This Free Offer Is Too Expensive

by Curtis Shelburne

I GUESS I FIT into our almost 21st century computer age pretty well. I love computers. Though they regularly frustrate me, I still love what they can do if their human operators punch the right buttons.

And I love e-mail, the electronic mail you get by subscribing to an online service or Internet provider. It makes traditional mail, which e-mail lovers smilingly call “snail mail,” seem, well, snailishly slow. At the punch of a button, I can communicate with my Marine lawyer nephew in Italy or my missionary nephew in Uganda, with a friend across town or across the state, and get information from every corner of the globe. For months now, I’ve been in a discussion group, a “talk forum,” that includes some of my closest friends and some folks I consider to be on the cutting edge of what’s going on in my own Christian tradition. I can talk to them, get advice, ask for their prayers, etc., all at the touch of a button. E-mail. It’s neat stuff.

It does have a down side. Got junk mail in your mail box? I promise you, if you ever let your e-mail address get out too far, you’ll have junk mail on your computer. Its subject line is almost always typed in ALL CAPS SO YOU’LL SEE THIS OPPORTUNITY YOU JUST CAN’T REFUSE, and it often ends with !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. I almost always delete it without reading it. It’s annoying.

And some is worse. The other day I opened the “mailbox” to find this offer: “Live Cybersex on Your Computer 24 Hours a Day! Free!”

No, I didn’t take “advantage” of the electronic peep show this cyber-cesspool company was offering. But it made me think. Was that “offer” really free?

No way. They were selling something we’d all be better off without, you can count on that. Although many of the choices we make may be less obviously wrong than this one, the fact is that you and I never make choices that don’t have consequences, good or bad, and none of them are “free.” If we really are creatures destined for eternity, then every choice we make molds us, shapes us, and transforms us slowly but surely into something that will end up one day more beautiful or more horrific than we can now begin to imagine.

Oh, yes, God’s forgiveness is real and strong. Not all, not even most, choices must be fatal. But they are all moving us in one of two directions. And sometimes all we have to do to start a scary transformation into a slobbering, window-peeping, lowlife creature crawling around under rocks is to punch a button. Choices have consequences. No choice is free.