Someone There to Shoot Us Every Minute

Today in English class we had to read a short story. It was called “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor. There was a line at the end of the story that intrigued me.

A grandma, who in a single and only moment of the entire book, shows compassion to a murderer. The murderer freaks out and kills her. Sorry to be so rash, but if you want the whole story, you’ll have to read it for yourself. The murderer and his partner speak to each other after the grandma is dead:

“She was a talker, wasn’t she?” Bobby Lee said.

“She would have been a good women.” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

This is a pretty powerful line. See the grandma’s problem all through the book was her sense of self-righteousness. Everything was about her. She always got her own way. As soon as she knew she wasn’t going to live she then had compassion and love for the murderer.

Isn’t this a beautiful portrayal of the Christian life? As long as we are centered on ourselves and we are only concerned with our well-being, compassion will never be found. When we die to ourselves, and let God worry about our needs, it is then that we are filled with love and compassion for our fellow man.

I’m sure that most Christians would have been ‘good people’ if there was only someone there to shoot them every minute of their lives. I know that I would follow Christ better. As we remove our pride and focus on Christ the only thing that will pour from us is compassion. Having someone there to shoot us is similar to taking up our cross. Taking up our cross daily (Luke 9:23) symbolizes our death to self, our walk to the cross with Christ. As we do that and as we acknowledge the feebleness of our own life, then and only then will our life begin to touch others.