Sin and salt
I don’t get along too well with computers. I was once the proud owner of an IBM Beelzebub with a 666 megahertz chip.
Some of its occultic behaviour was probably due to the fact that I have inputted some things into it which were inappropriate. Like a glass of orange juice, for instance. Tapping away late one night, I elbowed a glass right into the keyboard. The sticky concoction gummed up the keys, and the computer itself seemed to have a silly smile for weeks.
Then there was the time when I was just completing a PowerPoint presentation on the laptop, when the phone rang. I reached out to answer it, knocked a boiling kettle over, and reduced the computer to a scalded ruin in a second. The computer actually screamed – honest – and I joined in sympathetically. Another trip to computer hospital.
But my worst experience to date was the time when I accidentally formatted my hard drive. Back then, this was the equivalent of taking the top of your head off, removing your brain, discarding said brain forever, and then replacing aforementioned skull cap. You wipe out everything.
I don’t know why I did it. I was very tired, pressed the wrong series of command keys, and instructed the computer to format. This would mean the destruction of every sermon ever written, the wiping out of five years of accounts, and the nuking of my diary for the next two years. The computer itself raised a perturbed eyebrow at my instruction, and asked for confirmation. A message flashed on the screen.
“Are you sure?”
Of course I was sure, how dare you question my choices, oh evil, pathetic machine! In a moment of unbridled insanity, my finger hovered over the Y key; Y stands for “yes”. I punched the key with attitude. And in a second or two, everything was wiped out. Even as I held the Y key down, I realised the utter folly of what I had done. The hard disk was now empty. There was no way back. I wish I could tell you that I faced my foolishness with calm demure, murmuring, “The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away – blessed be the Name….
No, I screamed again, and ran around the room at speed.
If only I had heeded the cautionary warning – are you sure? – and had stopped for just a moment to consider my actions. I would have saved myself months of grief. Instead, my impatient, unthinking haste destroyed everything.
And sometimes the same is true when it comes to a heady moment of temptation. In the heat of the moment, we find ourselves sprinting down the mad pathway towards sin – it is like a temporary madness. Casting aside everything that we know to be true, ignoring every bible verse memorised, and every lesson learned, we leap headlong from a twilight zone of half consciousness into wrongdoing. If only there was an error message that automatically appeared before our eyes – “are you sure?”.
How many marriages might have been saved if a man had taken a few seconds to ponder the faces of his children, or remember wedding promises made, instead of just leaping thoughtlessly into an adulterous bed? How many lives might have been different if thoughtful, considered choices had been made, perhaps without the blurring that too much alcohol brings?
Next time we’re tempted to make a crazy, compulsive leap, let’s stop, think for a moment, and ask ourselves the question. Am I sure?