Life according to Gordon

I acknowledge that I had sinned. I had pursued sin in the hope that it would bring me happiness, comfort, power, control, stability, strength, joy. Sin promises all of those things. It looks alluring and seduces you, always tempting you with the belief that you don't already have enough in your life and that you need more. In thinking about sin, I realized that it is very much like a casino slot machine. Last June I went to Las Vegas with a group of friends and had an overall negative experience. We spent five days there, and while there were some good points in the trip (I did enjoy the shows we went to), the misery vastly outweighed the fleeting happiness. Las Vegas really just isn't my cup of tea. But I do remember seeing vast multitudes of people just pouring in huge amounts of money into the slot machines. They would put in more and more and more, always hoping to win it big. There were posters on the wall showcasing all the lucky individuals who had supposedly won it big. One lady won $6,000. As I looked at that picture, I just had to wonder how much more she had spent prior to that jackpot, and how much more she continued to spend afterward. Not to mention how much more everyone else spent because that picture was there.

Any slot machine you will ever encounter is rigged. They are specifically programmed to ensure that the odds are always greatly against you. They are also programmed to give you a small payout every once in awhile--just enough to get people to believe that they're winning, or that they're about to win big. There's even a term for this; it's called the gambler's fallacy. The money you put into a slot machine will almost invariably be more than the money you take out. The idea behind the fallacy is that people believe these tiny payouts they get once in a blue moon are signs that some higher power has some memory of all the times they lost money and is about ready to turn things around for them. In reality, there's no such thing as a higher power that's going to encourage anyone's gambling habits. The odds are what they are, and terrible odds are terrible odds. Mathematics is constant. Just because you lost six times in a row doesn't make things any more likely for you to win the seventh time. All that's going to happen is that you will put in more and more money until you're broke and desolate, or until you realize your own error and stop yourself.

The same is true for sin. Any supposed pleasure you derive from sin will always be vastly outnumbered by the accompanying pain. Like I said, sin makes big promises. It promises happiness, power, all those things. But it never delivers. Even if you can find 10 minutes of supposed joy in sin, how many days, weeks, months will it cost you in dissatisfaction and unhappiness to get there? Gamblers convince themselves that things are going to turn around if they keep putting money in the slot machines. "I feel a lucky streak coming!" And in so doing, they make themselves blind to what is really happening. When I was in Las Vegas, I saw a couple of beggars on the street, and I later saw some of them literally using the money they had begged for to play the slots. I was astonished and disgusted with how absurd that was. It was just so plainly obvious to me how much they were wasting their money, their time, their lives.

So if we're using this analogy where money represents happiness, then investing yourself in the slot machines is never going to bring you more money. The only thing that will do that is hard work. And the trouble with hard work is that it's hard. The so-called "promise" that slot machines offer is that you can acquire all this money without having to do any hard work. And it's a lie. It's absolutely a lie. And again, the same is true with sin. It promises a lot of things: happiness, closeness, love, strength, relief. But it doesn't deliver, and it will never deliver. It is a lie.

My practitioner recently shared with me an idea I really liked. She said she had been thinking about the story in the Bible about the Pool of Bethesda. In case you're unfamiliar with the story, I'll give you a quick rundown. The pool of Bethesda was a large pool of water--the size of a football field. Many people believed that every once in awhile, an angel came down and touched the water which caused a ripple. They believed that if you could be the first person to touch the water after seeing that ripple, you would be healed of any ailment. So as a result, huge crowds of sick people sat around this pool all the time, waiting for the payout. They lived their lives around it. Remember, this pool is the size of a football field. Just imagine how many people would be packed all around it, each one hoping to be the first to make it to the water. One man in particular that is discussed in the story was lame (i.e. he could not walk), and had been sitting by the pool for 38 years. He couldn't walk, and he didn't have anyone who was willing to lift him over toward the pool, so he obviously had no chance of ever making it to the water before anyone else. But he stayed there anyway, foolishly believing that maybe he could. One day Jesus came by, saw this man, and asked him if he wanted to be healed. He answered by saying that he didn't have anyone who could carry him over to the water in time to be healed. And Jesus responded by telling him to just take up his bed and walk. Immediately, the man was healed and walked away from the pool.

Now I found my practitioner's interpretation of this story particularly interesting. The Bible is clear that Jesus revealed Himself only to this man, and to no one else. So for awhile, she had wondered why Jesus only healed that one man at the pool. Surely there had to have been thousands of sick people gathered there, all desperately staring at the pool, hoping that the ripple would cure them. So why didn't he just heal everybody there? The conclusion she came to was that because this one man He talked to was the only man who actually looked away from the pool. He was the only one who actually looked away from the false promises that it offered. Once Jesus questioned him and really made him examine his own situation, he realized and acknowledged that the situation was hopeless. There was no possible way he would ever actually make it to the pool in the time. It just wasn't going to happen. So his 38 years sitting there thinking that he might were a waste. But the important part is that he finally was able to turn away from the pool and follow where Christ led him, and sin no more. Everyone else presumably just kept staring at the pool.

