No Private Sin

Brant Hansen:

A friend of mine did smething really, really bad a couple years ago. Real bad. Not illegal bad, but...bad enough it's followed him, years later. It showed up on page two of a metro newspaper, a thousand miles away from where he did it.

I love this guy. He's fun, smart, and fairly new to Christian belief. He's accepted responsibility for what he did, and he's had to live with it every day. He told me the other day he was sorry even I was having to deal with it now. "I'm amazed how many people this has affected. One stupid, wrong decision I made and it keeps affecting so many people. My wife, my kids...it just keeps going."

And so it does.

We marveled at that, and, just stood there, quietly, just shaking our heads. Amazing? Yes. But not really surprising.

The older I get, the more convinced I am there is no private sin. They don't all wind up on page two, but the surface of the pond is never undisturbed by the pebble. The ripples move well beyond ourselves, and, in many cases they radiate through generations.

Read the rest for some sobering examples.