One is accepting everything as God's will. I constantly see situations where people just accept things as Gods will without using their own mind that God gave them to change the situation.
Accepting everything as God's will cannot be used as an excuse to be lazy. For example, I could put no effort into getting a job to support my family and then claim my unemployment is "God's will", but it would not be. I think we are expected to do what we can on our end, but realise that we may not get what we work for or hope to get. It is then that we must accept that this is the will of God, and it is being done in order to bring about something even greater. Simply not doing anything, though, is not an option (cf. Mt. 25.14-30).
Another is the "turn the other cheek" thing, would an Orthodox Christian be expected to let somebody hurt another human being in their prescence without intervention.
The eye for an eye thing in the OT had to do with causing people to understand their actions..you cant just beat up on people...but this didnt speak about defending yourself from an attacker or while at war. It seems like in these books these people just take these beatings on purpose, it angers me everytime I read accoutns like these. People purposely letting harm come to themselves and to others in order to be "humble", I dont get a lot of this, anybody have some thoughts?
One intepretation of the "turn the other cheek" thing that I read went something like this. If you were right handed and wanted to slap someone, chances are you'd hit them on their left cheek. In order to hit them on the right cheek, as the passage says (cf. Mt. 5.39), you'd have to hit them with the back of your hand going in the other direction, and that is especially underhanded. This has more to do with insult than actual injury, if this interpretation (or my description of it) is correct.
More to the point, I think there is a certain value in patiently bearing with wrongs done
to oneself out of love for and in order to follow the example of Christ. Certainly there are instances where self-defence is perfectly valid, and most of us would probably choose to go that route rather than just deal with it, and yet there is value in following Christ even in this.
Allowing things to happen
to others is a different issue. I personally don't think there is any justification for sitting by idly while someone else endures some sort of attack, all in the name of "turning the other cheek". I don't think Christ necessarily wants you, upon seeing a woman about to be mugged at gunpoint (for example), to whip out a prayer rope, kneel in a dark corner, and pray when you are also capable of knocking the guy in the skull with a baseball bat, crowbar, brick, or whatever happens to be laying around and saving the woman from such an attack.
I hope other people will try to help you out, I don't know how helpful this is.
