I used to live in a neighborhood that wasn’t very nice. Well, when I moved in, it was okay. Then the management of the apartment complex changed and things went downhill really quickly and eventually the place got a really bad (and well-deserved) reputation for being rough and dangerous.
When the apartments were nice and didn’t have a reputation for housing a lot of drug dealers and gang members, we used to get lots of people of various sorts coming around to try to convert us to whatever religion it was they were evangelizing. I always took their literature and would sometimes chat with them about what they believed (even if I knew I’d never convert).
The worse the apartment complex got, the fewer people came around. Eventually. NO ONE did. Even the pizza delivery guy would make me come downstairs to the parking lot to get my pizza (he was too afraid to come into the stairwell). The religious sorts who had been around trying to convert us and save our souls just scurried off to some other neighborhood.
The thing that struck me about this is that I would have thought the people living in this bad neighborhood were the MOST in need of salvation and hope and spiritual enlightenment…
This experience taught me something about the nature of human beings. For most people, if it’s convenient and not too troublesome, they’ll try to help (and they genuinely do believe they’re helping when they try to convert you, no matter how annoying it may be), but the moment doing so puts them into any personal discomfort, danger, etc., they’re off “helping” other people who live in nicer neighborhoods (literally or metaphorically).
Small wonder martyrs are made into saints and revered. Most people won’t even go up a stairwell to convert the unsaved, so dying painfully for what you believe really does make you stand out in a crowd…
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