Is sin a myth?

6 of 17

by Neal Banks

Created on: June 13, 2008 Last Updated: July 01, 2008

I was five years old and I could see it from where I was standing.

It was on top of the kitchen shelf, just above the refrigerator. It was made of ceramic and it had the object of my desire: my mom's homemade chocolate chip cookies. It was the cookie jar and it was calling my name. I knew that she had just baked them only an hour before, since the kitchen still smelled like fresh-baked cookies. I had been told that I could not have any until after supper. Supper was many hours from now, however, after my father got home from work later this evening: a virtual eternity. I was already seeing the cookies in my hands, tasting them in my mind and salivating like Pavlov's dog.

I was figuring on whether of not I could reach the jar if I dragged one of the dining room chairs into the kitchen and propped it up against the refrigerator. I was confident I could, and proceeded to drag the chair into the kitchen. My mother was sewing in the other room, and surely the sound of the sewing machine would cover the noise I was making. Surely. I was rather confident of that too.

It is often a remarkable truism that certain things happen at the most opportune (or inopportune) time. Like the fact that I had dragged the chair all the way into the kitchen, climbed it, stretched until I had hold of the cookie jar, and finagled it into my eager hands to get the cookie right when my mother walked into the kitchen. I had been caught in the act of disobedience, red-handed.

Absolutely amazing.

Amazing how fast a five-year-old can come up with so many excuses, justifications and flat-out denials. Despite the fact that my mother had only wanted what was best for me. She had wanted me to learn patience, she had wanted to me have a healthy, wholesome dinner first, she had wanted me to share and enjoy them with her, my father and my brother around the dinner table while we talked and spent time together. All I could see an arbitrary command, a rule that denied me what I selfishly desired rather than what was best for me, not just at that moment but for years to come. Things that would serve me beyond that moment: like life lessons of sharing, patience and fellowship as well as physical lessons of treating my body like temple and feeding it well, keeping it healthy so I could live a long, more fulfilling life.

Things my mother understood well, but that she could simply not explain to the understanding of a five-year-old. Who wanted a cookie more than anything else.