One of my favorite things to do is to lis­ten to This Amer­i­can Life. If you haven’t tuned into it before, it is a radio pro­gram on NPR on Saturday’s (you can also down­load the pod­cast on iTunes) which offers real-to-life sto­ries which can some­times be funny, touch­ing or thought­ful. Last week we drove down to South Car­olina and when we take long trips like that, I usu­ally lis­ten to a bunch of episodes in a row. This time on our trip, I hap­pened to lis­ten to one episode which made me think about my own life.

The story was called DIY and you can lis­ten to it if you click on the descrip­tion below:

After four lawyers fail to get an inno­cent man out of prison, his friend takes on the case him­self. He becomes a do-it-yourself inves­ti­ga­tor. He learns to read court records, he tracks down hard-to-find wit­nesses, he gets the real mur­derer to come for­ward with his story. In the end, he’s able to accom­plish all sorts of things the police and the pro­fes­sion­als can’t.

This story is amaz­ing and sad all at the same time. It’s the story of a man who was inno­cent and had to endure 21 year of prison. It’s the story of a friend who believed in him so much he sac­ri­ficed many things to free him from an unwar­ranted sen­tence to life-in-prison.

In the story there was one part in par­tic­u­lar that caught my atten­tion. Early in the story, there is a detec­tive who is inves­ti­gat­ing the mur­der of a young Jamaican man. In his lazi­ness and des­per­a­tion to solve the case, the detec­tive believes whole-heartedly in the story of an eleven year old boy who every­one knows noto­ri­ously lies. Through­out the inves­ti­ga­tion, this detec­tive also coerces oth­ers to indict a man who they also know did not com­mit the crime. The detec­tive knows full-well the man he will send to prison is inno­cent, but he just wants to get the case off of his books. In the end, in these seem­ingly lit­tle things he does, this detec­tive destroys two decades of a young man’s life.

For all intents and pur­poses, this detec­tive had done an evil thing and this was most likely not an iso­lated event in his life. It was prob­a­bly a pat­tern in his life. In these lit­tle things he did, in his lazi­ness and coer­cion, this was the real man he was—he sim­ply wasn’t a very good man at least not at this point in his life.

This is what caught my atten­tion in lis­ten­ing to that part of the story — for most of us, it’s the lit­tle things we do or don’t do that make us into the peo­ple we become, either good or not so good.

Lis­ten­ing to that part of the story reminded me of that quote from C.S. Lewis that I posted last time on my blog:

Every time you make a choice, you are turn­ing the cen­tral part of you, the part of you that chooses, into some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from what it was before.

When read­ing the book of Gala­tians, you find one of the most impor­tant verses in the Bible which offers us what some of these “lit­tle things” are. It sim­ply, but pow­er­fully says:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kind­ness, good­ness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

For me this is the most dif­fi­cult verse in all of Scrip­ture. In each of these qual­i­ties, I dis­cover who gen­uinely I am. The words are inva­sive, ask­ing dif­fi­cult ques­tions of myself:

Gen­uinely, how lov­ing am I—especially to those who are strangers and those that I am not close to? How good or kind am I, espe­cially if some­one has been harsh to me? Under pres­sure or when I don’t get my way, how patient am I? When no one is look­ing, how faith­ful or self-controlled am I? These are just some of the ques­tions this verse asks of me and you.

In my life, like yours as well, it’s the lit­tle things that count. This is where this verse hits hard­est. This is where we need to be most mindful.

Han­nah Arendt coined the phrase “the banal­ity of evil” dur­ing her report­ing of the trial of Nazi war crim­i­nal Adolf Eich­mann. Arendt was struck by Eichmann’s demeanor dur­ing the trial—he seemed so ordi­nary, no dif­fer­ent than her next door neigh­bor. She learned dur­ing this time of research that peo­ple who carry out unspeak­able crimes are usu­ally ordi­nary indi­vid­u­als doing evil in the lit­tle things they are accom­plices to.

Based off of Arendt’s premise, good­ness, like evil, must also be banal—it is in the lit­tle things we do that make us good. It is in the day-to-day life inter­ac­tions and acts that we do that make us into the peo­ple we become. In the end, what makes us good is not when some­one is watch­ing, but rather in the lit­tle and secret things of our lives. In times like these, this is what makes us good or not so good.

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