This is also one reason (there are others) that I would not put a sticker on my car that announces my faith. I mean...I have a long way to go before a time that whenever my car goes by, people would say "There goes another polite, generous Christian." Well, because, for one thing, people aren't usually saying that about Christians because that isn't the reputation we've carved out for ourselves, and for another, I still struggle with my road rage too much to represent anything of great importance to me.
A factor in life that has helped me to focus on this is having a kiddo. One that has been pretty verbal since, well, birth? This kid is totally going to tell on me one day. But more importantly, what am I teaching her? That where we are going is more important than everyone else's destination? That WE are more important than everyone else? That when someone else makes a mistake, you call them names and gesture inappropriately at them? That we are somehow entitled to pass up everyone in the line to get off at the exit and just sneak in at the end? That we're...what? Too good to wait like everyone else? It sounds so crazy when you think of it that way, doesn't it?
I think about how if we interacted in person the way people interact on the road how insane and violent and angry a simple moment of confusion at the grocery store could get. We beep and gesture and yell from inside the confines of our steel-reinforced automobiles. In person, we might sneak in an eye roll or a sigh. But, truth be told, we aren't so committed to our sense of injustice that we'd risk getting punched in the nose over it. In either case, we do what we think we can get away with that expresses our displeasure but is unlikely to force a point of real conflict. Because, you know, we're afraid. And we don't really want to get into it or solve anything or hear where the other person is coming from - we just want to be mad.
We do that with lots of things, don't we? Just wanting to be mad. We get mad because someone criticized our fashion sense, insulted our intelligence or failed to empty the dishwasher and then we go and tell someone else who will encourage us in our indignation. (We don't go to the person who might point out our part in the mess or tell us where we might have gone wrong. Because that is scary and we're already hurt and raw. Honesty that is difficult to hear is often simply too much to bear.)
Is that who we want to be, though? People who shift from hurt to anger because hurt is too frightening a place to dwell? People who gossip about offending parties to co-conspirators in avoiding the truth? People who make the case against another's status as a categorically awful person, so we can avoid owning up to our part in it? People who go through all of that and then pretend nothing is wrong the next time we see that person because we are too scared to have a conversation about what went wrong?
I know I don't want to be like that. But sometimes it feels like the other option - the path of honesty, the benefit of the doubt, grace, humility and courage - is simply too hard. That I've had to take the high road too many times and it's someone else's turn for a change. That I've had enough. And because of that, I am so grateful for the people in my life who are brave enough to tell me (ever so kindly) to shush, to stop acting like a fool and remind me of what I know is the better way. There is no way to do this outside of community, outside of relationships. At least for me, there isn't. So, to the people who have put up with my clumsy fumbling along the way, thanks! I promise, I'm getting better (and yelling fewer swear words from my car.)
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