Home Away from Home with Abi Adeboyejo
Email: abi.adeboyejo@yahoo.com Twitter: @abihafh
My neighbour of many years disappeared from her house and it was a few weeks before anyone noticed she was gone. She had money problems and decided to relocate to Saudi Arabia to work as a nurse to make more money. I hope she knows that they don’t tolerate lies and backbiting over there. They are not as forgiving and she won’t be able to get away with the kind of huge pay-out she got for the lies she told about her colleagues, just so she could claim unfair dismissal from the NHS before she left the UK. Jail, suffering and swift justice is the language in Saudi Arabia. She enjoyed the stress she caused at work and has now taken her misery somewhere else. Let’s hope she comes back from Saudi with all her limbs.
It seems that everywhere I look these days I see examples of people behaving badly. Take for instance my friend’s tenant who refused to pay her rent for months. I wrote an article about this a few months ago. After a lot of threatening behaviour (from the tenant) and hours of fasting and prayers (from me), I was able to discover that the tenant had moved out of the said house since June and had sub-let the house to other people, including installing a poor soul in the garden shed, complete with portable heating and a small child’s potty! On discovering that the house had been turned into a refuge for disreputable people, I did more research and found that the lady was known for such criminal acts. In fact, she thrived on making people’s lives a misery. Now my friend owes her bank over £10,000 in unpaid mortgage, among the other problems she has.
I also heard about a lady (a family friend) in Ireland who had six children with her husband. After 14 years of marriage, the man decided to call it quits because he was unhappy and had heard rumours about his wife’s activities. The woman fumed with indignation. She insisted on suing the man for child support for the six children. After everyone had judged the man as cruel and irresponsible, DNA evidence showed that only one of the six children was his. Having an affair is one thing, but having children for other men and trying to pass them off as her husband’s is evil of a higher order. How could she live with the daily deceit while watching the man love children that weren’t his?
What about the story on BBC news this week about the girl/woman who left her new-born baby in a wheelie bin? The child was dead by the time it was found. I hope the mother suffers for what she did but I won’t be surprised if she is back in town by next week, visiting clubs, drinking and living her life like nothing has happened. She obviously couldn’t cope with having a child, but couldn’t she take it to children’s home or hospital or even leave the child in a church? She left a human being in a dustbin to die, like rubbish. Except she was suffering from a mental breakdown, such a person can only be described as evil.
We’ve all seen the video of the maniacal Ugandan nanny who almost beat a little girl to death. It went viral on WhatsApp and Facebook a couple of weeks ago and many of my friends with young children where distraught because they knew that such could happen to their children if their nannies or child-minders were evil-minded too. How can anyone justify such behaviour?
The heart of man can be evil. The one that smiles with you can be the one who will kill you. There are people who will always look after number one first, even if it means hurting everyone around them. There are people who only do things for their own pleasure, even if what gives them pleasure is inherently evil.
So let’s assume everyone reading this is a good person. Everyone believes that they are good, myself included. However, if a person finds pleasure in certain actions, they need to check themselves because they are clearly leaning towards the evil camp.
What does an evil look like? An evil person enjoys making life difficult, painful, and unpleasant for the good people around them. For example, the boss who insists that his staff come to work every weekend, even though they never do any work derives sadistic pleasure at the sullen attitude of his poor, overworked staff. He enjoys their discomfort at having to miss family events and time with their loved ones.
What distinguishes such evil people from criminals is that they are very quick learners; they figure out what will happen to them if they pursue the sort of obvious evil things and they know when to stop, without being detected as being evil. Take that Ugandan nanny, for example. She knew just how hard she could beat the child without actually killing her. Evil people make good people miserable because they enjoy other people’s misery. Just before you make your mind up that a person who has been giving you grief is evil, they will do something extremely nice, like buy you a present so that you will forget how bad they have been.
Evil people are careful to do their best to blend into society. This insulates and protects them from the angered reaction of good people. Examples of typical evil behaviour is putting people down, passive aggressive behaviour, insults, ‘back stabbing’, cheating and pathological lying. All of these things are so common that many good people adopt them as reasonable ways to behave; they are not, they are as evil as anything could be.
Life is hard enough without having to cope with evil. May God show us those who really love us. Amen.
