God doesn’t get bored. The author of creation and creating and creativity is endlessly taking delight. Which means God isn’t bored by ’rote’ or repeated prayers. If, every day, we pray “Our Father who art in Heaven” from our hearts, with full approval from our minds before it passes our lips, He is pleased.
He also is pleased when our prayers modeled on the Lord’s Prayer add angles. When they go on tangents. Or they expand far beyond the original 5 or so sentences.
I walk my dog with her leash in one hand, her poo bag in the other, and a tangent prayer on my lips (audible if no one is around to question my sanity). Recently, I found myself asking God to keep my grandchildren from “sins that cling.”
Not sure what brought that phrase to mind, but it set me mulling on the nature of sin and its remarkable likeness to…
plastic wrap.
Some plastic wrap is cheap. Before you convince it to cling to one area, it slides off another. Undesirable in plastic wrap, but if I have my druthers with wrongdoing, sliding sin would be it.
Sin that slides is the foolish kind. The careless word you immediately regret. The irritation that spills out when stress builds, and you kick the nearest piece of furniture. The choices you make when young that are foolish and soon discarded. The words you utter when old based on faulty perception, nostalgia, and anxiety about a world we can’t keep up with. Temporary vices can leave a bit of damage but seldom take root. Sin that slides is a result of a fallen world and its inhabitants who see through a glass darkly. But praise God, sliding sin doesn’t often stick. It’s flimsy and temporary and reminds us that humans are not particularly indestructible.
Sin that twists is the worst. Like a piece of plastic that gets mixed in our dough, baked in, inextricable. Sin that twists is a deep, distorting, mangling sin—so deep in some people that they either don’t recognize it, or they embrace it. Psychopaths, serial killers, those who delight in inflicting cruelty. We don’t want to dwell on twisting sin. Even thinking about it soils. Sin that twists, thanks to God’s common grace, seems to be the least common.
My walk-the-dog-and-talk-to-God request focused on protection from the clinging sins. The worldviews, the heart attitudes, the habits of the mind that seem to cover us, wrinkle us a bit, distort our perspective. Sins that cling—like habitual discontent, self-awareness so excessive, it leads to either pride or crippling lack of confidence. Sin that tends to find fault with others, excuse ourselves, sin that enjoys a ‘good’ gossip, sin that is bored with the ordinary and craves endless excitement, sin that takes such pride in being ‘blunt and outspoken’ that it misses seeing how hurtful words can be. Sin that hugs material wealth a little too closely. Judgement calls made without full understanding. And which of us fully understands? Sin that cringes or sin that bullies, sin that challenges authority continually or sin too lazy to ever question. Sin that is always impatient, sin that is ignorantly tolerant…. I’m sure I missed a few dozen.
One day all categories of sin will cease to exist, because all of them violate God’s holiness and He promises to make all things right. It will be dealt with on a permanent basis. For now, it continues to twist, slide, and cling, and for now, we pray that God will deliver us, and those we love.