THE SHOWER OF DOOM

If there was a prize for the most bothersome, aggravating shower in the world, mine would win it hands down. Sure, it has a nice silver-plated head with multiple 'massage' settings, an adjustable neck which sets the water at just the right angle, and beautiful hand-painted tiles along its walls. But don't let any of that fool you -- there's an ugly temperament behind the pretty facade.

Here's how an average encounter with the Shower of Doom plays out: I turn on the faucet, step in, and begin to relax, taking in the soft sounds of the pitter-pattering droplets and the soapy fragrance of the rising steam. Always an easy target, I am oblivious to the attack that's about to take place. Seconds tick by and the shower gets progressively warmer. It feels nice -- nice, until I realize that I'm standing in a torrent of scalding hot water. Then the shock hits me like an electric current, and every nerve ending on my skin joins in a simultaneous wail: "I'm boiling! Get me out of here!" I do a couple of pirouettes while trying to gauge where the tap handles are, scramble to remember which way is left and which way is right and which way to turn which tap without boiling myself even more, and gather my wits about me just long enough to twist the 'cold' handle a wee bit to the left. Just a millimetre or two does the trick.

Aaah... Refreshing, cool water comes pouring down like a blessing on my simmering self, and the atmosphere grows calm once more. The temperature is perfectly balanced -- not too hot and not too cold. Now that's more like it! I begin humming the overture to a musical and start to forget all about my previous ordeal.

But not for long.

Two seconds later, I find myself in freezing water. It's so cold that it literally knocks the breath out of me. I scramble for the faucet handle and twist it frantically. How could one millimetre have done this? I'd barely even turned the tap, and the shower went completely arctic on me! When I give my shower a quarter of an inch, it takes a mile. It refuses to understand that there's a middle ground between hot and cold. And, thus, the drama repeats itself every single day, creating a vicious cycle that will either cause me permanent shower-phobia or eventually teach me how to properly turn on the water. Either way, it's not fun.

But why, you might be asking, am I sharing this profoundly edifying and enlightening experience with you? Well, there's a little more to this story than meets the eye. I realized, during one of those episodes, that they can serve as an illustration of our lives and the way we sin.

I fool myself every single day. I tell God, "This is it. I will not walk away from you ever again. I will not make any more excuses for my sin. There is nothing in the world that can justify it, so I repent of it for life." And for the first few minutes, I do. I'm fired-up, living the "hot" life of Revelation, enjoying the resolve that pulses in every step I take as I return to the narrow path of my God. And then something catches my eye. It's about as important as an atom compared to the Lord I serve, but somehow, it grabs my attention and I become absolutely overwhelmed with desire for it.

One tentative step to the right. One millimetre. It can't do any harm. So I turn down the heat of my faith by a tiny increment; I skip a prayer, let a witnessing chance slip by, disobey my parents, say an unkind word to a friend. And the next thing I know, I am absolutely cold.

I might be wrong about this as I don't know the Bible by heart, but I don't think that God ever talks of Christians regressing -- in his eyes, we either walk forward or fall away. There's no such thing as a millimeter when it comes to sin -- the tinest veering off of his path turns the soul to ice, and to break the law at one point is to break it fully. We think, it's no big deal, this is only a fraction of a sin, but when it comes to evil, a millimetre quickly turns into a mile.

Sometimes, I can't stand the heat of living for Christ 100%, and I decide to tone it down just a little -- to just be one small decimal-point more like the rest of the world is. Surely it won't change the temperature much. So I wake up in the morning and think, I'll read my Bible a little later, after I do my hair. Not reading the Bible at all is obviously out of the question -- at first. But in the mad rush that ensues when I realise I'm late for school, my initial thought quickly morphs into, Okay, I'll read it after school. After school, when I'm starving and have tons of homework, it's suddenly not that big of a stretch to think, Not tonight. I'll read my Bible tomorrow. Ouch! Do you see how that happened? In the early morning, I would have been shocked at the thought of not reading my Bible all day, but, millimeter by millimeter, that thought becomes acceptable to me, and before I know it, I am left cold.

Let's look at it another way. I've never skydived before, and even the thought of jumping from a diving board at the pool scares me. But if I leap a few times from my kitchen counter, I'm suddenly no longer so afraid of jumping from the top of, say, the play-structure at the local park. And when I take that risk, a diving board isn't so scary anymore. After jumping from the highest diving-board in the pool, will I still be as afraid of sky-diving as I used to be? All it takes is that first jump from the kitchen counter, and a bunch of possibilities are opened. With many things in life, that's a good thing. With sin, it's not -- the tiniest droplet of a lukewarm or sinful lifestyle can leave one's faith utterly frozen.

As much as I hate the fact that my shower is out to get me, my daily hassle with it is a good reminder to enjoy the fiery life that God wants me to live, and to never cave into the idea that a little millimeter won't change anything. Even the smallest steps have big consequences. In the words of Casting Crowns,

"It's a slow fade when you give yourself away,
It's a slow fade when black and white have turned to gray...
Thoughts invade, choices are made, a price will be paid
When you give yourself away;
People never crumble in a day.

The journey from your mind to your hands
Is shorter than you're thinking,
Be careful if you think you stand
You just might be sinking..."

Article by Oksana K.



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