You and Tequila

Sitting here. I've been reading about all kinds of things this morning from education to recipes to the state of the nation and hedgehogs. Sure, it's a varied menu of material, but boredom does that to you. While reading along, I was listening to Kenny Chesney while I did some of the reading.

'You and Tequila'

♪♫When it comes to you
Oh, the damage I could do
It's always your favorite sins
That do you in ♫♪


That particular turn of phrase caught my attention last night and again this morning. "It's always your favorite sins that do you in". Something to ponder for sure. We ALL have our weaknesses. No rational person wants their personal ills to be on display, yet when it comes to the lifestyles of other people, the carnal side of us tends to think their favorite sins are so much worse than our own.

Tabloid media and the Internet and its 24 hour presence reassures us that whatever our favorite sins, there is ALWAYS someone else much worse. They display their version of the truth in living color, or at least as near it as they can manage from a running person holding a camera trying to take a photograph of just another sinner from a distance.

Isn't that the reality? We see EVERY ONE'S sins from a distance, sometimes including our own.

Who wants to own up to who they are when they think no one is looking? Who wants to walk into the room and have a group gathered around a pile of sins and then have them all watch you carefully to see which ones you pick up and shoulder as your personal load in life?

That would be humiliating, right? To know that everyone around you knew your struggles and failings and personal suffering that is sometimes too hard to bear? The harsh light of judgment falls heavily when the sins that another suffers aren't your own.

After all, they must somehow be WORSE, right? The answer to that is 'no', not worse, just different.

We all choose to bow down to the mortal failings that are our eternal struggle in this life. It is eternity that is in the balance. If we do become, as the lyrics elsewhere in the song suggest, "Hell bent on getting high", through the application of that pet sin, then we suffer, we struggle and sometimes we fall.

How can our pain be less than the other people around us who are likewise on their knees crying out for relief from the individually crafted hell that we tend to create for ourselves through our stupid, prideful, anguished and sinful choices?

The only difference I can see is that some choose visible sins and others don't. Doesn't make one "better" than another... it's just a different kind of pain. We drown out our pain in all kinds of ways. I won't list them, frankly a list makes me feel depressed because so many of them apply to me. That stings and I'm not a fan of pain.

Often, we hear people prescribe the 'Band-aid treatment' of just ripping off the bandage and doing so quickly. Trying to break free from sin is kinda like that. You can't partially remove just a segment of the sin by peeling back a corner. That only increases the power of Satan to continue to torment you to come back in all the way. It's like keeping a different kind of booze in the house and hoping you won't turn to it when you 'need' some of your favorite drink.

I remember once talking to a man who told me that the only way to get rid of a sin completely was to throw it out and every reminder of it so that you could start with a clean slate. That included everything from physical reminders of the sin, to circumstances, people and thought patterns that renewed the desire to continue that sin.

That's a hard sell for all of us. We don't want to think our good times have to come to an end that way. We want to wean ourselves from it as if we had the control to do so. But we lack that control.


More lyrics illustrate the point magnificently:

♫♪♫ 'Cause you and Tequila make me crazy
Run like poison in my blood
One more night could kill me, baby
One is one too many, one more is never enough

Thirty days and thirty nights
Been putting up a real good fight
And there were times I thought you'd win

It's so easy to forget
The bitter taste the morning left
Swore I wouldn't go back there again ♪♫♪

Our ability to swear to something and mean it with every fiber of our beings only lasts as long as our true intention to depart from the places and reminders of sin. If you still live in Sodom and Gomorrah, is it possible to stay clean from the influence? It's a lot like the old saw about a drunk who owns a bar. The irony of attempting to stay away from the booze yourself while selling the poison to another doesn't escape me.


Sometimes relationships with people are just as toxic. There are people who spread the kind of poison that booze does. It leaves a mark in your soul as well as in your physical yearning for more even when you know that what you are doing is killing you off a little bit at a time.

We never know the point at which we reach the "one more night" that will kill us, either physically and/or spiritually. It's like a child playing with fire hoping to never get burned. So far, every person I have ever met has a scar or a story about getting burned despite whatever best intentions or rationalizations that had gone on before.


I keep reminding myself that our entire lives are counted in the journey to "become"... not just the life we are living at this mortal moment. That's a pretty good thing, considering that we all fall down from time to time in our efforts to shake off the chains that bind us fast to the very things that hurt us the most.

It's a comforting thought to know that we have time to separate ourselves from our 'favorite sins' just so long as we keep trying. And it's a scary thought to think that the moment we give up on ourselves and stop trying might be the one moment that we lose it all.

Never give up the fight. The battles are always won in the 11th hour and we are always aided by our Savior in that very moment when our strength flags and we cry out to Him for the rescue to happen. He comes in and binds up our wounds and helps us to overcome, so long as we never stop trying.

'Favorite sins' may very well make me crazy, but I know that Jesus Christ can bring both hope and sanity into my personal struggles. He's already promised victory, I just have to be willing to give away a temporary thrill for something that can last for this lifetime and all eternity.