Our Serving Of Insanity

In Father Fiction, there is a chapter on integrity. A very short, yet powerful chapter.

Donald Miller "took advantage" of a salesman's mistake and got a free phone and his father figure mentor, John pointed out that it was wrong. John tells Donald, "The Bible talks about having a calloused heart. That's when sin, after a period of time, has so deceived us we no longer care whether our thoughts and actions are right or wrong. And we have to guard against that."

In college, I was intrigued by the concept of justification. Seriously, before that lesson in my psych class, I'd never heard of it. I had never thought of it. But, of course, I immediately understood what it was all about.

My life has been an interesting mess for quite some time. And I took advantage of the mess when I could. Tell my mom a small white lie so that I could spend an extra half hour at a friends' house instead of returning home, tell another small lie to get a few extra bucks from her to buy cigarettes. Then, they grew a little larger and a little larger. But I justified it. My mom was over protective, and I wasn't hurting anyone. So, soon, I was having boys over to friends houses with no parents, or was walking around town while at my dad's when she thought I was somewhere else. Then, the sneaking to parties, sneaking to get alcohol, sneaking to smoke pot. Somewhere, I crossed the lines from something small and insignificant, to putting myself in some very potentially dangerous situations. And even then, I continued to make stupid choices. On more than one occassion, looking back, I could have been raped or even killed. But, because nothing bad happened, I continued to justify my actions to myself.

My heart grew calloused. It grew hard and I began to struggle to tell the difference between right and wrong, between the truth and lies. At one point, I was so deep in lies that I couldn't even remember what the truth was. In all honesty, I don't even know if my mom knows how I really met Jose (unless she's reading this now!). And when your heart begins to grow hard, you start to lose touch with your faith. You begin to push God away, because, as we all know, you can't lie to God. You can lie to anyone, including yourself, but God knows. God always knows.