A few years ago, I was introduced to a site posted in a message board I used to lurk that to this day still hinders my walk with God. It’s a shock site, one still active that hosts contents of gore so gruesome it puts the movie ‘300’ on a Disney level. At first, naturally, I was shocked at what I was seeing. Tortures, beheadings, traffic accidents…these are things you hear about on the news, but to see it in its raw form, to see someone get hit by a car and lie in a pool of blood in his last seconds of life through the lens of a camera, is something very different and something I wasn’t prepared for.

However, despite the shock and the disgust I felt towards this site and the person who would even consider hosting such contents, something about it lured me to visit it a second time, a third time…until eventually I was visiting it several times a week. I vindicated going to this site by telling myself it would help me appreciate life; that even in my time of death, I could reflect back to this site and comfort myself by saying “Well, at least I didn’t die like some of those people”. If only I had come to Christ sooner.

I realized, after a few months of visiting, that the shock began to wore off. It became a leisurely thing to do, and soon it began to bore me. I had become desensitized to these pictures and videos of death and as a result, the severity of murder. While many of you may not have visited this site, I’m certain that we’ve all become desensitized to sin and things God despises to a certain point because of the culture we live in. Not just sites, but the movies we watch, the music we listen to, the people we associate ourselves with have an enormous influence in how sensitive we are to sin. When I was a child, I would be shocked when I heard someone swear; now, in an environment where even my professors use explicit language in their lectures, I find myself hardly raising an eyebrow. When I first used Napster to download music illegally, I would feel guilty and delete the song after I had listened to it enough times to not like it anymore; eventually there came a point where I would even defend my piracy habits. If only I had come to Christ sooner.

When I returned to Christ last year, I still remember how it took less than a minute to list off all the sinful things I had done between my last prayer and the current one. Because I was so “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2), I didn’t realize just how deep in sin I was. Every day I’m discovering more and more just how much I needed God to make a u-turn in my life. And I pray that it remains a u-turn, rather than a full circle to go back to my old habits for it says “like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly” (Proverbs 26:11).

In the culture we live in where more and more sins are considered the norm, let’s strive to keep our spirits and our mind sober (1 Peter 1:13) from the things that desensitizes us from God’s grace. Abhor what God abhors, and embrace the standards of His Word rather than the standards of the world.

-Solomon