If you do what is right, won’t you be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. Gen. 4:7

I have a bad habit. I’ve had it since I was a child. I do it when I’m nervous, I do it when I’m bored, and I do it when I’m thinking. It always gives me away during quiet lulls in a conversation or public settings. Sometimes, I don’t even know I’m doing it, and sometimes I can hear my mother’s voice telling me I’m going to be deformed.

I crack my knuckles.

I blame my dad’s friend Richard. Every time he would come to our house when I was a little girl, he would make a beeline for me, and I knew what was coming. I wanted to run. I wanted to hide. But in my fear of being disrespectful, I could do neither. All I could do was sit there and let him pop my fingers. Looking back, it’s funny and weird and I’m pretty confused about why he did that.

But it stuck. It used to be abhorrent to me. It was painful and embarrassing. My mom always told me it would make my knuckles get big, and as someone who could palm a basketball by seventh grade, I did not want big knucks to boot.

Still, I popped. Even after all the weirdest kids in school stopped doing it for kicks, for me, it stuck. For nearly three decades, it has stuck. In these latter years, I’ve even added the wrists for good measure. Now, I’m afraid I’m seeing the beginnings of arthritis take hold because of the constant aggravation I have caused.

We have the notion that we can control sin. That it is this inanimate object we have the power to bring out when we want and tuck it back at any time, careful not to let it smudge the other parts of our lives. Even if the sin pattern began as a child because of a wrong someone else did to us, we often view it as a passive feature of our lives — always there, but quiet and innocuous. Especially as those who have been freed by Christ and have even made peace with our pasts, it can be easy to think that because sin no longer has the force it once did, we cannot be enslaved by it.

The thing about sin is that it always aims to kill.

The gateway from abhorring sin to cozying up with it is the original easy-access entry. It is the most addictive substance on earth, packaged in the most ordinary plastic bag. Its means often look mundane, what everyone else is doing, but its end is always death.

I may be a creepy knuckle cracker, but I have this one real totem, a failsafe against my mother’s admonitions actualizing: I pop the first and second knuckles of every finger except one. There is one single joint I never, ever crack, and every once in awhile, I compare it to the same joint on the other hand, just to make sure they are of equal size. Thankfully, they are, but suppose I wake up tomorrow and the popping one is noticeably bigger. I tell myself I will stop immediately. Put a rubber band around my wrist and snap it every time I feel like popping, something like that. But a slowly creeping arthritic pain hasn’t been enough to cure me; it would take a jarring realization like my fingers growing before my eyes.

Maybe it’s seeing yourself in a tagged picture on someone else’s feed that alerts you about the weight gain. Maybe it’s overhearing a conversation about yourself or realizing you forgot an item on the calendar that tells you you haven’t been a great friend, or you’ve changed for the worse. Maybe it’s your toddler being brutally honest. Maybe it’s a credit card being declined. Maybe it’s getting caught in the act. The gentle rebuke of a fellow believer. The gracious discipline of a heavenly Father. Often, it takes being shocked by what we see in these metaphorical mirrors to cause us to really reset.

If you are brave enough, ask an accountability partner what is one thing they see in you that is causing you or those around you to stumble. Either way, may we always be praying God would confront us with the honest truth about our pet sins. Believer, we want to get caught! The Lord loves those whom He disciplines, but woe to the person He leaves to her own white-knuckling, cracking, breaking sin patterns.