This week’s word is one that you may have heard before: shadenfreude. It’s not a happy word. It’s German, and has been adopted into English for quite a while now.
It’s…pleasure and satisfaction in someone else’s pain. We’ve all felt it. We’ve all thought ‘oh that person deserved that’ and been happy they got what was coming to them. But the thing is…that’s not our place, is it? Judgement isn’t ours, it’s God’s. And in a world where we are often encouraged, even indirectly, to feel shadenfreude, to pass it around, it’s not a good thing, and it’s something that needs to be fought against. Because at the end of the day -- we’ve all ‘deserved it’, at one point or another. And God has forgiven us all, now and forever.
