Daily Lesson for October 12, 2015

Today's Daily Lesson comes from 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verses 5 through 6a:


4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or keep record of wrongdoing. 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing.

The Germans have a word called schadenfreude which is the delight a person gets at the misfortune of others. Pretty sick, I know.

But there's another sick delight I wish somebody would come up with a name for. It is the delight a person gets at the misdeeds of others.

This is the delight a 5th grader gets when standing at the chalkboard while the teacher has stepped away. There you are, asked to perform your duty in keeping the classroom in good order, but secretly what you're really doing is delighting in writing down the names of your misbehaving classmates.

I wish someone had a word for that.

Or, it's the delight one experiences when having been slighted in some way yet again in church or at work he gets to write down in his little mental ledger another mark of deficit in another's column. It feels good to be able to look down again in the ledger and see yet again how many times somebody else has wronged us. There's a kind of pleasure in the death from a thousand cuts.

Does anybody know German?  Because I wish somebody would come up with a good word for this feeling of deranged pleasure at others' misdeeds.

But whatever the word is, when we finally get it and look it up, it's opposite will almost certainly be the word love.