doing bad math

Today in A Year with the Church Fathers, St John Cassian tells us about doing the practical before we can approach the theory.

And he's right. We see this especially in the area of sin. It's helpful to think of sin as "getting the wrong answer", like when you're doing math. Because some people seem to think that sinning is cool and fun. But sinning just means getting it wrong. It means poor performance. It means missing out on the things that will really give us satisfaction. When we sin, we miss out on what happens when we consistently get the right answer. The building on learning that happens over time, until we can figure out really complicated things and send people to the moon.

As long as we're tinkering around with sin, we're just adding 2 plus 2 over and over and getting 5 or 3 or 12. It's not cool, and it's not fun. It's lame. Life is so much better... so much more rewarding and meaningful and satisfying... when we put sin (mistakes and errors) behind us and start getting the right answers.

This also helps you to see sin in a healthy light. Because when you do math, you're GOING to get the wrong answer sometimes. That's part of learning. And when you DO get the wrong answer, you do the problem again. And again. Until you get the right answer. And then you move on to the next problem.

That's what we should do with sin in our lives. Keep at the problem until we solve it (along with confessing our sin and repenting of it... which means deciding to stop making that math error) and move to the next problem.

God, please help us to do good math.