Sin, Cancer, and Antagonists

Working in a veterinary hospital exposes you to any number of sad cases on a weekly basis. It's a sad fact of life that many of our companion animals live shorter lives than we do. Beyond old animal issues, there are traumatic cases, contagious diseases, and freak accidents that take the lives of pets
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But one thing in particular that seems to claim a lot of critters: cancer.

It has a lot of names, some unpronounceable, some simple. It's not uncommon to hear someone ask if they're looking for "the badness" in a particular animal. Positive results are greeted with a string of profanities cursing the disease, deep sighs, and a sad pat on the head for a dog that probably still wags its tail.

Old, young, healthy, unhealthy. Doesn't matter.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about it is that it isn't anybody's fault. It's the body attacking itself from within, eating itself from the inside out. Sometimes it doesn't even show itself until the last moment, when there's nothing to be done.

Animals don't smoke a pack a day. They don't go to tanning salons. They don't choose to microwave their food in styrofoam or take unnecessary hormone replacements or drink excessive alcohol or work in high radiation areas or do any of the other things we avoid to try to escape the "c" word.

The badness comes for them anyhow.

Sin comes for us in much the same way.

We try to go to church and say the right things and do all the right things. We try so hard to be conscientious of our tempers, of our words, of our thoughts. But in the end, we fail.

Because the badness is already in us, eating us from the inside out.

We are by nature sinful and unclean. We cannot escape our sinful nature, our soul's innate desire to self-destruct through selfishness. It's growing within. And we can't fix it on our own. We need something from outside of us to cure it, something more powerful than ourselves. And that cure must be miraculous, or else sin will merely rear its ugly head in some other form somewhere in the body.

I think we're missing a key story element here. So often our antagonists in our stories are outside of the protagonists. We miss the opportunities that our characters themselves present. After all, if our characters are fallen humans (or fallen aliens, I suppose), they have sinful natures struggling to consume them from within, in spite of all their best efforts to prevent it from growing and spreading.

Don't get me wrong--I'm a fan of taking the Ring to Mordor to destroy the Dark Lord. The devil's real and we need to acknowledge that evil powers exist outside of human nature. However, the most terrifying battle line isn't drawn between Gondor and Mordor as good and evil clash head on; it's drawn down the center of every human heart. One side has the true picture of what God intended; the other has sin struggling to break free. It consumes from within, slowly at first, but growing.

Sometimes the enemy within is the most frightening--even if that enemy is yourself. Don't discount it in real life and don't miss out on the chance to utilize it in your stories.