I am sitting here at Starbucks, trying to get some work done and trying to wait out the downpour outside.

Next to me settled a gaggle of high school girls - nine of them! - who busied themselves with Frappuccinos, iPhones, and the latest gossip.

[Sidenote: did you know that these days, asking someone to the Homecoming dance looks an awful lot like a marriage proposal? I heard stories of boys filling up girls rooms with balloons, or decorating their lockers, or taking them to dinner, or writing clever messages on their driveways with sidewalk chalk, just to ask their girlfriends to a dance. I'm pretty sure every dance I went to in High School involved a three-second exchange: "Do you want to go to homecoming/prom/turnabout with me?" "Sure." (Or "No." I might have asked a few folks to homecoming and gotten turned down in my past high school life...)]

Anyway, in and amongst their chatter, they tossed off casual but poignant judgments and insults about their classmates. Nothing outside the realm of usual high school stuff, I suppose, but pretty harsh nonetheless. Judging everything from clothes to pets to circles of friends to school activities. And razzing on their parents and teachers.

On the surface, it's easy to dismiss this as "just what high school girls do," and you might be right. I was a high school girl once, and I know that I probably said the same sorts of things. High school is a place to learn about yourself and try to define yourself, and sometimes you do that by creating distance - even artificial distance - between yourself and others, even if you can only do that by cutting other people down.

But it was hard to sit here and listen to them while I still had Jesus' words from Mark ringing in my ears from last weekend: "For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

It is from within, from the human heart.

So today, I am thinking about what it is in the human heart that makes it feel okay to cut other people down, or what makes it okay to give high school girls a free pass because we assume it's just in their nature to be catty.

And I am thinking about what it would take for each of us - no matter age or place in life - to let Jesus shine through us, and for us to be at our best, even when no one appears to be watching us. Because even though this passage from Mark is sort of dark and harsh, I think it is telling us something pretty important: that faith changes us from the inside out, and even if we're not perfect, and even if we mess up sometimes, shouldn't the deepest desire of our hearts be to live out the grace and mercy that is inside of us?