My First Steps into Sin
It just comes automatically
Donald Miller introduces the topic of sin in his book Blue like Jazz by saying that “ I started to sin about the time I turned ten, although it could have been earlier, but ten is about the age a boy starts to sin, so I am sure it was there somewhere”(5). After working with kids for some years, I would say that ten years old is an old age for a kid to start sinning. Must kids start to sin from a very young age. It’s in their nature. They fight with each other, they make fun of others, and lie. And that’s just because we are all bad. Kids are not teached to be mean or to lie, but they still do it, because we are all sinners.
I remember the first time that I lied to my mom. I was about 5 years old, and my aunt had given me a very pretty ring, with a teddy bear on it, for my birthday. The ring was quite expensive and it didn’t fit me very well, so my mom kept it with her jewelry and told me not to wear it. I was excited about my new ring, so I told my friends about it, and they asked me if they could see it. I took the ring from my mom’s jewelry box and wore it for school the next day. Of course, I lost the ring somewhere in the playground, but I decided not to tell my mom. After a week, she noticed that the ring was gone, and asked me about it. My automatic response was to say that some girl had stolen it from me. My mom believed this, but I got grounded anyway for taking the ring. I remember that the next day, at school, I went to the playground to look for my ring. While I was looking at the ground, it hit me. I had lied to my mom, and she believed me because she didn’t think that I could lie to her, I was just a little girl. Even now, when I think about it, I’m not really sure why I lied. My mom still punished me, so I didn’t gain anything from that lie. It’s kind of scary that my first response as a 5 year old, was to lie to my mom. Maybe I just wanted to feel a little bit better with myself, to feel like it wasn’t all my fault, even though it was. I also remember that I felt very bad, and promised myself that I would never lie again. Of course, I didn’t keep that promise. After I didn’t get caught with my first lie, the second one came more easily. Sometimes I would get caught, sometimes I would get away with my lie. It was a weirdly exciting feeling, not knowing if the person I was lying to would believe me, but feeling like it was worth the risk, because the truth was harder to deal with.
Now I think that maybe it’s easier for kids to lie, or to be mean to others, because most of the time they don’t feel guilty afterwards. Miller describes his first experience with guilt after he started sinning, “[a]ll this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and wrong in the universe”(8). I think that this is a good description of how guilt feels. When you first feel guilty, when you first realize that you did something wrong, that you might have hurt others, the feeling can be very overwhelming. I remember that after I started lying, I got very self conscious. I was always trying to look like a good and responsible kid, because that helped me to feel less guilty. At some point, I also got very scared of what my parents would do if they found out about all my sins. I felt like that would hurt them. so I tried even harder, keeping my siblings from doing things that might get them, and by consequence me, in trouble.
Even though it can feel like a superior force or being, I don’t think of guilt, or our sense of right and wrong, as alien. I think we are all born with it, it is part of our human nature. It’s a very complex human feeling that many people find hard to deal with. People that don’t show feelings of guilt are considered to be mentally ill, because guilt is a basic human response. For this same reason, I don’t think that animals feel guilty. They are not aware of their actions, or the consequences of these actions, so they can’t feel guilt.
