A Little Lenten Period

I saw something a couple of months ago that got me all fired up. See, I have this pet peeve (well, I have lots of them, but this one is blogworthy). It really really bugs me when people throw their cigarette butts out their car windows to the street below. Maybe it's because I grew up in the 70's, when we were hounded by the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign. You know...Keep Litter in Its Place. It came at about the same time as "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires," but that's another story. Because of that decade of brainwashing, I can NOT bring myself to litter with a clear conscience. If you check the lint trap of our dryer, you'll find plenty of evidence of that fact, as I tuck trash in my pockets if I can't find a trash can (or I tuck it into Ian's pockets so he can deal with either disposal or litter guilt) and then forget that I was going to avoid littering when we load our washer. Again, another story.

So a couple of months ago, I saw the familiar sight of an arm out a car window casually waving a cigarette. I started in with my normal flash of internal annoyance, when I noticed something that really ignited a reaction. See, the arm wasn't hanging out of just any car. No, this was a Toyota Prius. Yes, the Hybrid, the eco-friendly, "green" car. So I stayed on the car's tail, just waiting and waiting for the inevitable casual flip of the cigarette butt down to the street below. What do you think happened? Well, I have to be completely honest here. I took my eyes off the offending piece of refuse (the cigarette butt) for just a moment. When I looked back, the butt was gone, the hand empty. So I can't say with certainty that the Prius owner was also guilty of littering, but if circumstantial evidence holds up....

It just seemed like such an oxymoronic observation. Most Prius owners aren't casual about their car choice. I've found them to be fairly intentional about the choice of that particular car. And most of them choose Prius because of the potential reduction of gas consumption, thus decreasing said owner's carbon footprint. However, last time I checked, neither smoking nor littering were particularly beneficial to the environment (nor the health of the offender and his/her second-hand victims). OK. So maybe this Prius owner wasn't a rabid carbon-footprint reducer and maybe we can say that I shouldn't be so hard on the potential hypocrisy it would demonstrate. Maybe this Prius owner was just trying to be economical. You know, save some money on gas. But even that smells a bit oxymoronic, especially when you consider the fact that the average smoker consumes around 2 packs of cigarettes a day, which is the equivalent of about 2 gallons of gas (in my car, that's 2 days of commuting).

At any rate, I got all fired up thinking about other examples of hypocrisy. And after a while, I realized that many of the examples of things I thought of exemplified one side of the political spectrum. For example, why is it that many people who are passionate animal rights advocates are also strong advocates of the movement to expand abortion rights. Why is saving the whales more important that saving unborn people? OK. I got that one from Erwin McManus. Here's one I thought of on my own. Why is it that advocates who wish to normalize homosexual behavior can use the justification that sexual preference is inborn and can't be changed? Yet when a sex offender is being punished, people defend them with the justification that they can change their sexual preference and should not be subjected to preventive measures to protect children from their advances in the future. Oh no. I had a ton more in my mind that I can't remember right now. At any rate, I started thinking about using this blog to make a case for conservatism. I started a dozen posts in my mind about the drawbacks of modern day liberalism and the positive points of neoconservatism. I spent hours in the evening (and sometimes even at work) reading political blogs trying to put together evidence-based coherent arguments. But then something happened...

It was about a month ago at small group. A friend of mine (Hi Stev!) was praying for us to be passionate about the things that Jesus was passionate about. And suddenly I had this feeling of conviction. I was spending much more time pursuing knowledge of politics than I was knowledge of Jesus. And I had this immediate sense of what I had to do. I tried to push it away, but it kept coming back. So 30 days ago I declared a little lenten period. I was going to avoid all of my favorite political blogs and any other kind of political analysis for 40 days. Instead, any time I had a compulsion for that material, I would try to think about Jesus instead.

So it's been 30 days now. And it hasn't been too bad. It was kind of tough at the beginning, especially when major political moments occurred. But I've enjoyed redeeming the time. And come to think of it, I can't even remember what major political events occurred in the past 30 days which would require my attention.

10 more days to go. Hopefully, I'll be able to return to my political education with a bit more balance. But I'll still allow myself to get a bit annoyed when I see the flip of cigarette butt out the car window.

Clarice