We Write Our Own Script

Melodramatic plays have a fairly standard formula: a heroine in distress, a hero who comes to her rescue and a villain who wants to wreck everything. In the end, no matter how bleak the situation appears, the heroine is saved, the hero is victorious and the villain's plans are foiled. All along the way, emotions are exaggerated and improbable circumstances keep cropping up, usually for comedic effect.
 
After having recently been involved in a melodrama, I was thinking how convenient it would be if life had the same standard outcome, with good winning out over evil in such obvious ways, and all of us learning to keep a good sense of humor about bumps in the road. But in the real world, good doesn't always appear to triumph, and defining good isn't always even possible. As much as we would like to think it's true, not everything can be broken down into absolute right and wrong. Murky areas persist.
 
War in the name of justice is a prime example, but closer to home for all of us are questions of loving those around us. How do we do that? For instance, there's the balance between disciplining children and giving them freedom to make mistakes on their own, of providing for them without going overboard. There's the call to love our neighbors and deciding if that means giving them what they need or helping them get what they need on their own. If we are "taken advantage of" by someone who appears to have misused what we've given them, do we never help them again because it could be "casting our pearls before swine," as scripture mentions?
 
There is no right or wrong answer to many of life's questions. We make decisions based on the circumstances at hand and hope we don't make a situation worse. When our motivation is based on our impulse to help someone who is in distress, when our desire is to place the needs of others ahead of our own, that's about the best we can do. Not every situation will always be summed up neatly like it is in a melodrama, life's too messy and unpredictable for that, but we can't let that stop us from trying to do the right thing, helping where we see a need. We're writing our own script as we go, we might as well learn to enjoy the plot twists and turns along the way.