Do you listen to your Jiminy?

I can hear it in the back of my mind with every sip of delicious coffee I take this morning.  My mom…  she is telling me about the woes of partially hydrogenated oil that is in my “Crème Brule Coffee Creamer”.  I have one of the coolest moms you could ever ask for.  She has seen her fair share of pain and friends with cancer.  Therefore, my mom has adopted a super healthy lifestyle.  So things that I would never have thought of before, such as partially hydrogenated oil, ring through my head from her telling me about them.  I haven’t had coffee creamer for a long time and I was actually looking for a pumpkin spice type, so I decided to splurge and get this special treat one time.  Every sip I take though, I feel guilty.

Have you ever had something like that, something that you KNOW you shouldn’t be doing, everyone has always told you that you shouldn’t do it.  Like staying out past curfew when you were younger, or watching a show that you weren’t allowed to watch as a kid.  Every time that you do it,  you feel a little stab of guilt.  Now there are two ways to deal with this.  First way, you can tough through the guilt and make excuses for why it is alright for you to do this.  The second way is that you can turn away from that habit and not do it anymore.  There was probably a reason someone told you not to do it in the first place.  Usually it was because that person cared about you enough to share the dangers of that action.

Sin is similar to that.  It is easy to sin, most the time, we know that we are doing it.  We just ignore that small voice and power through it a lot of times.  Sometimes, I wonder if God feels like Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio.  “Pinocchio, don’t go with those people, they will only lead you to bad…  Pinocchio, be sure you go to school…  Pinocchio be sure you don’t leave your father.”  But like Pinocchio, we ignore that small voice and I am sure that everyone knows the outcome of that decision.  Fortunately, in the end, Pinocchio listens to that still small voice and everything ends up alright. 

The Bible gives us guidelines – they are the 10 commandments found in Exodus 20 v 1-17.  Most of us know them, but choose to ignore them.  First, it seems terrible to use the Lord’s name in vain, or have sex outside of marriage.  Then we start to justify it by the FALLEN world around us.  We say, well everyone is doing it, it is just acceptable now.  Well guess what- it isn’t!  Today, I re-read the 10 commandments- and my goal is when I hear that small voice in the back of my head, I am going to obey, not acknowledge and ignore, not push aside, but obey them and obey God.  How cool would this world be if we all followed God?  Now, I am off to get coffee without my special treat creamer in it…  sigh…