One bad hombre

Have you ever run into a bad person? I don’t mean someone who cuts you off in traffic or litters in the park. I mean the sort of person that sparks your hypothalamus to drop fight or flight chemicals into your bloodstream. The sort of person Wild West novelists referred to as the “bad hombre”.

These people are in all walks of life and I don’t think its how they dress or what social background they come from. It’s not how they look; it’s something about how they look at you or maybe how they look through you as if you are merely an object in their way or something to be used.

Now I know we’re all technically “bad people”. That’s not what I’m talking about. There’s a bell curve of behaviour that becomes strikingly obvious when you are introduced to individuals that occupy the top 1-3 percentile of the bad hombre curve.

A few weeks ago I read the verse “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” – Romans 5:8. It’s a nice verse and I understand what all the words mean but the truth of that statement is profound and I don’t think I had ever taken it to the logical extension and allowed it to really sink in before.

Two truths related to that verse are quite amazing;

1) God doesn’t love me any more when I’m righteous than when I am a sinner. He loved me when I was still a sinner enough to send His Son to die for me. Sometimes I feel like I need to “get right with God” before I can approach Him. When I was at my absolute worst He approached me.

2) God loves the Bad Hombre as much as He loves me. The person that I avoid like the Black Death, He reaches out to. Of course I know that, but it never really sank in before and that changed the way I look at people. I realize the only difference between how God looks at anyone is whether or not He sees Jesus when He looks at us.