The seventeen-year-old boy throws a water bottle across the parking lot into the bushes. A teacher sees him do it and now there are consequences. The boy is told to retrieve the bottle from the shrubs as tall as he is. On his first attempt he finds a dead bird.

“It’s nasty in there. I’ll be right back,” he tells his teacher. Soon he returns with his little brother and the little brother’s two friends. “Get that water bottle for me,” he commands the younger boys.
The teacher allows this. There is a lesson to be learned here: your sin affects others.

All of these boys lose much of their lunch recess. The teacher doesn’t get to finish his lunch, either. The water bottle is hard to find. The teacher picks up more student garbage as he waits for the boys to accomplish their task. So now four more people are impacted by the seventeen-year-old’s decision. All because the boy felt like throwing a water bottle at recess.

The girl is nineteen with a string of abusive boyfriends. She’s been arrested for drunk in public and drunk driving. Her tongue is pierced and so is her eyebrow. Her heart is pierced as well. The heart is an old wound acquired as a child. Divorce is often harder on kids than their parents. This particular divorce began with a father’s adultery. He didn’t want his wife to leave him. He just wanted to have a good time on a night out with his buddies. Ten years later his daughter is a disaster. And she’s angry. Her parents destroyed her home so now she is destroying herself. She has made them pay. And pay. And pay to love her.

This is the woman’s third miscarriage. She knows that abortion at eighteen has done this. Her mother put her on birth control pills, but as a teen, she forgot to take them. At twenty-eight, her cervix is weak and so is her marriage. She and her husband long for a family. Yet the legacy of once living loosely has left her broken in places she can’t fix. And it’s breaking the man she loves too.

It all started with a wine cooler from her parents’ frig. Then two or three or four coolers come college on her own. Good times. Now twenty years later she lives on wine at night. And sometimes in the afternoon. And sometimes mid-morning when she should be at work. And now she’s lost her job and her children and her husband, too.

When does it end? Sin that multiplies like a virus in the body. In the population. Like the Holocaust. Hitler was once a boy. Who grew up to be a man. Who ravished a country. Then a continent. And then a generation of Jews. And Christians. And the handicapped. He hated and murdered them too while the whole world looked the other way. Why?

Because it started small.

Hitler was a boy.

Who grew up to be a man.

Who killed millions.

I posted a video titled: 180 on my facebook wall. It’s well worth watching.

How many times have you looked away from sin? Your own sin and that of others? That little sin you just ignore. In yourself. In your children. In other people’s children.

Hitler’s mother must have had friends. Did they talk to her boy? Pray for him? Love him?

Not long ago

Hitler was just a boy

with a little sin

that went a long way.