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1 Timothy 6:10 NIV:  “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”

Luke 16;13 NIV: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

I’ll call my friend Roy. He’s my best golfing buddy, also a novelist, and a firm California democrat. He plays the stock market, and the other day he told me that he was selling off his green stocks and buying oil company stocks. The gist of his rationale was, since Trump’s cabinet is going to be a sort of oilman’s club, oil would be (or would remain) king.

After I bawled him out for betraying his green principles, he argued that he was only looking out for his future, and his family’s.

I’m quite fond of Roy, but it seems to me that such thinking will be the ruin of us all.

If I’m clear on one of Christ’s teachings it’s that there is no good justification for compromising with the ways of the world.

As writers, we encounter the temptation to compromise every time we sit down to write. For instance, my current project can be called a legal thriller, and though I don’t much like tags, I have chosen to try to make this one fit the genre. And I’m finding that to live up to the word thriller, the book needs to have pretty much constant tension. Tension can often be sustained by putting sympathetic characters in danger, but after some pages the danger needs to elevate or the tension will fade.

My current plan is to add another couple murders and render more graphically a certain massacre. Now, to justify these additions to myself, I need to believe that they not only make the story more gripping but that they are consistent with the worldview I want the story to present and with an attitude toward violence I hope the reader will assume.

One of the victims is a seriously bad fellow. But I don’t want anyone to jump for joy at the death of anybody. Relief is okay, as long as it contains at least a morsel of sorrow on account of our world being in such a condition as to require murder.

I mean, we ought to take life and our role in it seriously and recognize that at every intersection we have a choice; do what we believe in; or follow the way of the world.

Only rarely do those two roads go in the same direction.