Delayed Consequences

If consequences were always obvious and immediate, most of us would take our daily performance more seriously. But some of the premiums and penalties for what we do or don’t do are not always immediately apparent. Justice and judgment are often seemingly delayed, are sometimes slow and subtle, and the false assumption that anyone is cheating and getting away with it is actually merely a process of piling up accounts to be paid with certainty at some future time. It doesn’t matter whether it is cash or credit, if the sale has been made, the charge is there. Sometimes we ignore the factors of health, and because we feel no immediate permanent effect from some indulgence or some bad habit, we may think we have “gotten away with it.” We may think, because we are not spanked at the moment of our misdeeds, that the spanking has been forgotten. But it hasn’t. Nature and God and conscience and the record of our lives are inexorable in remembrance, and deliver the consequences in their own time and in their own way, for “there is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven . . . upon which all blessings are predicatedand when we obtain any blessing . . .it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.” This is no mere threatand it is certainly no more a threat than it is a promise. It is merely the statement of an unfailing truth. And the sooner we learn it, the greater will be our chances for happiness here and hereafter, for every act of our lives has its consequences, desirable or otherwise.