Observation

Riding down the road the other Sunday I had an all to common experience.  The person driving in front of me cracked their window and threw their cigarette butt out.  This irked me for several reasons.  First, I ride a motorcycle and I find it very rude for people to lob flaming objects burning at near 1,000 degrees towards me.  Next, I can only assume that people do this so that they don't dirty the ash tray in their car (dirty ash trays smell bad, look bad).  They must think that they evaporate on the ground, or that the world is so big that no one will notice.  Anyways, this is not too uncommon unfortunately.  But this particular case really got my attention because the person was driving a Toyota Prius hybrid.  My first thought was, "I guess you feel that you are saving the planet from CO2, so a little litter just evens it all out." Karma neutral living.  But then one more thing caught my attention, the church sticker on the read window.  This was a sticker from a local church, not just a generic Christian one.

Okay, so... he wants everyone to know that he belongs to Church X and cares about the environment.  While at the same time showing a blatant disregard for other people and the environment. I had an almost overwhelming desire to follow him to his church parking lot and have a word with him.  I felt that fire start burning in the pit of my stomach, anger, indignation...

...Then I caught myself.  I've felt that before and it never led to anything good, cathartic for me maybe, but not good.  Would confronting this person with my observations and assumptions change anything? "Excuse me sir, I see that you are uncaring and hypocritical..."  I know I wouldn't respond to that well at all.  I took a deep breath, let it out.  It occurred to me that I didn't know this person or anything about them, I just had my assumptions.  But God knows him and everything about him.  If God had wanted me to get involved in this person's life I'm sure he would have made it clear to me... and maybe, just maybe, this person had only this one time ever done the combination of things they did that day that once.  Maybe it was so that I could be brought face to face with myself.