{"id":5595,"date":"2026-07-22T08:35:49","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T12:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5595"},"modified":"2026-07-22T08:35:49","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T12:35:49","slug":"mini-me-and-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/22\/mini-me-and-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Mini-Me and Me"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>


Dr. Evil is back.

This summer, Mike Myers is reprising one of the all-time comedic bad guys in a new series of commercials for Verizon.

The gray-suited parody of early James Bond villains is attempting to launch Menace Mobile, a new mobile phone company, which he claims will have \u201cthe most confusing pricing plans of all time.\u201d Now, that\u2019s diabolical.

Dr.\u00a0Evil typically hangs out\u00a0in one of his\u00a0secret lairs, hatching\u00a0schemes to take over\u00a0the world.\u00a0His entourage includes the dashing Number Two, teenage son Scott Evil, Soviet-era femme fatale Frau Farbissina, the hairless cat Mr. Bigglesworth, and his sidekick clone Mini-Me, who is declared to be one-eighth\u00a0his size but\u00a0twice as evil.\u00a0\u00a0

What accounts for this relentless commitment to bad-ness?\u00a0\u00a0

According to the\u00a0back story, Dr.\u00a0Evil was\u00a0raised by Belgians, which is what made him “so complex and evil.\u201d And who can forget that it was the Belgians who eliminated the US soccer team from the World Cup two weeks ago? He takes it personally when people call him\u00a0Mr. Evil<\/em>. “I didn’t spend six years in evil medical school to be called ‘Mister,’ thank you very much!”\u00a0\u00a0

What’s interesting is that apart\u00a0from video games, horror flicks,\u00a0and Austin Powers movies, the word “evil” has almost disappeared from our vocabulary.

It seems outdated and extreme – something our grandparents believed in, maybe, but not an idea\u00a0to be seriously entertained by modern\u00a0educated people.

Haven’t we outgrown the whole notion\u00a0of evil?\u00a0\u00a0

The problem is that it’s painfully hard to classify certain realities as anything less than\u00a0spiritual darkness.\u00a0

The agnostic poet\u00a0W.H. Auden believed there was a logical, humanistic explanation for everything.\u00a0But during the 1940’s, when he saw newsreels of the rounding up of Polish Jews at the start of World War II \u2013 and realized that Germans in the darkened theater were actually cheering \u2013 he realized that “evil” was the only way\u00a0to account for such horror.\u00a0That realization ultimately led him to trust God.\u00a0\u00a0

“Evil” is the only word to describe assailants shooting randomly at students and teachers in elementary schools; terrorists flying passenger jets into skyscrapers; and \u201crevolutionaries\u201d using trucks to run down families on Parisian sidewalks during holidays. \u00a0

There’s something seriously wrong with these\u00a0people.

But then, there’s something seriously wrong with you and me, too.\u00a0\u00a0

That dreadful something is the starting point for every religion and philosophy worth its salt.\u00a0Whatever else people have believed, they have universally concluded there is a something wrong with humanity.\u00a0Socrates and Plato and Aristotle believed that.\u00a0So did the Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, Marx, Freud, Gandhi, Tony Robbins, and Shirley Maclaine.\u00a0\u00a0

You can put Jesus into that crowd as well.\u00a0

Author John Ortberg writes, “Something is terribly wrong and cries out to be put right.\u00a0But it’s not just the world.\u00a0Something is terribly wrong in me<\/em>.\u00a0I’m afraid, alone, aging, arrogant, anxious.\u00a0And I haven’t even gotten to the B words yet.”

There are all kinds of problems outside of me. I usually experience them as suffering<\/em>.

But when I fearlessly consider the condition of my own soul, I begin to grasp\u00a0the depth of the problems inside<\/em> of me.\u00a0\u00a0

According to Scripture, evil isn’t a disproved theory.\u00a0Nor is it a spiritual virus that’s been “cured,” like polio.\u00a0Evil is alive and well and lurking inside every human heart. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:8)

What is evil?\u00a0It’s the rejection of love. It’s to cherish\u00a0what I know is wrong.\u00a0When I refuse to forgive the person who hurt me, and harden my heart to the needs of my neighbor, and choose to do what I know is self-serving, I am rejecting love and surrendering to evil.\u00a0\u00a0

The problem, in other words, isn’t Mini-Me. It’s me<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus makes it clear that fleeing\u00a0evil is on the short list of what needs to occupy my\u00a0attention every day.\u00a0“Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”\u00a0

We may think we need to be on the lookout for the real-world equivalent of Dr. Evil today.\u00a0But our gravest\u00a0concern is far scarier:\u00a0who we might become if we choose to reject love.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>

James Bond and Austin Powers appropriately spend their time\u00a0thinking\u00a0about how to save the world.\u00a0\u00a0

But our call is to think about how to receive and share the love God alone can provide.

That’s because it’s the only thing that\u00a0can\u00a0surely save us<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here Dr. Evil is back. This summer, Mike Myers is reprising one of the all-time comedic bad guys in a new series of commercials for Verizon. The gray-suited parody of early James Bond villains is attempting to launch Menace Mobile, a new mobile phone company, which he claims will have \u201cthe most… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5596,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[520,104],"class_list":["post-5595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-evil","tag-love"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5597,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595\/revisions\/5597"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}