Little by Little

Discipline yourselves and keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. - 1 Peter 5.8

Of course, Peter never says that the Devil swallows us whole. 

Cuban poet Armando Valladares spent twenty-two years as a political prisoner under Fidel Castro. In his book, Against All Hope, he recounts many small but mighty triumphs of the human spirit over oppression which make survival possible. On one occasion a guard bragged that no prisoner could get anything past him. A certain Captain Morejon, hearing the boast, warned, "Why, if you're not careful, these men will drag a sack of fertilizer right in under your nose and you'll never even know it."

Game on!

The sacks in question weighed upwards of two hundred pounds, but the prisoners were determined. First, they opened one of the sacks by picking out three inches from the top seam. Next, they emptied its contents through that tiny opening. The squad spreading the fertilizer dropped the empty bag near the cell block door and the cleaning crew brought it inside. After that, hundreds of men muled in small amounts of the fertilizer in pockets, shoes, and matchboxes, pouring each little offering back into the tiny tear at the mouth of the bag. When it was full, they sewed the seam back up and waited for the next search to turn it up. Guards were furious! Political Commissioners tramped into the fields to discover how the men had done it. The prisoners, of course, claimed complete ignorance.

Satan works with sin like a convict with a load of fertilizer. The devout Christian who would never take delivery on a two-hundred pound bag of transgression might not notice as the Enemy slyly slips a pocketful here and a fistful there through a tiny tear in his spiritual defenses. Maybe that's why Jesus equated anger with murder and lust with adultery: Once the first little pile of rebellion trickles in, it's only a matter of time. "It does not matter how small the sins are" Uncle Screwtape, the seasoned tempter, tells his trainee-nephew Wormwood, "provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick."

Discipline yourselves and keep alert: Roaring lions or nibbling mice; it's all the same in the end.