If you buy a pair of shoes of a size smaller than your feet, it’s not going to suit you, not even a bigger size.

If you’re an adolescent girl with the body of a model and put on one of your grandmother’s dresses, and she’s 10 pounds overweight, it’s not going to suit you.

If you’re a married man and you keep giving a ride to a woman who already flirted with you, it’s not going to suit you either.

This is what people don’t understand about sin. When the word is cited, one quickly thinks of an offense against God or an act of transgressing a religion. Sin, which comes from the latin word peccatum, means simply an error, a mistake. In the Bible, the root of the word is the same as the one that makes up the verb used to transmit the idea “missing the target.”

Which is to say, more than offending God, sin is to offend yourself, hurt your own life and well-being in some way. It’s to make a mistake toward yourself. Missing the target. Something that didn’t feel right to you (didn’t gel with you.)

And you know, instinctively, what doesn’t work for you. That’s why God gave you a conscience. You don’t even need a religion or a religious person to tell you this. However, in order to guide us, God left advice and instruction about what’s good and what’s not, for our own good.

I have set before you today good and evil, life and death, blessing and cursing. therefore choose life…” Deuteronomy 30:15,19

Choices. They determine our destiny.

I hope that you choose the ones that are going to suit you.