Your Cheating Heart
September 3, 2008
I was walking through the living room this morning and on the TV was a story about how scientists have found a gene in men that is basically a cheating gene. Supposedly some men have a gene that makes them susceptible to cheating on their wives. This reminds me of the scientific findings back in the mid 1990’s of the so called “Gay Gene" and also more recently the "Alcohol-Dependence Gene". If you read between the lines you might come to the conclusion that science is trying to give us excuses for our sins. Now it is not always this way but scientist are people too and have their own biased opinions about things. And on more than one occasion a scientist has come up with a hypothesis that they want to be true and then set out by any means necessary to prove their hypothesis to be true. Now I am not saying that this is what happened in this case but I am going to give a scenario that I think is possible and can I believe explain most of the findings.
“The Apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree” is a statement that I have heard all of my life. It is basically a true statement and the example I am going to use is myself, my dad and my granddad. My granddad absolutely loved to hunt and fish. I can’t remember a time that when we all got together that hunting and fishing wasn’t at least discussed. My granddad passed down his love for hunting and fishing to my dad who in turn passed it down to me. Now that doesn’t mean that I have hunting and fishing genes in me but it does show that genes are not the only thing we get from our parents. So with that I personally believe that the only thing that the scientists have proven with the “Cheating Gene” is that “the apple didn’t fall very far from the tree”.
Now I am going to give you my own little bit of theology on what is happening. The way I see it, sin (whether cheating, drugs, alcohol, greed or many other examples) happens in our lives because there is a void in our lives that we are trying to fill. And when there is a void in our lives we usually fill it with the first available thing we find. So that person that all of the sudden finds out that their spouse doesn’t seem to be the same person that they first met and feels a void in their life that they perceive to be because of their marital relationship will turn to something else (another woman, alcohol, drugs or possibly their job) to fill that void. But for some reason that void never gets filled no matter what they try to fill it with. And that is because they never really figure out what is missing that actually caused that void in the first place. Now this void is in every single one of us, not just the ones going through marital problems, we are all trying to fill that void in some way. And it also doesn’t have to be filled with sin for it to be the wrong answer. You can even spend more time with your family to fill that void and it will still just get bigger and bigger. You see that void is God and Christ. Each and every one of us has a void in us where Christ is missing no matter if we have never known Christ or if we are a lifelong Christian. The right way to fill this void is by receiving more Christ into our hearts but the wrong way is by receiving more of the world into our hearts. And also remember that you can fill that void with religion and still not be filling it with Christ.
I challenge you to look around you and find that void that is in your life. Once you find it start filling it with Christ and fight the urge to fill it with other things. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree but with the right bounce it can roll a long ways away from that same tree.
Vaya con Dios
The Eclectic Cowboy
Winfield Davenport