Snow

DISCLAIMER: This is a late blog post, so forgive my lack of grammatical cohesiveness in the following paragraphs...I just gotta get this stuff out! :)

I was driving on the thruway earlier this week, and it happened to be during an incredibly snowy expedition as I was returning to my apartment in Fillmore. What really got under my skin was that the roads were very poorly plowed causing my car to slide, skid and fish tail every which way along the road. As I was making every possible attempt not to let my car drive head on into a snow bank, a thought popped into my head. The thought was this: "At this moment I do not like snowplows at all!" You see, I expected the snowplows to do their jobs when the snow hit the streets...and when my immediate need of having a plowed street so that my car wouldn't skid and fishtail everywhere wasn't met, I became a little miffed because the plows were not out there doing what I expected them to be doing in that moment.

All I can say is a deep truth hit me as I was driving that I hadn't realized before. We tend to become bitter and resentful towards anyone/anything that isn't meeting our immediate needs in a particular moment in our life. Obviously a few heated words directed towards a snow plow isn't the best example. But I think the concept rings true. How often do we have deep immediate needs that we're expecting to be met by someone, whether it's a friend, family member, boyfriend/girlfriend, husband/wife? And if that need isn't being met by that particular individual, how do we chose to respond? Will we chose bitterness/anger and close ourselves off? Or will we seek reconciliation/forgiveness among those people we know have been put on this earth by God to meet our deepest most heartfelt needs?  

You see, I think flip side is also true...we have been placed on this earth to meet the immediate needs of people. Do we ever wonder if our choices to become bitter, angry and closed off towards people prevents us from meeting someone else's need in particular moment, and consequently preventing us from having ours met?

I think Jesus words of loving your neighbor as yourself most definitely rings true in moments like this. If we expect others to treat us a certain way...to meet an immediate need of ours, we should expect the same of ourselves when responding to others.