Polluting the Drinking Water

Do the names Prairie Home Companion or Garrison Keillor ring a bell? If they don’t, they should. Keillor is the voice for the radio show which airs each Saturday on NPR. I discovered it when driving to and from Freed and have loved it since. One year for Christmas Sara bought me a set of CDs from the show, and there was a particularly interesting section that I’d like to share and discuss.

One of the more popular parts of the show is a section called “Letters from Lake Wobegon” – a fictional town with amusing stories told by Keillor. But one letter was not from Lake Wobegon really, but a friend. The episode is entitled “Letter from Jim.” If you can find this episode and listen, I strongly encourage it. In it, Jim is writing Keillor about growing older. He had come to a point in his life where he felt fairly useless to his family, other than to put the food on the table. And along came a young attractive lady at his workplace who made him feel more useful and important. When the opportunity came to go on a weekend trip for work he jumped at it, with adultery on the heart.

But as he is waiting for her to pick him up, he gets to thinking about adultery. He calls it horse trading. It seems as though he’s just going to the highest bidder. But what happens when this new girl grows tired of him, or vice versa? The day will come when there will be no bidders and then what?

But more poignant than that to me is what Jim says about the effects of his decision:

“As I sat on the lawn looking down the street, I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, that they are no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families—my infidelity would somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth. If I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard the intersection and someone’s child will be injured. A sixth grade teacher will think, “What the hell,” and eliminate South America from geography. Our minister will decide, “What the hell—I’m not going to give that sermon on the poor.” Somehow my adultery will cause the man in the grocery store to say, “To hell with the Health Department. This sausage was good yesterday—it certainly can’t be any worse today.”

Obviously there’s some humor here, but there is something so very true, not just about adultery, but sin in general. Sin pollutes. And it’s never really just us – it’s those around us. We think it’s in secret, but it doesn’t work that way. When I lie, or lust, or become prideful, or whatever sins we humans have a propensity to do … it’s not just about me. This is the great lie our world tells us – it’s okay as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. But sin always hurts people, even if the effects are not immediate or obvious. My lustful thought hurts my relationship with my wife, and thus hurts my children, and so on and so forth. The same goes for lies, cheating, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. It’s never really just me. My sin pollutes the drinking water of those around me and even of those not around me in many cases, because it spreads like disease.

So just remember that. Your sin is never going to be just about you. It always affects others in serious ways. And in thinking of this, to those whom my sin has hurt, I apologize and ask forgiveness. I too am selfish too often, and I am confident I have polluted someone’s water before.

Thank God for the Healer, the One who cleans the water … who purifies even me, the sinner. Know that for this problem of sin, he is the only cure. And only when we are the method of spreading the cure instead of the disease will we ever have hope.