I have realized that I have been sitting, staring at a pool, thinking falsely that it will bring me everything I need if I can just get to it in time. And I have seen that this is a lie. It's just as impossible for me to reach my metaphorical pool as it was for the lame man to reach the Pool of Bethesda. Now I'm not going to cut myself down completely as a terrible person. It would simply be incorrect to say that I'm a miserable, worthless person who has never done anything right. I have done lots of things right. However, lately I've been realizing that I had been ignoring the bad parts, or covering them up and thinking that the good parts were sufficient to make up for them. But good and evil are like oil and water. Even if you've got a solution that's 90% water and only 10% oil, it doesn't matter how much you shake up the bottle; the oil will never dissolve. You need to filter out the oil completely. And that is what I need to do. I cannot expect the oil in my life to ever mix with the water.

The sin that I have come to realize recently is my pursuit of women, or more accurately my pursuit of validation from women, as a source of happiness. And let's be clear, lots of people do this. With everything in the movies and on TV showing us often-unrealistic romantic stories, trying to get us to believe that if we just find "the one" then everything in our life will suddenly be complete. This belief, however, goes hand in hand with the idea that without finding this person, our life is incomplete. Without this person there to complement us, we should feel empty or imperfect. This idea effectively tells us that we can only ever hope to be half of a person. And what happens then if that person spends time apart from us? Should we be unhappy? Does that make us incomplete again? This also goes hand in hand with another idea. There are 6 billion people in the world, and roughly half of them are female. If I'm to believe that there's only truly one person out there who could possibly provide me with this true sense of completeness, how depressing is that? Does that mean I only have a 1 in 3 billion chance of finding satisfaction? Does that mean I only have a 1 in 3 billion chance of finding completeness? Does that mean I only have a 1 in 3 billion chance of being a good, happy person? I hope you can see how absurd that idea is.

The truth is that I already am complete. I already can be happy, with or without a partner. I don't need to go out and constantly try to make someone else happy every waking moment in order to be happy myself. I can find all my strength, all my happiness, all my supply right now in the Lord. I can turn away from this pool of false hope, and turn toward the true source of joy, health, and completeness. That source is not in another person. That source is in God. Sinning isn't going to get me any closer to God. Sinning isn't going to give me strength. Sinning only ever brings pain and hardship. And actually, it's good that it does. Because all that pain can be used as a catalyst to get us to stop sinning. All that pain can be used to make us crave something higher than ourselves, something more than just a quick fix. It's only natural that when people feel pain, they recoil. They try to get away from the pain. It's completely unnatural to put yourself through pain again, believing the myth that it will somehow make you happier eventually. That is a self-destructive lie.

There's one more analogy I was reading about lately that I also really enjoyed, and again the credit does not go to me for this one. Imagine a person is out in the ocean, in a wild storm with waves crashing about that push them under the water. They start to drown. Now some people believe that when a person is drowning, and as their brain is deprived of oxygen, they actually enter a euphoric state in their final moments. Just before they're about to die, they go completely numb to all the pain as they sink toward the bottom. Now suppose this person drowning is already at this point. They're on the brink of death, so they're completely numb to all the pain they felt initially. Would it be cruel for someone else to jump in and rescue them? Would it be cruel for someone to reach out their arm and save them? When they get pulled out of the water, that euphoric numbness is going to go away. They're going to feel pain again--probably lots of pain as they cough up all that salt water. Is it cruel to make them go through this pain? Obviously not! It is much better that they go through that pain temporarily in order to save them from death.

The same is true for sin. Is it cruel to try to save a person who is drowning in sin? When they've gotten to the point where they're so numb to the pain that they're on the brink of death, they're so out of it that they can no longer recognize the situation that they're in, is it cruel to pull them back? To bring them to the surface, knowing that their temporary numbness will dissolve and they will be forced through huge amounts of pain from repentance? Again, obviously not. Now let me clear: I'm not talking about just any old person saving another person. The only person outstretching His arm to save the drowning victim is the Christ. The person reaching out is God. So does it make sense to curse God for trying to save you, even though it seems to hurt? Even though the pains of repentance, the pains from taking responsibility for your own sins, hurt like nothing else? Not at all. Don't blame the person saving you. Don't blame God for the pain. Blame the salt water that had filled your lungs. Blame the sin itself that you fell into. This week I've been coughing up a lot of that salt water. And let me tell you it sure feels good to breathe fresh air again.