An Overflow of Sins…

A very small thing happened yesterday and yet it sparked a flood of thoughts and God-given insight.  My daughter has been very forgetful lately… one can imagine that the stress and grief from getting over this miscarriage may have her sort of preoccupied.  She has made the mistake upon a few occassions of leaving out perishable food so that it had to be discarded before it had been fully used.  They had bought a gallon of milk and only used a small bit then she left it out.  Her husband found it in the morning and the milk had gone bad.  Having worked for the local grocery store chain just recently, he knew the ins and outs and budget allotments, etc. so he took it back to the store and said the milk was spoiled and asked for a new one.  Of course they complied and he got a new gallon of milk.

My daughter was telling me a little bit about it when we were passing the time when that meeting was cancelled.  They sort of laughed about it, guiltily, and she said, “Now, wasn’t that lying?  I told him that was deceit and that he shouldn’t do it.” 

My son-in-law said, “I didn’t lie, I said, ‘the milk was bad,’ I didn’t say HOW it got bad.”

I told them that I had to think about that for a minute.  I said, “There are two types of sin.  The sins of O-mission and the sins of CO-mission.”  Explaining that, I went on, “The sins of O-mission are the things you SHOULD have done that you DIDN’T do.  The sins of CO-mission are the things you SHOULDN’T have done, that you DID.   How do you think that plays in here?”

“The thing is,” I continued, “when you spoke about the milk going bad and didn’t say how, that was probably a sin of O-mission, but when my daughter left the milk out and didn’t put it away, maybe THAT was a sin of CO-mission.  We are instructed to be good stewards over what we are given, and that was not good stewardship.  Her sin of CO-mission (unintentional as it was) actually spawned YOUR sin of O-mission.  That’s something to think about.”

I thought more and more about that, myself.  Small as it was, there was a definately lesson there.  Whether our intent is to sin or not, one sin often spawns another.  Sure, God forgives us, but the chain reaction has begun even before we realize we’ve sinned!  My daughter is very Godly.  She puts God first in everything she can.  She’s not Mother Teresa or anything, but she is amazing for a 27 year old girl!  Nevertheless, here was a sin, poor stewardship.  Unintentional and not even realized, but still a sin, and because of that sin, my son-in-law committed another sin.  That sin was a WRONG thing committed for the RIGHT reasons, if you think about it… he was trying to practice good, sensible stewardship.  But, look at how things all turned out… they BOTH ended up sinning simply from an unintentional mistake!  Wow!  That really made me think.

And I got to thinking about my first sister-in-law.  When I was only seventeen she and I became very close.  One day we were in the kitchen together and I said to her something about being a virgin until you were married.  She put down her dishrag and told me, very thoughtfully, that she didn’t really think the important thing was waiting until you were married, but instead waiting for THE one that you would be with for life.

She told me that she had slept with my (oldest, not the crack guy) brother before they were married and she didn’t really see anything wrong in that since they were now married.

I mulled that over and immediately accepted it into my young belief system, consequently, when I got engaged, I slept with the guy (or tried to, we were both very inexperienced so actually never culminated it).  After breaking that engagement, I really slept with my next intended (whom I did marry).  I never really felt there was anything wrong with it.  I considered the Bible rather antiquated and non-reliable, so that didn’t sway me in any direction at all.

Nevertheless, that one sin (even though we didn’t believe it was a sin) spawned the next sin (my sleeping with my future husband out of wedlock).  That set me up for a slippery slope into promiscuity later as well as teaching my OWN daughters the same erroneous beliefs that my sister-in-law had taught me.

Later, when I came back to God, I realized that the Bible is a wonderful and right guide.  Nevertheless, my oldest daughter was pretty worldly and she ended up losing her virginity before marriage.  I tried to keep it from my other daughter but eventually she found out.  Of course once she found out, she too lost hers thinking that it must be okay since her older sister did it.

As you can see, good-hearted and well-intentioned people made unintentional mistakes not even realizing their sin and look what happened!  The sins just begin flowing and flowing and flowing like rivers that trickle until they build into a stream and eventually you have a white-water rampage of loosened devils.  It just seems like the worst onslought of sin begins with small unintentional errors.

Now, I’m not saying that this whole milk thing is bringing on or has brought on the white-water river of further sin, but I’m just considering the chain reaction of sin and how it moves in even when we are trying to be vigilant.  We don’t even realize our sins so often and then we wonder how we got into the messes we’re in!

This was all just food for thought and consideration.  A ponderance from the Lord to me.