BE CAREFUL–TODAY MAY BE THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE: A post about how every sin is like a child.

[This post talks about other people. I’m 100% certain that no one, including both my best friend and the other people described, will be able to figure out what I’m talking about, which is the only reason I’m posting this. I’ve done a lot of awful stuff in public, because I’m awesome like that, so if you know me just assume that this post is about something worse than the thing you’re thinking of.]

On Saturday I went with friends to revisit the National Gallery’s “Sacred Made Real” exhibit (see below). It’s a sufficiently intense exhibit that I couldn’t take too much of it. So for a little while my friends were still in the dark monastic gallery rooms, studded with paintings and sculptures of God in agony, and I was standing in the big sunlit atrium staring out the window at an American boulevard. And I thought about you again.

You and I were friends once. Not for too long. The reasons we’re not close now are partly your fault, partly mine, partly just the inevitable nexus of circumstance and personality and nobody’s fault but the big pinball machine of life.

But I can still think of scenes, moments, in which I sinned—and I had no idea, at that time, that I was sinning against you and that these sins would form part of the barrier between us later on. I (hope I) would never have done those things if I had known.

The thing with sin is, you cannot control it. You birth your sin and send it out into the world and then it does whatever it wants, to whomever it wants to do it to. You aren’t totally helpless (except when you are), just as parents aren’t totally helpless except when they are. They can educate their children, and you can try to mitigate your sin. Sometimes you can make some kind of partial amends. (I am not sure I believe that any sins are fully amended in this life. I’m not sure I believe in any real temporal reconciliation.) Sometimes the relationship you damaged heals, and sometimes it’s even “stronger in the broken places,” as I think Hemingway said, and that isn’t to your credit but you still get to enjoy it. But a lot of the time there is no way to attempt amends without causing your victim further pain. I can think of at least one person (not the main person this post is about) to whom I desperately want to apologize, but I know that reestablishing contact would be more likely to hurt than to help, and the attempt would be more about my guilt than about the other person’s pain. I still pray for that person, which is pretty much all I can do now.

You can have high expectations for your sin, as parents have aspirations for their children. In the most vivid moments in which I sinned against my friend, I sometimes expected that my sins would bring us closer together. But you don’t control it. You don’t get to choose. Sin is not a domino rally, where if you were just acutely insightful enough you could see the whole pattern and predict and direct the repercussions of knocking over that very first domino. Sin is a lit match thrown into a fireworks factory: Sometimes nothing too bad happens to the people you love (I mean, you know, other than Jesus). Sometimes something beautiful happens, as God chooses to make your sin a source of grace for you or for others. But sometimes the catastrophe occurs, chaos come again. And you don’t get to guide your sin or make it do what you want it to do or keep it from doing what you most desperately want it to avoid.

Sin is your child, and you are as helpless as any parent. I read once a mother, quoting someone else, saying that your child is “your heart walking around outside your body.” Sin is everything that isn’t your heart, or shouldn’t be, walking around outside your body—and, once the deed is done, outside your will.