Redefining Sin (part 1)

I remember the day as if it were a movie.  Not shot particularly well, more like security camera footage, only in color.  For some reason this is the way most of my memories from my childhood work, a photograph, a silent video, somewhat sepia toned but with spots of color.  I can always see myself in my memories, almost as if they are someone else's of me.  Someone videoing and taking still shots of my life all the while knowing exactly what it is that I am thinking, what I am feeling.

So I am walking home from school, and I hate myself.

I've always had a strong conscience.  I had fought with it for a long time.  I tried not to care, I even tried to be a little bit of a "bad kid," but that conscience...  My mom used to tell me that if I ever did anything wrong then I was going to be caught.  No 'ifs', 'ands' or 'buts' about it, I would be caught.  She said something about God loving me...

What I started to realize was that she was right in the worst imaginable kind of way, I was always caught, but not always by someone else.  I was always caught by myself.  That stupid, overactive, never sleeping conscience!  Maybe this was why I always viewed my memories as if from the outside, maybe because I was always spying on myself, and I hated what I saw.

I grew up in church hearing about the evils of sin in our world.  How we all have a "sin nature" that causes us to want to sin.  How there are forces of darkness in our world that would try and cause sin to become the accepted way of life.  How sin entered into the world when Adam and Eve first bit the forbidden fruit.  I understood this in my own life.  I could see it as if from the outside.  I was filled with this blackness.

So I am walking home from school, and I hate myself.  I know who I really am.  I walk in the front door and no one is home.  I am so sick of myself.  I don't want to die, because I am certain God will throw me in hell, but I really hate me.  I'm fuming with it.  I walk into my bedroom, I shut my door, I pull off my shirt, I take out my belt and I begin to whip myself.  Over and over again, welcoming the pain, not holding back.

I deserve this.

I have been caught.

I have been found out for who I really am.

I cannot hide from me.

I had come to understand sin as an outside force, a black cloud in a sense.  Something ever looming on the horizon, praying on the weak, causing me to want to party, and look at porn, and break things.  But I also saw it as an infecting force.  And how do you deal with an infection?

So I took my daily inoculations of reading my bible, and praying, and going to church, and lifting my hands in worship.  I went on a mission trip, I shared my beliefs with my classmates; all this in an attempt to hold the force of sin raging in my body at bay.  But I wasn't fooled, God wasn't fooled, we both knew who I was.

I began to hold tightly to Paul's statement in Romans 7, "I do not do the thing I want, but I do the very things that I hate!  Wretched man that I am! Who will save me from myself?"

So I whipped myself.  I punished myself so that God would not have to later.  Maybe if He saw how much I hated that I was sinning, He would take that into consideration when determining my eternal destiny.

I was so broken.  I was such a mess.  How could I ever move beyond this?

The change came when I began to redefine sin.

(To be continued...)