can respond to the evil that surrounds us: One is to fold our arms and give up; and the other is to keep ourselves so busy that we lose sight of reality.

How true is this of us today? We either completely give up because our efforts cannot even make a dent, or we busy ourselves with our own lives to the point that anything outside of our world is either opaque, or worse case, merely a fictional tail.

Wednesday morning at Chick-Fil-A we took prayer request, and a few of the high school girls commented on how they had a lot going on. At this point Pete Carter stepped in and offered some fatherly wisdom. He gave some simple advice that I have heard before, but it is often necessary to be reminded of such things.

He asked Laura if she knew how to eat an elephant. “No!” She replied, with a puzzled look on her face. Then he paused, and just looked at her for a second, and I butted in, “One bite at a time.” Then Pete chimed in, almost to echo me, “One bite at a time!”

So how does this tie into pushing back the evil that surrounds us?

First it is important to understand what the gospel is. I think some people mistake the gospel for taking care of social issues. But here’s the problem with that, the gospel is in no way tied to anything that we do… it is by grace, through faith alone. Then as a result of the gospel in our lives we should long to see justice brought to these social issues.

My fear is that we can become so overwhelmed with all the evil in the world that we never do anything about it. What if the Church started to take care of social issues instead of letting the government play the churches role? What if we had a positive influence on the society around us? What if non-Christians stopped thinking of us as self-centered bickering intolerant jerks, and saw us as an accurate representation of Christ?

Let’s face it, people are going to hate us because they hated Christ first; but people didn’t hate Christ because he went around healing the sick and caring for the oppressed. They hated him because he claimed to be God.

If we’re going to start impacting the world in a positive way, we can’t look at the big picture and become overwhelmed. We are going to have to take one bite at a time. I like the way John Randles puts it... "One day you'll be sitting on your front porch and your grandkids will ask you "What's that out in the yard?" Then you can say, "It used to be an elephant." And when they ask what happened to it, you can say, “I ate that sucker!”

As you observe all the evil in the world do not become overwhelmed and ignore it or give up... take one bite at a time and encourage those around you. Remember these three things: You cannot eat an elephant in one sitting. Many hands makes small work. And, if we all did a little, we could all do a lot.