Lie Strong?

Lance Armstrong admits he lied about using performance-enhancing drugs in his seven Tour de France victories (January 15, 2013).

Abraham, patriarch of the Hebrew race, cooks up a lie with his beautiful wife, Sarah (ancient history).

Abraham and Sarah, father and mother of the Hebrew race, conceive a method for performance-enhanced childbirth  (ancient history).

Compare and contrast.  Is human nature so different today than it has ever been?  People want a favorable outcome, so they do what it takes to get it--even if it means lying, or at least not telling the whole truth.  People know that "good things come to those who wait", but why wait when you can have it all now, with just a little performance-enhancement?

I saw a yellow plastic wristband on the news today, made popular by Lance Armstrong's campaign to fight cancer, with the slogan "Live Strong".  Only this one said, "Lie Strong".

Lance Armstrong is not the first man to lie in order to create a "happy ending" to a story.  Abraham, the great patriarch of the Hebrew race, did not tell Pharaoh the whole truth when he migrated to Egypt to escape a famine in Canaan.  His wife Sarah was so beautiful that Abraham feared Pharaoh would kill him so he could marry her.  So, he told Sarah to say she was Abraham's sister (in reality, she was his half sister--which was legal and acceptable in those days).  But, by posing as Abraham's full sister, Sarah appeared unattached--until Pharaoh took her into his harem and began to suffer terrible plagues in his home!  He confronted Abraham on his lie and sent him out of Egypt, surrounded in a cloud of scandal.

Pharaoh had given Abraham many gifts on account of his lovely "sister" (wife), including many female servants.  It was an Egyptian servant, Hagar, who Sarah later convinced Abraham to sleep with in order to have "performance-enhanced" childbearing.  Abraham had been promised an heir, but Sarah was barren and a "spare womb" certainly seemed like a great way to get the job done.

In both cases, Abraham had to do a 180-degree turn, turning away from the lying and the performance-enhancing methods he was using to create "happy endings".  He had to allow God to work out the circumstances of his life.

At the moment, Lance Armstrong has options.  He can pedal off in the direction of redemption, as Father Abraham did, which means really coming clean, not just "making a show of it", as many in the media currently believe he is doing with his well-planned, choreographed "confession" to Oprah on Monday, January 14, 2013. Those who "come clean" accept the consequences of their moral failure and don't expect that life will "be the same as it was before". Or he can morally crash by the side of the road, expecting a showy "confession" on Oprah's network to elicit sympathy from the viewers and fans he has been lying to for more than a decade, allowing him to get what he wants.  That is his call.

It's not the lies he tells that determine a man's spiritual legacy.  It's what he does after he lies.

--Posted by Mama O.