Today, I almost got caught. I thought I was doing everything I could to avoid being noticed. I was always on the lookout. I knew what to look for. I have been doing this for so long, it was as if I almost had a six sense about this sort of thing, like I could feel it in my bones. My time was up, or at least I thought.
As I drove home across the barren landscape that is north-eastern Nevada, I paid no attention to my speed nor my surroundings. The landscape may as well have been a softly sung lullaby, drifting me off to sleep. So I sped, and I almost got caught. If it wasn’t for my cat-like reflexes and my flash-forward thinking, I could have gotten a ticket, but with one swift move, I escaped the detection of the highway patrol, and now live to drive another day.
In so many respects, this is how we can live our lives, covering up our filth, making sure we take all precautions to not be noticed; avoiding detection to only wallow in it once again.
Matthew 5:29-30
“Let’s not pretend this is easier than it really is. If you want to live a morally pure life, here’s what you have to do: You have to blind your right eye the moment you catch it in a lustful leer. You have to choose to live one-eyed or else be dumped on a moral trash pile. And you have to chop off your right hand the moment you notice it raised threateningly. Better a bloody stump than your entire being discarded for good in the dump,” (The Message).
Sometimes the best thing for us is to get caught. To have what is done in the dark to be brought into the light. I was told a while ago that “what is done in secret, is wide open in heaven”. Sin has a way of letting itself known, today, tomorrow… eventually it will become known.
I guess the question that faces us now, is what will we do when we have become exposed? Cover it up once again? Figure another way out? Or will we let it become known that we are like everyone else in the world, fallen and broken, and we, just like the rest, needs Christ’s love, now probably more than ever.