How We're Conditioned by Sin - Part I

I'm beginning a new series on conditioning factors associated with sin. Please feel free to join-in on the conversation. Also, if you have a question, you are more than welcome to post it. I'll work to answer an many as possible.

Here we go...
Since God is love, than love is the most powerful force in all the cosmos. Whenever we sense a lack of love in our key relationships we face a quandary – we feel uncertain and perplexed. Intrinsically, we know we have a need for love; yet, the quandary arises because we are often times unsure of how to get this need met. The more significant the lack, the greater our distress will be. All too often, we learn to cope with distress in maladaptive ways involving the self-deceptive modes of denial, repression, and rationalization. For example: A wife feels a painful lack of love in her marriage, so she focuses a significant amount of time and energy on caring for her children and work related activities to keep her mind preoccupied. By doing so, she limits the amount of time spent feeling the pain associated with the lack of love she feels. At the same time, her husband also feels the sting of love’s lack in the marriage, so he dulls his distress by viewing pornography. Through this behavior he experiences brief euphoric episodes that alter his mood. Until emotions of guilt and shame take over, he feels free from the distress of the relationship. Through their behaviors, this husband and wife deny and repress their painful thoughts and feelings. They then rationalize, i.e. justify why it is okay for them to behave in these manners. But it is plain to see they are only deceiving themselves. In reality, they are distressed over the marriage. Their attempts to avoid this reality only add to their distress. Self-deception does nothing to solve our problems in life – it only adds complexity.

Any type of strain produces stress, no matter if the strain originates from a spiritual, mental, emotional or physical source. Depending upon the factors involved, stress can have positive or negative consequences in one’s life. Basically, there are two types of stress, eustress and distress. Tomorrow, we'll continue with Part II in this series by looking at how distress caused by sin pertains to dysfunctional modes of thinking and behaving.