Living on the Edge?

Hey Friends! Sorry it's taken me a few days to post...I'll try not to let it happen again. :) It's been a good week, busy, but good! Tomorrow is going to be a fun day. Five of my closest girlfriends and I started doing a Christmas recipe exchange last year and tomorrow is our second one. I'll post my recipes for those interested later. I was reminded of a hard truth today. That sometimes as Christians we live way too far out on the edge and try to see just how much we can get away with before we feel guilty or consider an action or thought to be sin. Here's how the story goes. For those of you who may not know, I began Weight Watchers at the beginning of the year and almost a full 11 months later have lost almost 60 pounds. Very exciting! I work in the medical field and decided yesterday at work that I wanted to have some lab work done...check all my levels, cholesterol, that kind of thing. Well, I got my results back today and thankfully everything was perfect except for my LDL...or bad cholesterol. It's 20 points higher than what it needs to be. A lot of you are thinking, "oh, that's not that bad!" Exactly...that was my first thought too. I thought to myself that as long as those levels don't get any higher then I'll be ok. Really, my first thought SHOULD have been..."oh wow, I really need to make sure I work on getting those levels down to where they need to be." We (I) think this way though as Christians all the time about so many areas in life. How far can I get to sin without it really being sin? How close to the edge can I live a "worldly" life without falling off the cliff? In my opinion, our whole mindset needs to change. It needs to change from being "how far can go?" to instead being "how pure can I be?" I prayed in my own life today after this gentle reminder that my heart would become a whole lot more sensitive to the sin in my life and in the world around me than what it has been lately. I want to live in the comfort of knowing that I'm much more close to the heart of God than I am to falling off a worldly cliff that will take a lot of pain and sweat and tears to climb back up. Safe living? Maybe. Am I ok with that? Absolutely.