Delayed Consequences

Let’s say you do something stupid, like stick your hand into a fire. If you leave your hand in the flames long enough, you’ll feel the immediate consequences of excruciating pain. An even dumber action, however, would be to think that you’re different and stronger than everyone else, believing you can put your hand in a campfire and not be burned. Since everyone knows that fire’s consequences are instantaneous, few men play with fire.

Sin has a different timetable, however. You might sin for years and never experience the consequences, but they will come. I wish somebody had told me that the consequences may not appear for many years. I wish somebody had told me that God wanted me to obey Him out of love and faith, not just to avoid immediate pain.

Since there were no immediate consequences when I cheated in fifth grade, I figured there were no consequences at all. So the next time I had the choice, I cheated again. I felt pretty good bout getting by and moving forward. Yet if you fast-forward ten years of my life, you would find me graduating from college with a degree in a subject that I had no intention of using. I wish I would have graduated with a degree in music, which might have led to a career in opera or musicals on Broadway, but I wasn’t able to learn a foreign language, which was a requirement for a degree in music. Having cheated all those years, I’d never learned to study well enough, so I had to drop out of the music school and find another major.

That’s not all. I graduated from college with the easiest degree I could find, just to get out. The consequences of compromise landed on me with a crushing thud.

I must stress this important truth. If you base your life on wanting to feel good, any time something feels good, you’ll believe it’s acceptable. Every time there are no consequences, you’ll believe that it’s even more acceptable. It’s so tempting to live that way! The world is always screaming at you to do what you want when you want. If it makes you feel the way you want to feel, then go ahead.

So I never delayed gratification. Feeling good was the ultimate goal of my life, which is why I cheated rather than studied. This proclivity led to a wasted education rather than preparation for a great career in music. Wasting four years of expensive college education was nothing, however, compared to what was in store in the other areas of my life.

That first decision to cheat on the fifty states and their capitals led to a far greater pain outside the classroom that I ever experienced inside a school. As much as I hate to admit it, my unwillingness to delay gratification even led to the death of a child – my unborn boy or girl. It grieves me today to say this, but it took the death of my child for me to learn some hard lessons that I desperately want you to learn so that you don’t make the same mistakes I made.

Copied from book: Every Young Man’s Battle, Stephen Arterburn & Fred Stoeker with Mike Yorkey