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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago”

I’ve been thinking about this quote. “If only it were all so simple,” as the quote states; if only labels could be permanently set and we never had to hold ourselves to a standard. But we humans are complex beings, capable of both good and evil, no matter who we are.

No one is really absolutely evil or completely good on their own. Typically, upon closer examination, people act mostly within the bounds of their influence. The Stanford Prison Experiment is a great example of this. Sometimes it’s convenient to simplify humanity when we want to distance ourselves from the idea we could be terrible given a different upbringing or set of influences, but it’s important for us to take a deeper look into what life choices and factors may lead individuals like ourselves into doing undesirable things, lest we blind ourselves to our own capacity for evil. In order to take initiative and ownership of our lives, and in order to repent and find freedom, we must be aware and take responsibility for our potential for darkness as well as light. It’s like Anakin/Darth Vader, one of the most iconic villains ever, who is always described as having potential to turn back to the light. Or Cal in “East of Eden,” who is constantly wrestling with an inherited inner darkness, a generational curse, looking to triumph over it.

“Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.’” — Genesis 4:6-7

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—'Thou mayest'— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man.” … “And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.” — John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“For a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again, But the wicked stumble in time of disaster and collapse.” — Proverbs 24:16

What makes a man righteous or good is not perfection, but the humility and conviction to rise again after every failure; admission of faults, confession of wrongdoing, vulnerable exposure of weakness, and the choice to improve through it all. So hike upward, toward the light friends, though it may take all we have and every day brings opposition, the view from the top will be invigorating.