A loooong time ago … I was about eight years old.
I was using the toilet (yeah… sorry). After wiping thoroughly, I stood up to flush and pull my pants up, and out of the corner of my eye I caught the reflection of my backside in the bathroom mirror—the sliding shower door (because of course, who doesn’t put a full-length mirror across from the toilet!?!).
There, on my left cheek, was a Loonie-sized brown spot.
I panicked, as only a horrified 8-year-old can.
I grabbed a fistful of toilet paper and started wiping what I assumed was… well… poop. I wiped. It didn’t go away. I wiped again. I rubbed harder. Still there. I shuffled over to the sink, wet the toilet paper, and tried again.
No luck.
By now, I was in full meltdown. What is this voodoo doodoo that has affixed itself to me?!
Through sobs, I pathetically bleated for my mom.
She came charging in like a momma bear ready to rescue her cub from a pack of ravenous hyenas—and instead found me, pants around my ankles, sobbing, clutching a handful of soggy toilet paper.
Between heaving sobs, I explained that I couldn’t get the poop off my butt, turning and bending over so she could grasp the gravity of the situation.
She froze for a second… and then burst out laughing. A full, belly-deep laugh.
I was stunned. The indignity of it all. I admit I was a little offended.
Once she caught her breath, she explained: “That’s not poop. It’s a birthmark. You were born with it. It’s part of you.”
I was SO relieved.
She dried my cheek, wiped my tears, helped me get dressed, and gave me a big hug. “You’re a delight,” she said, still struggling to stifle her laughter.
I think about that story sometimes when I hear folks carry on about what they think constitutes sin, and how easily sin becomes the main story we tell about what it means to be human.
Because I wonder how often we misname what we’re looking at.
How often, through the lens of shame we assume something is wrong with us—something dirty, something needing to be scrubbed away—when in fact it is simply part of being human.
How many of us spend our lives with handfuls of wet toilet paper, trying to remove what was never meant to be removed?
Let me be clear—sin is real, and it matters.
It wounds. It distorts. It damages our relationships with one another, with ourselves, and with the God who is love.
But sin is not synonymous with being human.
Often, a faith so focused on sin slowly turns inward. It becomes a quiet kind of self-rejection—self-hatred dressed up as faithful devotion. And from there, it’s not a long stretch to placing that same burden on others.
And sometimes, what we’ve been taught to call sin has more to do with inherited fears, preferences, and cultural taboos.
There are whole histories of this.
Things once named unclean—shellfish, pork—have quietly found their way onto our tables. Practices that raised no concern in one place become moral fault lines in another. Even our language around modesty and gender has shifted over time, shaped as much by culture and power as by any clear sense of piety.
And sometimes, more painfully, people themselves have been named as the problem. Not because they diminish love, but because they do not fit the stories we’ve inherited about what is acceptable. And so they carry a burden that was never theirs to carry—spending years, sometimes a lifetime, trying to fix something that was never broken to begin with.
At its heart, sin is the failure to love.
Not simply breaking rules. Not failing to meet inherited standards of what is “clean” or “acceptable.” But a turning away from love—toward harm, toward indifference, toward disconnection.
And when we begin to see sin this way, something loosens.
Because when we lean into love—when we allow ourselves to be shaped by Love—what we might call life-giving moral living begins to take shape on its own.
Not as anxious rule-keeping. But as love, embodied.
Less about managing taboos, and more about participating in the overall well-being … the flourishing of everyone.
My mom knew the difference between something that needed to be washed off and something that simply belonged.
She was more than willing to clean my hands and face after a day of play—but she had no interest in scrubbing away something that was part of me.
Surely, the One who formed us knows the difference too.
Surely, the God—who—is—love knows what in us needs healing… and what in us is already, deeply, wonderfully good.
Where might you be trying to wash away something that was never meant to be removed?
Sola Caritas,
𝞃Michael
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