Do you ever wonder about the why of evil? For many years I persistently questioned why evil even seems to exist, until I finally found that pondering evil’s apparent existence was an obstacle holding me back from healing. The following comparison has been a great help for me to understand why this is so.
Many of us have been driving on the highway in hot, dry, and windless weather when it appears there is a big puddle on the road ahead. But we don’t brake, because we know there’s no puddle there. It’s just a mirage, or what I like to call an optical lie. As we continue driving, the puddle disappears before our eyes.
This mirage is without substance, and therefore it can’t make us skid. We could even say the “puddle” is without reality, although we all see it. So, we cannot directly answer the question, “Why is there a puddle on the road?” because there is none there. Nor should we ask, “How could this big puddle evaporate so quickly?” because this question is based on the wrong assumption that there had been an actual puddle there. The only thing we can do is explain the phenomenon of mirages and what makes the puddle appear to be so real.
