Every so often, things change in the building where my office is, particularly when we need to accommodate newly-hired faculty.  Walls and doors appear where there were none.  Open spaces disappear–along with the things that formerly stood in those open spaces, like chairs and vending machines.

I miss the vending machines.  Admittedly, I can be a bit of a junk food snob.  I’m one of those people who read the nutrition facts on packages:  “Wow, look how many empty calories there are in these cookies!  I’m not eating that.”  And Cheetos?  Who really wants greasy orange fingers?

But that doesn’t mean that I won’t eat anything off the coin-operated menu.  I confess that I’m particularly partial to barbecue potato chips.  And not just any barbecue potato chips, mind you, but the kettle-cooked kind.  (By the way, why is it that chips always seem to go in the top row of the vending machine, where they have to fall the furthest?   Just saying.)  Every once in a while, I get a craving for them, and now that means I have to walk across the campus to find them.

A few days ago, I was retrieving my prize from the vending machine when one of my colleagues happened by, going the other direction.  “Ah, junk food!” he said amiably as he passed.  “Food of the gods,” I responded reflexively, as I headed back to my office.

You’d think I’d be able to toss off a joke like that and let it go.  But what I said stayed with me as I walked.  And then it dawned on me.

As a lecturer, I can get a little obsessive about my PowerPoint backgrounds.  I seldom use the canned layouts; I create my own, something that visually expresses the theme of the lecture.  Sometimes, this is harder than it sounds.  What background, for example, would you use for a lecture on the doctrine of sin?

The image I use is of a young woman’s face, half obscured by her long black hair.  The face is unnaturally white; the background is jet black.  And peering out at the viewer is a single, malevolent, intensely blue eye.  For the lecture, I altered the image further, making the eye red instead.

One of my more spiritually sensitive students couldn’t take it.  “That’s really creeping me out,” she shuddered.  I had to go into the image and paste a black rectangle over the eye, and then she calmed down.  Apparently, I had been a little too successful in communicating an image of evil.

But what about sin?  This is what dawned on me as I walked back from the vending machine.  If I saw someone with that kind of ghostly pallor giving me a malevolent stare, I would give them a wide berth.  A better image to convey the nature of our daily encounter with sin might be…potato chips.

Yes, those tasty little morsels that are engineered to make you want more.  You know you shouldn’t eat them, but they’re not as bad as those junky things that other people eat.  Potatoes can be good for you.  And these chips are all natural!  So I’ll just eat three or four, just to satisfy the craving.  Well, maybe a few more–how much could it hurt?

We need to look true evil square in the eye, even if it’s to know that we should be repulsed by it.  But temptation usually comes to us in more subtle guises.  We need to take care lest our caricatures of evil allow us to take our own goodness for granted: “Well, at least I’m not like that.”  We need to be more aware of the ways in which we allow ourselves to be captive to the logic of our desires, letting ourselves be led on a velvet leash.

Today, at least, I won’t be visiting the vending machine.  One has to start somewhere.