Murray Smith
What are you opening your life to? Are you watchful with influences you allow into your life – or your family’s?
The fact is practices, habits or inclinations which ought to be named as ‘enemies’ to our well-being are often accepted as ‘friends.’ Friendship with wrong things always ends up badly at some point. Initially unhealthy interests and behaviours might appear innocent, harmless and manageable. But time reveals that carelessly opening dangerous doorways results in people’s recognition becoming gradually dulled that they’re becoming snared by things that should definitely never be ‘befriended’.
As an example, someone opening the door to a ‘little’ pornography, runs the risk over time, to becoming enslaved by a deadly, obsessive compulsion. The fact is that this shaming enemy weaves into its victim, an insatiable appetite whereby things which delivered stimulus previously no longer satisfy a relentless craving for ‘more’.
Soon, what would have originally been considered unthinkable, becomes tolerated and defended, even justified as acceptable.
I heard a story originating in Africa that graphically illustrates the point. A young boy accompanied his father on a hunt into the African bush. A lioness attacked them and the father was able to protect his child’s life and his own, by killing it. A little lion cub appeared and realising it was now without a mother, the young boy pleaded with the father for it to be taken home with them. The father was adamant that could never happen, stating, ‘little lions become big lions and big lions kill.’ The boy was unrelenting with his tears and pleas. Against his better judgment, the father conceded the cub could come home, ‘just for a little while.’
Arriving back at their kraal (traditional African village of huts, enclosed by a fence), the villagers mounted a protest similar to the father’s original one with his son. ‘Little lions become big lions and big lions kill.’
The father promised it would stay a week or two and then be released. Time went by and the young lion grew from a cute cub into an increasingly accepted adolescent pet. Although some voices still cried for it to be released, passivity seemed to creep in and what was once deemed intolerable, became tolerated. The growing lion stayed on.
Later, the father and son were on another hunting trip. Now, bounding alongside was the maturing lion that they had adopted as a ‘pet’. Brushing past a thorn bush, the boy received a nasty slash on his leg. As the blood flowed freely, the lion’s interest was piqued and licking the wound, it flicked a switch. The frenzied animal set about ferociously mauling the boy’s leg until the father managed to put an end to it. Tearfully carrying his fatally injured son back to the kraal, the wide-eyed villagers murmured sadly, “little lions become big lions and big lions kill.”
If there’s a ‘little lion” in your life, deal decisively with it – remembering God won’t deliver us from wrong things we make ‘friends’ with.
“Whatever you are giving in to will become your master – be it sin, resulting in death, or righteousness leading to life…” (The Bible- Romans 6:16)
