Life is full of opportunities as well as temptations. How can you determine the difference? It’s not a hard question and the answer seems as though it can’t be that difficult…but how would you determine one from the other?

It seems to me that it has to be based on a moral code that would establish right and wrong, good and bad, holy and profane, worthy and unworthy, helpful and unhelpful, healthy vs. injurious.

Opportunities may or may not create conflict in relation to the morality of an action. Many opportunities may be equally moral, upright, full of goodness, reflective of purity, worthy of our efforts, helpful to us and others, healthy for everyone involved. Other opportunities may be equally immoral, destructive, and unhealthy, you get the idea.

Temptation on the other hand pits right against wrong, good against bad, holy against the profane, worthy against unworthy, helpful against unhelpful, healthy against injurious. Then we are left to decide what we will do. Both have the power to draw us in its direction. The draw toward the wrong, bad, injurious is not without its reality. That draw is nothing new to our day….it has been that way since the beginning of time.

It is my experience that a simple academic exercise to move in the direction of the moral has often, maybe most often, not been sufficient. It is there and then that I realize I need the power, the presence and the person of Christ to invade my life and turn me at a heart level toward that which reflects His goodness and enriches my life and the lives of those who are in the wake of my less than perfect life.

So, to engage Him daily is my need…in a personal and communal exchange of thoughts and truths, of grace and humility, of adoration and being adored.