Road Trip

The past two days I've spent on a car ride to Boston to watch a friendly of maybe the biggest soccer rivalry in the world, AC and Inter Milan. It was a ride that's supposed to take about 12 hours, it took about 17 hours. There was almost always one common cause to the traffic. It was one of those things where there were three lanes that have to merge to two, and everyone who feels like they are more important then everyone else goes as far as they can and cuts in. That frustrates me like no other. What makes them think they have the right to skip to the head of the line over all the rest of us?

At one point there wasn't even that much traffic but we were so frustrated from earlier traffic. We were pulling up to one of those frequent dreaded toll booths on the northern roads in the cash lane because of course we don't have an EZ Pass, we're just clueless red neck tourists. That's when someone cut us off, there was no need, there wasn't any traffic around. We reacted by swerving into the lane they just came from. Rode right past them and gave them the "I bet you feel stupid now" look. That's when we pulled up to the booth, cash in hand, window down, and realized, this ain't no cash lane. With a couple cars already behind us, honking at us to ride on through, there was no turning back. We rolled on through without paying the toll, and we drove off to a huge alarm like we just pulled a Nicolas Cage and stole the Declaration of Independence from D.C. That's when we saw a sign, 25 dollar ticket for not paying the 5 dollar toll that we just rode through.

Later in the ride I started thinking about the back up, it had to start somewhere. There had to be that one person that was the first to cut in, therefore causing an even bigger back up. With the bigger back up, more people cut in, more people cut in, it's an even bigger back up. It's a huge cycle all started by the first person. The only way to break it is if we joined together and refused to react to a back up with cutting in. If we did that, the back up would slowly deteriorate, that way everyone could get through in good time without the need to cut in. Anyway, many times just like in our case of reacting to the swerve into our lane with a swerve into theirs, reacting so quickly isn't the best choice.

Isn't sinning the exact same way? It always starts somewhere. For us, sinning started with the first human, Adam. Since then, just like the only way to react to a huge back up is cutting in, the earth has been so contaminated with sin that the only way to react is to keep sinning. It's always gonna be that way until we join together to take a stand.

It's our choice.

As Christians, we must train ourselves to find pride in being "peculiar" to this world as my Pastor Steve would put it. Bill Perkins says this, "We must learn to find pride in refusing to sin when sinning is most justified." And many times, reacting to sin with sin, just like reacting to swerve with swerve, isn't always the best choice for ourselves. Yes, I'm pulling out the cliche phrase, What would Jesus do? React with love.

Make the choice.