It’s fun to stand on a partly full inner tube. As we shift back and forth, there’s a little “bounce”. If someone else stands on the tube with us, the bulges grow. If two or three people join us, which can be easily seen on a truck-tire inner tube, the rubber around the bulges gets thinner and thinner.
The air within compresses, but “wants” to return to its programmed volume.
Just as the amount of air in the tube, as the amount of water on earth, seems fairly constant, so does the amount of sin in the world. In every time, there is about as much sin, but it’s more concentrated in some places than in others. When Cortez and his faithful band of Catholics landed in Mexico, they found a huge “bulge” of sin amidst the cannibalism, human sacrifice, and slavery that abounded.
Another huge “bulge” of sin reappeared with the Communists. While the prison camps of Socialist governments in Russia and China were wiping out a whole generation, they held within their confines a great amount of the sin in the world. The New World was living with less self-inflicted destruction than ever.
As the Russian prison camps were closing, the abortuaries of America began their bloody butchering. Sin had returned in all its horror to the New World. Millions died, and are dying. Murder was easier than it was for Montezuma and the depraved practitioners of their bloody Babylon. A pill or two, and death is done to the tiniest and most helpless.
Most of us can see the enormity of the death machine every government becomes. We realize there is little, if any, way to fight. We withdraw. If we do so to pray, we are wise.
St. Paul was correct: “We do not battle with men, but with powers and principalities.” That battle rages everywhere, and all must fight, or run the risk of being treated at Judgment as “The lukewarm water, I spit out of my mouth.”
When we understand that the battles are among spirits, we know that prayer is the armor our own soul must put on every morning, that prayer is ever the weapon it must take from the wall.
Thus only can sin be driven away from us until God comes in His Power, and destroys it all.
