Avenge not yourselves, beloved, but give place unto the wrath of God: for it is written, Vengeance belongeth unto me; I will recompense, saith the Lord. – Romans 12:19
This is a winter parable from Chicago – not from the Bible. Unfortunately, it is a true story.
So…a guy in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood is a security-camera salesman and has his own home equipped with a bunch of cameras. In the aftermath of the recent 20-inch snowfall, he discovers his snow shovel is missing from his front porch.
A quick review of the recordings generated by his multiple security cameras reveals that one of his neighbors was walking her dog, entered his front yard, allowed the dog to do its business, took his shovel and dug her car out of the show. And…she didn’t return the shovel.
Mr. Security Camera decides he’ll show her, so he fires up his new snow thrower and buries her car in snow, then gleefully reviews his new security tape of her spending several more hours to dig it out again.
We live in the internet age, so Mr. Security posts his “revenge” video on YouTube, where it gets 100,000 hits. He is interviewed on local television. He is glorified on local radio as a guy who really taught his naughty neighbor a lesson. One talk-show host joked that he should have covered the woman’s car in water so it would be encased in ice.
Sorry, but I think Mr. Security should be ashamed of himself. And this reminds me of a lesson taught to me by my parents and grandparents: “Two wrongs do not make a right.”
Sure, stealing someone’s snow shovel in the middle of a blizzard is a nasty thing to do. But this isn’t the Old West, where a horse thief gets hanged from the nearest tree.
Maybe she was desperate to dig out her car and couldn’t afford to buy a shovel. Maybe the local stores ran out of shovels. Maybe she intended to bring the shovel right back and forgot. (After spending four hours shoveling my driveway earlier this week I could barely remember my name, let alone if I had “borrowed” the shovel. But rest assured, I used my very own shovel.)
The result of this “vengeance” is that an apparent shovel thief has dug her car out of the snow twice. A guy got his 15 minutes of fame for doing something rather nasty. And he still is out one shovel. The media have glorified a bad deed. And nobody has advanced the cause of Christian charity.
