A "moral" question...

So, say someone dear to you (a fellow believer) has done something "wrong"--either immoral, illegal, or just plain stupid...doesn't really matter--and they've asked you to bail them out of the situation. They've dug themselves in so deep that the only way they're going to get out of it is take one more step in the process of immorality/illegality/stupidity, with YOU as their facilitator. There's light at the end of the tunnel and you can see the hope of it, but it's a one-way tunnel and there's no back-tracking the way they came in.

You have the ability to do the "digging out" for them. What do you do? Does yet another "wrong" make a lot of "right"? If you choose to NOT do it, what kind of blood does that potentially put on your hands? Or does it put anything at all on your hands, since this was their mess to begin with? What does the whole "body of Christ" concept say here? If we are truly operating as a BODY, how much of this mess is MY mess as well? How much can we separate/compartmentalize--and potentially justify away--our responsibility to care for our "body"?

And where (if, indeed, there IS this point...and I believe there is somewhere) do you draw the line and say "no more"? How do you know when you just have to say "I'm sorry", close your eyes, shed your tears, and let them fall? I'm not sure how to know if you're walking close enough to God to hear his voice if he says "stop NOW". I guess I'm afraid of getting so sucked into someone else's mess that I'm not going to be able to discern God's voice because my compassion has clogged up my ears.

Thoughts???

Stranger in a not-so-strange land...

So, I'm back from my little hiatus. And wishing I was, as I said in my last post, warm. It was bad enough to leave Miami with temps in the 80s and fly into St. Louis where it was 21, but...I'm just cold. Heart-cold. Soul-cold.

I feel like Rip Van Winkle...somewhere, I must have fallen asleep and missed something crucial. The world has changed and I've awakened from a crazy dream in which life has been going on "normally", only to find that everything familiar is not...and everyone familiar is not. The thing is, I just don't know when I fell asleep. Last week? Last month? Last year?

It's weird, because in some ways, it was much easier for me to be a stranger in a strange place--it was okay for me to feel out of place in Miami Beach, because I WAS out of place, but it was a comfortable kind of being out-of-place...getting accustomed to new surroundings, gradually getting to know the sights and sounds and becoming familiar with people and places. It's NOT okay for me to be a stranger at home. But here I am.

I think I'd like to go back to the dream now, please. And I'll take some sunshine along with it.

Brief hiatus...

...I'll be back. When I get warm. :-)