Not long ago, a pastor friend named Jeff jokingly chided, “Your sins will find you out!”
I had probably taken the last doughnut or put regular coffee in the decaf pot or something, but being reminded that the phrase existed made me think about what it means.
I am confident I did my share of bad stuff as a kid – more than I will ever remember or even want to. We all have those sneak-a-cookie stories, or the one where we lied about finishing our homework so we could go out and play.
But I can now honestly admit I tangled with lust before the age of seven.
I grew up in Wichita – a typical Midwest town, burgeoning into a genuine city in the early sixties. Caught between the age of innocence and the shifting of the tides leading to the summer of love, my friends and I were more concerned with baseball, kites, and bicycles than we were with the news about Vietnam or college campus upheavals.
The smell of plain Bazooka Bubble Gum still takes me back to the tissue-paper-under-the-collar haircuts my parents insisted I get for the first seven or eight years of my life.
The barber shop was tucked away on a sidewalk that was more like an alley in Westway Shopping Center. It faced the grocery store at the south end of the center, nestled between a locksmith and a shoe repair shop just across Seneca Street, which I was not allowed to cross on my own. The rule probably stemmed from a little tumble I took off the front of some poor guy's bumper in front of my house several years earlier, but I was not supposed to cross Seneca Street.
Rule or not, I was accustomed to scavenging pop bottles and making the journey —carefully, mind you —to collect the three-cent bounty on each one of them. It was on one such trip that I spotted something that ignited my first tangle with lust.
In the shoe repair shop window sat a pair of black leather cowboy boots — white stitching curling up the shaft, silver-tipped toes catching the afternoon sun. Four dollars, used, and exactly my size — or so I told myself. I begged until my mother, against her better judgment, relented.
When I tugged them on, my toes curled and my heel rode up, but admitting it meant losing them. So I lied with my whole face and walked the squeaky little circle the man asked me to walk.
The blisters came before the week did. Moleskin, bandages, double socks — still, I limped. Those boots eventually went to the back of a closet, but the lesson stayed: what I wanted so badly was never made for me. There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death (Proverbs 14:12). Mercifully, the lesson came cheap — four dollars and a handful of blisters — long before the price got steeper.