I have a friend who is an agent in the Secret Service. So, one day we were talking and I asked him, “So, you guard the President?” And he said, “Yup. The president, diplomats, all of them.” And he began to tell me about his office job. He does the recruiting process, and every applicant that comes in has to complete a long written application and then come in for personal interviews. It’s a very demanding process.
So, on the day of the personal interviews, he gathers everyone into a room and proceeds to give them a very clear and intimidating talk. “Only 2% of people make it through the whole process, and only 5% make it by me. Do you know why? They lie. They write one thing on their application, and they say something else in the interview. They lie.”
He asks people about what they put down in the application, and they catch some fear and their story starts to change a little bit. The drugs, academic failures, black marks in their lives, they don’t want to bring out.
My friend said to me, “See, I don’t care if you did drugs in college. You could do all the drugs you wanted in college. But when something goes wrong in the whitehouse, when you mess up and everything is on the line protecting the most powerful people in the world, you better not hide it.
It’s not the crime.
It’s the coverup!”
A few years ago I arrived here in Chontal with a Christmas present for the school: a brand new miniature video projector. That’s special because the government wants the teachers to use those things and that school doesn’t have any of it. Well, last February, the principal and a teacher sat me down and said, “We have some bad news. The projector was stolen. We think it was one of the other teachers who left.” I was ready to say, OK, and think about how to replace it. Then they said, “It happened 4 months ago. We haven’t told the police, or anyone else, because we’ll just get criticized.” Well, everything changed when I heard that. You mean, you haven’t looked for it, haven’t told the police or the local people to get their help to look for it? You’ve been sitting on this for 4 months, even though you think you can narrow things down to 2 people? I was not happy, and let’s just say that giving them another gift is not on my radar screen.
It was not the crime.
It was the coverup.
Imagine you are God in the Garden of Eden. You are strolling along and now you can’t find Adam and Eve. Why? It is because they are hiding. They are afraid and have covered up. It wasn’t the sin of eating the fruit that made God put Adam and Eve outside the garden.
It was the coverup.
On the cross, Jesus is going to take all the consequences for our sins and messups and forgive us. But it’s not just that. See, Jesus is naked on the cross. The fig leaves are gone. There is no more coverup. The Garden of Eden is back.
To be in God’s service, we are invited to Jesus’ cross to be loved and forgiven. To be free to leave behind the fig leaves inside our heart and get back to the original Garden of Eden and experience a joy and life like no other.
There’s only thing that frustrate God’s efforts to take us back into Paradise on earth.
And it’s not the crime.
It’s the coverup.
“I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.” (Gen 3:10)
ALM 