The Bad Part of the Good News

I wonder what I would have done.

I think I may have done different. May have been able to avoid the same mistake, the same weakness. 

I could have made it. I could maybe just maybe have been the one to not choose what He chose. 

Or if not me then someone else...anyone else.

I replay the scenario a thousand times with a thousand heroes...couldn't one of them have been better than the first one?

But then I look at my choices. At my tendencies. At my weakness. 

And I realize his choice is the same one I've been making in too many ways for all of my years.

The choice to do nothing, when I should do something.
The choice to listen to the wrong voices.
The choice to put something else at the center of who I am.
The choice to forget the best in favor of the fleeting present pleasure.

...just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned...

All. Every last one of us. Brokeness in billions of different directions, all pointing the same direction: death. It is a heavy thing to consider the ramifications of the bad news. The news that we are broken. The news that me and all my friends have made a mess and need help. 

But there is help. And everyone I meet needs it. (Including the one I meet in the mirror.)

...if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One...

One sunk the ship. One can right it.