A Lesson from My Lawn

You wouldn't willingly expose yourself to lots of radiation, would you? Then why do we so willingly expose ourselves to sin?

Those people who know me personally know that I have a fondness to being irreverent. Oh, I'm not always brave enough to be that way as often as I would desire, but it brews underneath the surface most of the time. It's actually been kind of trendy to be irreverent in recent years (note the success of shows like, "The Simpson's"). Last night I got to wondering, at what point does irreverence lead to irrelevant?

It was my lawn that got me to see this. I was noticing that parts of my lawn are lush and green, while others are brown and dying. Where the grass is thriving is where there is a nice balance of trees and grass. I got to thinking it was a bit of an irreverent acts years ago that someone decided to grow grass where nature might not normally grow it, and they called it a lawn. My lawn might suggest that if we had left the trees around growing as they were intended instead of yanking them out for our yard we might have lots of lush grass. Instead in a irreverent act those trees were removed and now (in a sense) the grass has become irrelevant as it lies there brown and suffering.

I suppose that's true in our lives. How much can we rail against the established norms before we become an irrelevant voices droning on in the background? How long can we walk that path which exposes us to sin before we give in and begin to live embracing the sin ourselves?