Daily we hear reports of corruption in government as leaders exploit resources and people for their own gain. In Afghanistan, decades of war left a government with almost no financial, administrative, accounting, or auditing procedures. With billions of dollars of aid flowing into the country after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, this was a recipe for corruption.

After the election in 2009, President Hamid Karzai appointed an anticorruption czar, Mohammad Yusin Osmani, but his efforts have not received enough support to make a serious difference. As The Christian Science Monitor reported, "Nearly a year into his job ... [Osmani's] group has only sent 15 cases to law enforcement agencies, resulting in just a handful of arrests" (Ben Arnoldy, "World's most corrupt nations? Afghanistan at No. 2," November 17, 2009). Since then Western governments have increased pressure on the Karzai government to become more transparent, but much more progress is needed.

Another corrupting element is that Afghanistan supplies 90 percent of the world's opium trade. Farmers are entangled in a criminal, and therefore unregulated, and dangerous occupation. The lawless opium industry cannot be taxed, so it not only defies the lawful government, but also supplies no revenue for its institutions. Rather, a good portion of the drug money goes to support the Taliban and corrupt government officials.

Financial and social security would protect investments in legitimate agricultural and mining ventures that can replace the opium revenues. And efforts are being made to support these industries. Nevertheless, a CIA investigation into corruption in Afghanistan shows a network of officials, drug traffickers, and insurgents involved in criminal syndicates reaching up to the elite in government and business.

It's clear that the Afghan people, many of whom have been directly affected by corrupt practices, need leadership that is helpful in life's struggles, not the cause of those struggles. Our prayers can help them.

A GOOD SHEPHERD DOESN'T PREY ON THE SHEEP

While the imposition of Western-style civilization and values on other cultures is often viewed with hostility, the Bible's message of God's care for all people embraces everyone. It erases political and cultural differences because it perceives each individual as precious to God.

In ancient Egypt, ideals of leadership were modeled after the relation of a shepherd to his sheep. This image also pervades the Bible and it brings out the intimate nature of the relationship. The shepherd king appears in the sacred literature of the Israelites, the most lovely of which is the 23rd psalm. It begins, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want."

The Lord, the divine shepherd, was mirrored in the figure of David, a shepherd who became king in Israel. A thousand years later, when Jesus' disciples argued among themselves as to who was greatest, he squelched their ambition, saying, "I am among you as he that serveth" (Luke 22:27). Yet Jesus, through his humility and obedience to God, is also called Christ, the anointed of God. When he laid down his life for his sheep—for his disciples and for all humanity—his stature increased, because he destroyed death and proved the reality of eternal life. "That he might liberally pour his dear-bought treasures into empty or sin-filled human storehouses, was the inspiration of Jesus' intense human sacrifice," wrote Mary Baker Eddy in her foundational work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 54).

When praying for the leaders of the world, it's important to see clearly that true leadership and service to humanity brings incorruptible blessedness. This is the spiritual quality all leaders need to express, and they have the ability to do it as they too are able to hear God's voice. "The rich in Spirit help the poor in one grand brotherhood, all having the same Principle, or Father; and blessed is that man who seeth his brother's need and supplieth it, seeking his own in another's good," says Science and Health (p. 518). IN THE NEWS A SPIRITUAL PERSPECTIVE

DIVINE LAW SUPPORTS HONEST LEADERS

Israelite prophets sharply insisted on the responsibility of rulers for the people, warning that the nation that strayed from God's laws would be too corrupt to survive. Ezekiel railed against injustice whereby a shepherd grows fat on his sheep. The prophet sketched the shepherdking thus: "I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick: but I will destroy the fat and the strong; I will feed them with judgment" (Ezek. 34:16).

Ezekiel's ideal shepherd feeds his flock, even the greedy, with justice—surely a good and bracing diet for everyone. This thought blossoms in the beatitude given by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled" (Matt. 5:6). People who do humanitarian work in dangerous regions can be seen as hungering and thirsting after righteousness, sometimes at the expense of their own lives. This promise of God's care is a sustaining one.

INJUSTICE IS NOT VICTORIOUS

A good shepherd's relationship with his flock is immeasurably enriching, not from the standpoint of bleeding the flock dry, but in the unity of love and mutual respect that allows all to flourish.

When leaders whose aims are selfish and even criminal rise to power, they may prosper for a time. But that doesn't mean God permits injustice to go on and on. God destroys sin, whatever form it takes. So however successful they may seem, the aims and rewards of corrupt leaders will prove transient and unsatisfactory, and they would be better served by larger ambitions and higher motives.

Civic corruption pales, however, before a corruption of the wise and compassionate character of any religion, when people are led to believe in "holy warfare." History supplies enough examples of this perversion in every religion to keep us all humble. When human nature justifies its own misdeeds with reference to divine law or will, this is nothing but a convenient and self-justifying argument for avoiding civil, moral, and legal constraints. It is delusion wherever, whenever, and in whomever, it appears.

That God, divine Life, should command or reward the destruction of even one of His precious creations is simply untrue. Each and every one, from the least to the greatest, can have no life except that which reflects the divine Life. Has He entrusted this great and only Life to mutable forms, some of which are not worthy of that Life? Hardly. As spiritual ideas of the one Life or Mind, all are inseparable from their divine source.

Humanity cannot implicate God in its misdeeds as if God could sin. Quite the opposite. When we see Him s He is, we will know a glory, grace, and goodness unflawed by sin, disease, or death.

Jesus is our exemplar as we follow this spiritual path. When he saw people who were ill or in other trouble, "he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd" (Matt. 9:36). The good shepherd's care for his flock is born of his abiding and selfless concern for the safety and well-being of his sheep.

THE MOST IMPORTANT MISSION: HEALING

To support peace and progress in Afghanistan and its neighbors, our prayerful mission is to turn first to God for the perfect humanitarian model and hold fast to that which is good—namely the reality of God's love for the man and woman He created. To insist on the presence of the divine shepherd, seeking out the lost and enabling self-examination that will admit an error, turn from it, and reform what needs changing. This will restore the well-being of all people. Our prayers to heal injury and to end injustice will satisfy human needs, and also forward moral and spiritual blessedness among those struggling with strife.

The good news today is that the Lord is not in earth's woes, nor is He the source of them. Rather, God is an ever-present and unerring Mind who reigns omnipotent above and beyond earthly trials with the sinless character of divine Love and with profound compassion for all. This Mind is the ground of all being, saying to corruption, "Thus far, and no farther."

Divine Life never created evil; it never allowed a crime; it holds all in its own perfect image. All this is yet to be seen clearly, yet it is true because as Mary Baker Eddy put it: "The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and real. The mutable and imperfect never touch the immutable and perfect. The inharmonious and self-destructive never touch the harmonious and self-existent," (Science and Health, p. 300). So our prayers can insist that justice does reign, holding crime in check, until righteousness shines forth as the sun in the heavenly Father's realm. |css