Article July 4, 2016 Issue

Good government starts with self-government

Judy Wolff

I threw the newspaper with the shocking headline onto the dining room table. Dismayed, I couldn’t read any further. A political scandal had been dominating news coverage for the past few days, and on this particular day a disclosure had come to light that took the improprieties to a new low.

I started to carry a basket of dirty laundry down to the basement, but I wasn’t really thinking about doing my laundry. I was mentally condemning the individual who was at the center of the scandal. Lost in my thoughts, and unable to see the stairs because of the laundry basket I was carrying, I started down the steps unaware that my cat was right in front of me, sound asleep. I stepped on him, inadvertently pushing him off the stairs. I lost my balance, twisted, and fell, landing on my shoulder on the basement floor. The fall knocked the wind out of me, and, for a moment, I couldn’t move.

Immediately I turned to God in prayer for help. As I prayed, a thought came to me in the form of a Bible phrase: “Stand upright on thy feet” (Acts 14:10), which is a phrase the Apostle Paul spoke with “a loud voice” when he commanded a crippled man to walk. It felt as if God was commanding me to stand upright and to do so immediately—to demonstrate my God-given strength and dominion. So, I obeyed, and I found that I could stand, although with much discomfort at first. As I stood up, that word upright rang in my thought. Another Bible passage came to me: “Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace” (Psalms 37:37).