Doing good and dying for it.

I remember sitting in Sunday school as a little boy, learning what Christians refer to as ‘the fruits of the spirit’. Imagine the giant, hand-drawn tree on the wall. From its branches hang carefully coloured apples and bananas and the like. They’re named: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This is what, we’re told, Christians should be like. The Bible says there is no law against these things! That bit always fascinated me. Here was something you could do and there was no way you could get into trouble for it.

Fast forward to yesterday’s news and I’m reading about Gayle Williams being gunned down in Kabul. She was about my age. Perhaps she looked at a similar tree in Sunday school and thought of living a life of helping others in a way that wasn’t against the law. She was certainly living that way when lawless people decided she had had to pay the ultimate price for ‘spreading Christianity’. Jesus went around doing good and healing the oppressed. That is an unquestionably positive example to follow. It is a sad and sobering thought that some deem such charity so offensive they’ll kill to eradicate it.