Sin's Stench

I woke up gagging and knew I’d made a mistake. More than a miscalculation or misjudgment, the choice I made was really stupid and the smell proved it.

Before going to bed the night before, I opened a package of spare ribs that I bought earlier in the day. I intended to cook them at a low heat overnight and serve them to the guys at Bible study. The meat didn’t smell right. In fact, it smelt awful. But instead of trusting my nose, I leaned on my reasoning ability. Okay, ‘ability’ isn’t really an actuate term to use to describe my powers of deduction. Such thought processes for me tend to be unreliable, based more on feeling, instinct or how long it’s been since I’ve eaten a good does of dark creamy chocolate than on logic. I weighed the options.

1. I hate to waste food, so I don’t want to throw this out. Plus it will take time and more gas to go back to store tomorrow morning to return these, and I need this meat for dinner tomorrow.

2. The meat looks nice and pink (the appearance is what fooled me).

3. I just want to go to bed and don’t want to deal with spoiled meat.

4. Maybe, it just needs to be rinsed off and cooked!

So, that’s what I did, put the meat into a roasting pan to cook overnight.

The putrid meat heated slowly all night long. And when Craig opened our bedroom door the next morning odor invaded our room. That’s when the gagging part happened.

It’s hard to describe the smell. Rotten, sour; worse than milk left in baby bottle for a week, in the car, in summer heat. Much worse. Deep. Penetrating. A stench that assails your senses, turns your stomach and convinces you that you may never want to eat again. An odor that makes repeat over and over, “I will not vomit. I will not!” Nothing like a delicate, lovely fragrance but a rotten reeking revolting smell so thick that it almost seemed evil. God intended this disgusting aroma as a way to prevent us from eating something that would make us sick. A warning. Yet, I am the one who brought it into our home, opened it up, ignored the warning and rationalized that it was really okay and instead of throwing it out I provided a way for that decayed meat and its smell to slowly permeate our home while we slept.

Sin is like rotten meat. We don’t have to partake, but if we’re deceived about it’s true nature, because it looks good or we don’t want to be bothered with dealing with it, and we decide to bring it into our life, it will invade the places where we live. I think this may be especially true of sexual sin, addictions, those that we try to hide, as if we could secretly indulge in them without any effect to the rest of our lives. In time, the affect of such unconfessed, hidden sin—sin that we like, that we hold on to, the kind that pulls us and draws us and wraps around us—is that in time it will take over our soul and those we love most will be tainted by it’s odor.

(To Be Contiued)