Act Justly

The first thing God requires, says Micah, is for us ‘to act justly’. It would be easy to instantly leap on that word ‘justly’ and think about what it means. But to do that would be to overlook something more basic – we need to act.

If you think about it, life is a continuous series of choices. Every day we make a vast number of decisions in the different ‘zones’ of our lives. The innermost zone centres on us as individuals, about what sort of people we are and what priorities we will have. Then, going outward, there is the zone of our home or family life where we face endless decisions on how we treat our spouse, our children, our extended family, and how we spend our time and our money. For many of us the next zone is our workplace. Do we decide to work hard or try to get away with just the minimum needed? Do we live for work or do we work to live? Another zone is that of our community. Here we must choose whether to be involved or not. Do we work at helping neighbours or do we leave them alone, bolt our doors and live in isolation?

Yet our decisions about how we act do not stop there. There are issues on a national and global level that cry out for action and involvement.

The problem of how we are to act is made harder by two things.

First of all, actions (and words) are serious in that they can affect and change our lives. Some decisions seem to come with a warning that they are momentous. For instance, we all know that the choice of whether or not to go on to further education is life changing. And for someone in a dating relationship to decide to utter that little word ‘yes’ can have huge implications.

The second thing that increases the problem is that once actions are made they can’t be unmade. Words once spoken can not be withdrawn. Of course we can – and do – get second chances. But second chances are like the airbags in cars: it’s best not to proceed along the road of life in such a way as to make their use inevitable.

It is precisely because actions are so momentous and can be so permanent that many people decide not to act at all. Unfortunately, to decide not to act is actually to take a decision itself, and sometimes a very unwise one.

If we choose not to act we can only blame ourselves if things end up very badly wrong in our family, our workplace or even our country. Eighteenth-century writer Edmund Burke said, ‘All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’

If you want to walk the right way, the very first thing to do is to decide to walk.