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Thursday, March 20, 2014

Weighty Decisions

This article appeared in the March, 2014 edition of the Wheatland Parish newsletter.

A few weeks ago, I weighed myself and discovered I weighed 178 pounds.  Now, that’s not terrible for a person of my height, but it’s ten pounds more than I weighed six or seven months ago.  Gaining ten pounds in six months is not a good thing.  At that rate, I’ll gain twenty pounds in a year, forty pounds in two years, sixty pounds in three years, etc.  That’s not a good trend.

So, it’s time for me to start trying to lose weight.  The thing is, I know how to do that.  I know exactly what I did to gain the weight, and I know exactly what I need to do to lose it.  I gained weight by eating a lot of foods I should not eat.  I gained weight because I was eating too many things like chocolate chip cookies and M&Ms and brownies and Dairy Queen blizzards.  It turns out that things like that tend to make me gain weight.  Who knew? 

So, to lose weight, I need to stop eating those foods.  It’s as simple as that.

What makes it not so simple, of course, is that those foods I need to stop eating, the chocolate chip cookies and the M&Ms and the brownies and the Dairy Queen blizzards, are things I really, really, like to eat.  They’re a hard temptation for me to resist, because I really, really want to eat them.  And because I want to eat them, it’s really easy for me to make “exceptions”. 

I come up with reasons why it’s okay to have a few chocolate chip cookies “just this once”.  And they can be really good reasons, or at least they seem like it to me at the time. The first time I make an exception like that, I struggle with it.  I have to work to convince myself it’s okay.  The second time, though, is a little easier.  It takes less effort.  The third time is easier still.  After a while, there’s no struggle at all.  I don’t even bother to come up with reasons why it’s okay to eat those things.  I just eat them, and I start gaining weight again.

As I thought about it, it seems to me that’s kind of the way sin works in our lives.  Don’t get me wrong--I’m not saying gaining weight is sinful.  But think about it.  For the most part, we know what we should do and what we should not do.  For the most part, we know when we’re sinning and when we’re not. 

But sometimes, the things we should not do are really tempting to us.  So, because we want to commit a sin, we find it easy to make “exceptions”.  We come up with reasons why it’s okay to do what we want to do, “just this once”.  And they can be really good reasons, or at least they seem like it to us at the time.  The first time we commit a sin like that, we struggle with it.  We have to work hard to convince ourselves it’s okay.  The second time is a little easier.  It takes less effort.  The third time is easier still.  After a while, there’s no struggle at all.  We don’t even bother trying to rationalize our sins.  We just commit them.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible for us to ease away from sin the way we’ve eased into it, any more than I can ease away from the wrong foods the way I eased into them.  The only way I can lose weight is to drop those bad foods entirely.  And the only way we can get away from our sins is to drop them entirely.  We need to ask God for forgiveness and resolve to change our lives.

The good news is that, when we ask God for forgiveness, God will give it to us.  When we resolve to change our lives, God will help us.  We can drop the weight of sin, and get back on the right path again.  Then, we can get on with our lives and be the people God wants us to be.


I’m trying to clean up my diet so I can drop some of that extra weight I’ve gained.  As we enter the season of Lent, let’s clean up our lives and drop some of that extra weight of sin.  Let’s get back on the right path again.  

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