Just a little sin....

'The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality'

There is no little sin... A half-truth is a whole-lie, the opposite of Yes is No, anything other than 'I love you' is lying.

I'll use myself as an example. I have been seriously ill for over a month now, and I feel its due to a little white lie I told two days before I fell ill...

There's this guy that always wants to hang out, invites me out, etc but I always blow him off. So he sends me a text the previous weekend and as usual, I don't reply. Then he calls me during the week, and I feel very guilty. Not for blowing him off, but because I was rude, and he's a client as well. So I pick his call and tell him that I have been very ill for weeks, even been out of work, etc and of course he believes me and sympathizes with me.

Some days later, I fell ill, exactly as I described it to him. Its a month after and I still haven't recovered fully. The past four weeks were one of the worst of my life, I felt cut off from the whole world, couldn't eat or sleep, had enough injections and drips to last a lifetime. I felt so sad and alone, and during the course of the illness I lost two life-changing opportunities as a stylist and an intern for one of the biggest fashion shows in Africa.

Its the reason I am lying in bed writing this on a Sunday morning, because I don't feel well enough to go to church. All because of a simple white lie....

Case in point, one of the best couples I have ever come across. They were the envy of everyone that knew them. I later got to know that their relationship started as an affair, the chic was dating someone else when she now started getting close to this other guy.

During the course of this relationship, one of them contacted a terminal illness, was caught cheating during an exam and expelled from the University. Their story became a scandal still talked about in town, even ten years after. They later became born-again Christians, the illness was cured , but they broke up after a while. You might ask, what's the big deal? After all, people cheat all the time, and they were not even married. I wish I could answer the question.

I was watching this movie recently- 'Vicky Christina Barcelona'. There was this babe engaged to be married in a couple of months. During this period she met some other guy, spent the weekend with him and from then on she could not get him out of her mind.

She still went ahead to get married to her fiancé, but thoughts of this other guy filled her mind. One day, the other guy invited her to his house, and she went, knowing fully well that she was married and would most likely end up in his bed. Long story short, just as she was about to kiss the guy, she got shot. In that split second she remembered that she was a married woman, and how would she explain the gunshot to her husband, and what was she looking for with another guy in the first place when she had a wonderful husband waiting for her at home? That was her wake-up call. She went back home to her husband and they lived happily ever after. Not everyone is that lucky, she could have died, or even ended up destroying her marriage for such a flimsy reason.

Now, I'm not saying I know the mind of God, or that God punished me or these people for what they did, like I said, its just my thoughts.

My point is, there is always a window period, that second when you take a breath before deciding to tell a lie, before deciding to cheat on your partner instead of trying to make it work, or when you could have been assertive instead of trying to please another human being at the risk of displeasing God.

As long as you have to pause to take a breath, then you have a choice....

Sin has so many disastrous and far-reaching consequences. More than we can even imagine....

Some people get away with grievous sins while some others, like me can't even get away with a simple lie.

There are no half-measures, our conscience usually tells us but I guess over time we have seared our conscience so well that we can sin and feel no remorse at all, our moral compass is lost in transit.

"Always resist even the appearance of evil. In doing so, evil will never subdue you.."

Did you know?.... Its possible to get gonorrhea just from kissing, possible to get pregnant without having sex? That 2 out of every 10 people living with HIV contacted it through oral sex? I could go on and on, but the point is, there is no 'almost-sin' or 'I could not help it', or 'there was nothing I could do'. If you decide not to be assertive, you only have yourself to blame.

God does have a wonderful sense of humor.....