How to Break the Cycle of Hate. UNITE Linky

Sitting one car away, waiting patently, for caffeine. Drive-through stops, like a river halted by the town-car in front of me.

And I have been learning….Anything not moving, not growing, living, breathing….will eventually die.

Breathe starts slowing. Counting.  1….2….3….4….5 minutes pass.

The car before me keeps chatting with the Starbucks worker.  Maybe there is a problem?  Maybe something serious happened?

I wait longer.  6….7….8…..9  minutes.  Patience is shrinking, like a cloud covering thinning, sun beating down revealing the truth of what’s in me.

“What do I do?”  I ask myself.  “Do I honk?”…”No, that just seems rude.”  I am really not in a hurry.  But time keeps accumulating and I simply just want to get moving.

I feel like a river.  Stopped up.  Impatience, anger, frustration, rising like debris, stopping the life, joy, peace I had in me…prior to coming to Starbucks.

I role down my window.  Stop. Think.  Role it up again.  If words slip out…I know they won’t be “Christian.” 

I feel anger welling, a volcano of emotions I never knew I had, surfacing within me.

I don’t see a reason for this hold up.  Still, emotions can flare when we have no understanding or explanation for difficult situations happening around us….

Barista and town-car in front of me keep talking.  Now laughing. While I am a branch….slowly dying.  Needing grace to come and snip off these emotions running through me, at a rate I never could have anticipated or expected.

“God give me patience.” I mumble under my breathe.

Then, I hear it. “Pay for the car behind you.”

“What?”  I argue. “You have.  Got.  To.  Be.  Kidding me.”  I am now angry.  10…11….12.  The clock keeps ticking.

It will be a miracle if I don’t give an earful to the attendant….”But YOU want me to pay for the car behind me?”

I wrestle like Jacob.  Feeling the weight of His presence pressing down on me.  In insistence.

How will I explain that to the worker?  Instead of cursing…I want to bless?

Finally the cars move.  I breathe.  Expecting an apology or at least some explanation as to why I had to sit in the drive thru for 15 minutes.

I anticipate seeing the barista tired, worn out, or distraught from whatever conversation took so much of her time.  But instead, she smiles as if I hadn’t (we all in the line) hadn’t just wasted fifteen minutes of our life.

I gasp and whisper under my breathe.  “I am not paying for the driver behind me!”  She is not even a little apologetic.

A tantrum flares inside of me like a child inside me come to life.  And I feel like a two year old needing to choose whether she will grow from this situation…or die from the pride welling from inside.

It is a very real choice.  My choice.

However pride can sometimes seems so much more gratifying when the world doesn’t go our way, when people seem selfish, and the drive-thrus of life leave you stagnant or dismayed.

I had over my bankcard.  Funneling through the choices. “I am NOT going to pay for the person behind me.” I keep repeated silently inside of me.

Using all grace within me…just to hold my tongue.

But then the weight of His presence fills the car once again.  Pushing emotions aside and reminding me that not doing what He calls us to do…regardless of how irrational it may seem….is no less than disobedience.

Finally, I ask begrudgingly between my teeth.  “How much is the bill of the car behind me?”

“What? Oh! Let me check.  It’s $7.58.”

She seems surprised.  Ugh. I slide down in my seat a little.  “O.k. I want to pay for whoever it is in the vehicle behind me.”

“You do?”  The voice of the attendant climbs willingly an octave or two.

“Yes.”  There.  I did it.  Nothing more.  Look God, I am being obedience, I want to shout at the top of my lungs, no more humble than when I started. 

I drive away.  Still not ecstatic at what I had done. Still fuming that the barista so
painfully took too long and didn’t. even. apologize.

But then, the freeway comes.  Oh that glorious freeway where stagnant people can’t stop up the open road calling me forward.  I go a little bit faster this time…trying to assert my freedom.

But it is there, He speaks to me again.

“We have a choice.  We can let hate, anger, resentment flood, freeze, stagnate people…car after car…situation after situation.  Or we can cut it off…and choose to love instead.”

I think of the branches and how hate is like leaves shriveling.  A dead branch.

I imagined that if I was mad and was one cup away from my glorious coffee…how much more angry where cars five, ten, fifteen people behind me?

I remember how at that same Starbucks ,a while back…for three days, there was a rally of every person paying for the coffee of the one behind them.

It was love so radically, they even wrote an article about it in our local paper.

A river of love, a love revolution moving, starting with simply one person, choosing to think of others instead of themselves. 

And I realized why God had called me to break the cycle….of one person ruining the day of so many behind them.

I needed to cover over those hurting behind me.  And offer love where there had been hate birthing.

I realized obedience is more about His plan to change a dying world, an angry world…than it is about my own personal circumstance….Or how I felt in the heat of the moment.

And when we listen to Him.  He has the power to cut off branches.  Growing love and fruit and joy and peace….where there had only been a stick suffering from the effects of other people.

And hadn’t I been wanting a life that bloomed?

So, I bowed my heart in that car on the freeway.  Saying “Thank you. Thank you God that you lead me to your truth….and showed me that LOVE is always the way.  Trusting you (despite how we feel) is always the way to have a life that really blooms with the fruits of your Spirit.”

Love.  Kindness.  Blessing.  Not because we want to or always feel like it….

But because loves covers over multitude of sins…And I too have been, the one stopping traffic…

By thinking of myself…instead of seeing first, the needs of other people.

(Linking with Titus 2, Jen)