Sometimes it can be easier to ignore the awful reality of the Fall. Figuratively speaking, we just want to close our blinds and turn away from the brokenness we see around us—and inside of us.

This tactic is nothing new. Just as Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together to hide from their nakedness, we too want to hide from the ugliness of our sin. Like Adam and Eve, we do what we can to cover up the bad stuff. The thought is that if we just behave, pray, and go to church, surely no evil can touch us or be in us.

So sometimes it takes a story of pure human brokenness to pierce our thick coats. In one of America’s finest short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor gives us just that. The plot revolves around a selfish old grandmother trying her hardest to get her way and an escaped killer called The Misfit. The story unfolds to show the universal evils of humanity’s fallen condition, existing in everyone from a grandmother to a madman.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find takes both mundane and extreme circumstances to show the root of the wickedness of man: doubt. O’Conner then forces the grandmother into a position where she has to look her sin in the eye, and she turns to the only place that offers a solution: Jesus. The grandmother experiences redemption only after she realizes her brokenness. We too must do something with the wickedness in us: go to Jesus or despair.

Sin leaves us barren and incomplete, and like The Misfit says, “It’s no real pleasure in life.”

O’Connor shows our need for a savior from this world’s brokenness, whether a churchgoer or a murderer. 

A Good Man Is Hard to Find is sobering, beautiful, painful, and ripe for study. Click the link below to read and pull some of God’s Story from this great short story. (Read Below)

A Good Man Is Hard To Find