That can't be true, Journeys leave marks on your psyche in the form of memories and habits, so each day isn't really a chance to start anew, it's just a chance to change direction.
Habitual sin is a journey. Small, habitual sins are journeys of tiny steps. Each step is, in and of itself, relatively inconsequential, but in the aggregate, quite damaging. Each small sin is a decision that's easy to make because of some combination of the following:
- You can (you have the opportunity)
- There's some payoff
- It's not really hurting anyone
It's the last one that gets you in trouble. Any individual step on a long journey doesn't get you all that much closer to your destination, so each step is unimportant taken by itself. However, the cumulative steps of selling your integrity, having another dink or drinking every day, downloading a little more porn, criticizing your kids or mocking your wife for a mistake can be horrific. Addictions and divorces result from such individual steps.
I've got a good friend who is a recovered alcoholic. The other day he told me that people turn around their lives when they find the one thing they won't give up for their addiction. In his case, it was his family. My point here is that he got to the point of having to make the choice between his drinking and his family by single steps.
I'm sure he'd rather have seen into the future, imagined what that moment of choice was going to feel like and turned his steps around before he hit bottom.
We all have that choice every day, but we almost never make it. Instead, we go for that payoff because one more (drink, lie, criticism, porn viewing session, theft) isn't going to hurt anyone all that much.
Until it does.
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| This was the most cliched image I could think of for this post. You didn't think I was going to be completely serious for the whole thing, did you? |
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