Evil fed on evil until we knew every kind of sin.
I am generally quite resilient in a car. I generally do not experience motion-sickness. However, if I sit at the back of a car and look down at a book or a phone or a computer, I will always experience terrible nausea and I will generally throw up.
It is quite lucky that this does not affect me when I am a passenger of a car. My husband (and his family) on the other hand, will generally throw up each time they are passengers in a car because they are severely affected by motion sickness.
Motion sickness is a queasy uneasiness that a person feels when they get sort of dizzy as a passenger in a car. This can be aggravated by jerky driving (with lots of sudden stops and starts). It can also be aggravated by winding roads. Smells inside the car are also problematic. But in general, these things can cause a person to feel quite sick.
Now, motion-sickness does not really creep up on a person.
It starts with some general uneasiness in the stomach. If the person heeds this feeling straight away and puts their book away and looks straight ahead with the window open, they generally have a chance of keeping the sickness at bay. If instead the person is stubborn and choses to preserve with the activity at hand, then the motion sickness becomes worse, until the point where the only relief a person can have from that feeling is when they can get out of the vehicle and can throw up a little. That seems to settle the stomach and allow the person to return to a more comfortable state.
And I have been reflecting on this throughout my day, because in a way, this motion sickness is like sin. Sin starts off small. A little thing. One small lie. And then – if left unchecked and nothing is done to change our ways, that small thing becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, until eventually that one small thing becomes a very big thing and the only thing that one is left with is to throw up and end up quite spiritually sick…
And I know this because of the generation of sin in the book of Genesis.
Pride led to Disobedience. Disobedience led to lust. Lust led to deception. Deception led to jealousy. Jealousy led to murder. And onwards and onwards the sins multiplied and compounded.
Eve ate from the tree because she was proud and therefore in that act, she disobeyed God. After disobeying God and encouraging Adam to do the same, the two experienced lust, which is why they suddenly needed to cover their nakedness. This led to their lies when God entered the Garden asking them where they were and why they were hiding. Then their children were jealous – Cain of Abel. This jealousy caused Cain to murder Abel… Evil fed on evil until we knew every kind of sin.
And I have been thinking about that today, as I have been thinking about motion sickness. Because it seems to me that just as stopping and looking out a window can help with motion sickness, surely stopping and reevaluating my sinful life could help with that too…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.