This letter is for Corey and Becca Elder, my friends, who work in law enforcement.
You live in the midst of a collision between two worlds. On the one hand, you’re servants of Christ, dedicated to him and devoted to healing the world. On the other hand, you’re surrounded by idiots and jackasses, criminals and fools who are hell-bent on destroying the world you’re working to save.
How do you keep from getting bitter? How come you haven’t given up?
I’ll tell you.
Deep down you know that God has placed you in the crux of this conflict. You know God has equipped you and prepared you, not only to survive this conflict, but to win. To make a difference. To struggle, to achieve, and to experience victory.
Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew congregations, sums up your predicament exceptionally. He says, “When what you can do, meets what needs to be done, there is God’s challenge and your task.”[1] That’s how you see the world. That’s how you live. You realize your lives are not accidents. You didn’t slip on an existential banana peel and fall into your life. No. God incubated you. God grew you.
For this.
Ultimately, every vocation will bear the mark of God in the midst of man. There will always be two competing authorities in every place: the Rule of God—where imagination, vocation, and connection direct glory to God—and the Laws of Man—where man’s work is subservient to man’s fame, and the best we can hope for is to keep people from ruining each other. Your task is to restore the broken order in the world, to live under the Rule of God while working with the Laws of Man.
There will always be people who disrupt goodness, but I’m thankful that you are working day by day, act by act, and step by step to achieve “a redemption of small steps.”[2]
God blesses you, and we love you, for all you do.
[1] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 72.
[2] Ibid., 77.