The Easy Choice or the Right Choice?

The end of another year is approaching, and the relative "unknowness" of 2006 looms in the future. I was at my Grandparent's house the last few days, and because they live in the middle of absolute nowhere I had the chance to catch up on some of my reading. For some reason, I felt compelled to read a book I've had for a couple of years but hadn't read through in a long while. It's another one those Christian purity books. And I don't mean that in a flippant way, I think purity of mind and body is an important issue for young Christians and our generation.

As I read though it, I was struck with a harsh reality. Many of the bad decisions that the book warned against, I've made. So many of the promises I made to myself have fallen by the wayside. This year is not one that I will look back on and think, "gee, I made a lot of wise, godly decisions this year." And oh, how I regret it. I made the easy choices.

For me, the foolish decisions always seem to be the easy ones. The ones where I don't think. It's easy to do the wrong thing, it's hard to do the right thing. It always seems that way, why can't the right choice be easy for me? The closer I look at the year 2005, I'm almost glad I made some easy choices. Don't misunderstand me, I really really wish I had done the right thing. But now that I have made some easy choices, I feel like I have a better understanding of what sin is.

All too often, I feel, in Christian circles we portray sin and obvious, and easy to spot. But the truth of it that sin is sometimes disguised. It wears a pretty mask. Sin rarely seems wrong to us. And this year, I was too niave of a Christian to see that. This didn't look like sin. But now that I've seen sin, fallen into it, and faced it's consequences, I know what it looks like, and I refuse to be decived by it again. I don't want to make the easy choices.