On Sin

Sin is delicious.

It is an intoxicating blend of excitement and freedom, of self-enabling action and a wanton exercise of power.  It heightens the senses even as it can dull them, grants self confidence even as it strips us of concern, empowers us while enervating others.

It is exhilarating.

Sin - at least when I think back on the many and varied applications of it in my life - is almost never something I have to have long arguments about with myself.  To my shame, few are the times that I have stood there and actively argued against myself for long periods of time.  More often than not it was a fleeting sort of hallway discussion in my mind before the baser side of me blasted out through door of my consciousness into the world.

Often I have tried to make excuses - blaming circumstances or others or some sort of physical or mental weakness that prevents me from not sinning.  It never really works quite the way I am hoping in my mind, which always tends to bring things back to the place they should be.  I prefer to justify the why, ignoring the what (specifically the "What I did") entirely.  I am usually disabused of this option rather quickly.

Sin is also both an easy and difficult thing to discuss:  easy because too often I can rattle off the most horrid of actions as if I had watched them in a character on the screen as I try to relate to others and "connect", difficult when I actually have to confess or discuss it to those whom it has harmed or injured or to whom there exist no justification for the actions.

Sin remains reliable, in at least one sense:  whether sooner or later, the results of it will always turn to ash in my hands and bitterness in my mouth.  There is scarcely anything that has come from sin in my life that has in long term brought me health, wealth, or happiness - with the very few exceptions of those things where, by the grace of God, He turned something that was very bad (evil - can we use the word evil here?) into something good.

But perhaps the saddest part of all to me is the very real sense that, just on the outside of my consciousness and barely out of my sight, sin is hovering, waiting for the least indication of self doubt or self justification to lunge in with the speed of a striking shark, attempting to push through the barrier of thought to action.