It so happened that Aram, on one of its raiding expeditions against Israel, captured a young girl who became a maid to Naaman’s wife. One day she said to her mistress, “Oh, if only my master could meet the prophet of Samaria, he would be healed of his skin disease.
2 Kings 5: 2-3
Naaman was the commander of the Syrian army that had captured a young Israelite girl and brought her back as his wife’s maid.
You can imagine how her life was turned upside down.
Taken from her family and friends into a foreign country, she barely understood the language.
Her hopes and dreams were shattered, and it’s all because of Naaman.
You would think she hated him.
But whenever he came home and took off his armor, hidden underneath was the leprosy, eating away his body.
She could have thought, “I hope you die.” But instead, she was full of mercy and offered the remedy through which he was completely healed.
All because she showed kindness to someone who had done her wrong.
It’s easy to hold a grudge, try to pay someone back, ignore them, and make them suffer, but all that does is hold you down. Jesus says, “God blesses those who are merciful, for they will be shown mercy.”
Be good to someone who doesn’t deserve it.
Globalization and the attendant concerns about poverty and inequality have become a focus of discussion in a way that few other topics, except for international terrorism or global warming, have. Most people have a strong opinion on globalization, and all of them express an interest in the well-being of the world's poor. The financial press and influential international officials confidently assert that global free markets expand the horizons for the poor, whereas activist-protesters hold the opposite belief with equal intensity. Yet the strength of people's conviction is often in inverse proportion to the amount of robust factual evidence they have.As is common in contentious public debates, different people mean different things by the same word. Some interpret "globalization" to mean the global reach of communications technology and capital movements, some think of the outsourcing by domestic companies in rich countries, and others see globalization as a byword for...
Comments