After owning it for more than a year, I’ve just started reading Nineteen Minutes, one of Jodi Picoult’s many novels. For me it’s the kind of book you have to be in a certain mood to read, simply because the issues dealt with can be so emotive and thought-provoking. I haven’t been disappointed so far although I’m only a sixth of the way in.
As usual, Picoult weaves her plot and characters finely together in a realistic and engrossing way. It seems she will deliver what I hoped for – a detailed and ‘human’ examination of the background and motives behind a 17 year-old American boy’s school shooting.
Part 1, Section II opens with this:
Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that’s because it’s all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on. You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone’s ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end.
But then again, maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.
I’d posit that the first reason is the more accurate one, and it certainly gells with the Bible’s explanation for why bad things happen. It bears itself out on both a macro (Adam and Eve’s fall into sin and the rest of humanity’s being infected by the same disease) and a micro (chain reactions of bad things / behaviours / patterns being passed down from one person or generation to the next) level.
I’m looking forward to getting into the meat of the novel and seeing how the characters are further pictured and developed. But I’m thankful that when I reach the end of it (as well as episodes of Criminal Minds for that matter) I don’t need to wallow in the hopelessness of all the ‘bad things’. The Bible shows me both a convincing explanation for them and a convincing solution.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t say this tritely. Bad things are awful – I can’t overstate that. But Jesus Christ offers us his death on our behalf as the all-time solution for bad things – as God punishes Jesus in our place as if HE had been the perpetrator of all bad things ever done – so that none of us need to be punished for the bad things we actually have done.
And he doesn’t stop there, but gives everyone who trusts in his saving death ability and incentive to change – power to do fewer ‘bad things’ and desire to do good things instead. This is definitely what Steve’s and my experience has been and what we pray more people in our community and city will come to know. In Jesus our past ‘bad things’ (done by us or done to us) don’t need to govern our present and our future. If anyone is in Christ, the old has gone and the new has come.
