On Vaccinations

I got all my vaccinations last week in preparation for my upcoming East Asia trip. The shots included Typhoid, Hepatitis A & B, and some pills for preventing malaria (which I started taking this morning--the pill was the size of a small mammal).

Getting shots is never fun, but it's a necessary evil if you're going to go overseas, particularly to a part of the world which is very prone to diseases. So I paid $300 to sit in a doctor's office for 4 hours so that they could stick me in the arms with needles and inject me with diseases. Fun, fun. But enough ranting. There is a point to this discussion.

If you're unfamiliar with how vaccines work, here's a short synopsis of the process: You get a shot of some sort which contains a small amount of a weakened form of the disease that you want to be defended against. Once you are injected with the disease, your body reacts, forming antibodies against that disease so that when you encounter the real form of the disease, your body is already prepared to fight against it. Got it? Good.

Vaccines are good for our bodies, but exposing our spirits to small, weakened forms of spiritual "diseases" doesn't work out too well for us. You see, small doses of sin don't protect us against the "larger" sins. Unlike a vaccination, they weaken our defenses, leaving us vulnerable to a full attack.

The process of temptation starts out very similar to the process of vaccination. The Enemy often works in the following manner: we are exposed to some sort of temptation which seems very trivial, i.e. looking at a scantily-clad woman on a shampoo commercial. Soon, we don't see anything wrong with the trivial temptation. We're not affected by it anymore. So, he tempts us with the next level of temptation, such as viewing a sex-scene in a movie. After all, it's not "true" pornography, so it can't be that bad. And so the process continues until before very long, we have gotten so used to sin we longer see it as being that bad.

Satan very rarely tempts us with the full, ugly form of sin in the very beginning. Most of the time, he works us up to it with things that we deem as being "not that bad." However, every small temptation that we give in to leads on a slippery slope to sin.

James describes the process of sin this way: "Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death." (James 1:14-15)

Get your shots for school and trips. We don't want you getting sick if you can help it! However, don't expose yourself to "weakened" forms of temptation. Sin is sin, and it all leads to death.