I don’t understand people. At times, I look at the people around me and think to myself, “Am I one of them? Really?”
Case in point:
I ride a bus in the morning to get to work. The bus stop is in front of a small strip mall with a child care facility on one end. Each morning, the bus pulls in parallel with the strip mall along side the curb and I, along with about twenty other people, get on. It isn’t paradise, but it gets me to work.
The problem arose when one of the child care facility employees decided to park in… gasp… one of the parking spots reserved for the child care facility. The spot happened to be in the path of the bus. Of course, chaos ensued. The hapless employee was accosted the moment she stepped out of her car.
How dare she park there? Doesn’t she know that a bus pulls across those parking spots? For the love of all that’s holy, why would she dream of parking there instead of to the right of the building like everyone else?
Turns out, she simply wanted to keep her car out of the sun during the day. The tramp.
The woman got angry. The people in line got angry. And then the bus showed up. You could cut the tension with a knife. Would the bus simply ram the car out of the way? Would it skip this stop altogether because it couldn’t take its normal path to the curbside? Would the earth explode and kill us all?
The answer to all those questions was no.
The bus driver was one of those rare types who can think on his feet. He veered around the car and angled in toward the curb. And there the behemoth sat with doors open, ready to load passengers. Oh, but the plight of those poor passengers. The bus was now eight feet farther from the curb than normal. Eight long, arduous, nearly insurmountable feet.
Upon seeing this, it would be logical to assume that the bus passengers would feel a bit sheepish about the whole debacle. After all, what’s eight feet among friends? But the very next day, the woman parked her car, and the passengers revolted.
The end result is this: the passengers are stressed (one of them is going so far as to run the woman’s license plates to see if she really is who she claims to be), the poor woman who had the nerve to park in a spot reserved for her to park in is stressed, and I’m reminded that without God, people will kill each other over something as trivial as eight feet.
You know all that stuff you read in the Bible about being made a new creation in Christ? What if it’s true? What if we don’t have to be the petty, shallow, bitter people that seems to be the common denominator in humanity sometimes?
Wouldn’t that be something?
Case in point:
I ride a bus in the morning to get to work. The bus stop is in front of a small strip mall with a child care facility on one end. Each morning, the bus pulls in parallel with the strip mall along side the curb and I, along with about twenty other people, get on. It isn’t paradise, but it gets me to work.
The problem arose when one of the child care facility employees decided to park in… gasp… one of the parking spots reserved for the child care facility. The spot happened to be in the path of the bus. Of course, chaos ensued. The hapless employee was accosted the moment she stepped out of her car.
How dare she park there? Doesn’t she know that a bus pulls across those parking spots? For the love of all that’s holy, why would she dream of parking there instead of to the right of the building like everyone else?
Turns out, she simply wanted to keep her car out of the sun during the day. The tramp.
The woman got angry. The people in line got angry. And then the bus showed up. You could cut the tension with a knife. Would the bus simply ram the car out of the way? Would it skip this stop altogether because it couldn’t take its normal path to the curbside? Would the earth explode and kill us all?
The answer to all those questions was no.
The bus driver was one of those rare types who can think on his feet. He veered around the car and angled in toward the curb. And there the behemoth sat with doors open, ready to load passengers. Oh, but the plight of those poor passengers. The bus was now eight feet farther from the curb than normal. Eight long, arduous, nearly insurmountable feet.
Upon seeing this, it would be logical to assume that the bus passengers would feel a bit sheepish about the whole debacle. After all, what’s eight feet among friends? But the very next day, the woman parked her car, and the passengers revolted.
The end result is this: the passengers are stressed (one of them is going so far as to run the woman’s license plates to see if she really is who she claims to be), the poor woman who had the nerve to park in a spot reserved for her to park in is stressed, and I’m reminded that without God, people will kill each other over something as trivial as eight feet.
You know all that stuff you read in the Bible about being made a new creation in Christ? What if it’s true? What if we don’t have to be the petty, shallow, bitter people that seems to be the common denominator in humanity sometimes?
Wouldn’t that be something?
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