Don't Bleed Out.

Ripping off the bandaid hurts. It's not like slowly peeling it off is painful but if you just rip it off it stops hurting.

I'm trying to wean myself off of caffeine. Withdrawal is real. Quitting cold turkey is not ripping off the bandaid. It still hurts. Evil is like that too. Only you can't wean yourself off of evil, or can you?

Does the Lord let us slowly realize our evils and slowly help us remove them? Yes. He knows that if we were to quit all evil at once we would die. He lets the wheat and the tares grow together. He bends us, not breaks us.  Little by little (Matthew 13:24-30, Isaiah 42:3, Exodus 23:30).

So when is the bandaid analogy apt?

I think that people think that it will stop hurting if you just rip off the bandaid. But that's not how it works. It's more like a wound that cannot heal with a bandaid on it. The bandaid isn't a solution. It's a problem. It's gonna hurt as long as it's there. And it's gonna hurt however you choose to remove it. Slow or swift the bandaid removal will hurt. And guess what? It will continue to hurt. Even after the bandaid is gone. But that wound cannot begin to heal if the bandaid stays.

But even so, changing the analogy a little bit, if you get stabbed or pierced you are not supposed to pull the thing out of you. If you do, you'll just bleed out. You have to wait until you're equipped to handle it. Like wait till you're at the hospital or until you are prepared to deal with copious amounts of blood pouring from you. If you don't have help, or can't deal with it yet, it's a bad idea to pull the knife out or you'll just bleed out and die.

So, I don't know. I'm mixing analogies, but I guess I don't understand the bandaid one. Cause bandaids are supposed to be helpful, not harmful. Why is there all this discussion about ripping them off?

Maybe it's because they are helpful. They cover a hurt from getting worse. But if you never changed that bandaid, or tried to keep in on forever then it would start to infect your skin and be really nasty. So you just gotta rip off that little strip of sticky plastic that was once helpful but is now just gathering dirt and dead skin and making you feel sick when you look at it.

Don't bleed out. But don't let infections fester. Breathe.