Corruption Fighters
Theme of the Week: Mixed Bag
Neal Plantinga
Monday, March 7, 2005
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Key Bible Verse: The human heart is most deceitful and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is? (Jeremiah 17:9). Bonus Reading:Isaiah 64:5-9
The subject of sin is full of ironies, and surprises. During the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Improvement Association led thousands of blacks through months of hardship and to bring down city walls of injustice and break municipal bus segregation.
Many black citizens supported the boycott with a spirit of mutual help and accountability. They rode bicycles, trudged miles to and from work, and formed car pools that local police regularly harassed. They stopped and interrogated drivers, making them demonstrate their wipers and lights, and writing them up for tiny, often bogus, violations. Drivers adapted. According to historian Taylor Branch, they "crept along the road and gave exaggerated turn signals, like novices in driving school."
Remarkably, a number of blacks also figured out ways to defraud their own movement. By submitting phony reimbursement claims, they hustled the Montgomery Improvement Association for "oceans of gasoline and truckloads of imaginary spare tires." The MIA, says Branch, was constantly trying to deal with the corruption within and "plug the holes in the reimbursement system."
—Neal Plantinga in Not the Way It's Supposed to Be
My Response: Have I undermined a virtue I believe in? If so, how?
Adapted from Not the Way It's Supposed to Be (Eerdmans, 1995) by permission.
Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity. 1 of 1
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Lord, help me to stop kidding myself about what I'm really like. Thank You for loving me even though You know the worst.
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