Considering Thoughts

The other night as I stepped outside of where I work to take out some trash, what greeted me was a thick haze that at first I thought was fog until the overpowering smell of smoke hit me.  My first reaction was panic.  Oh my gosh!!!!  There's a fire in Albuquerque!!!  My second reaction was to calm myself down because if there was a fire in Albuquerque of that magnitude, I would likely be hearing sirens or something.

It turns out the smoke was coming from a fire somewhere in Arizona near the border.  So while my first reaction was to freak out, my second reaction was to look down at my work clothes and realize that they were going to smell like smoke the next time I wore them.  Since I had just washed them, I was not happy.  I voiced my complaints to my dad as I called to let him know that I was heading for home a while later.  But as I drove, another thought came to me.  Here I was complaining about the fact that I was going to have rewash my clothes before work the next day when people in Arizona might not have a home to wash their clothes in anymore or even clothes to wash because of that fire.  Just thinking about that made me realize how selfish I had been.  There were people who had potentially lost their homes or who knows what else in that fire.  Surely that was more important than the state of my clothes!

I realized that I really needed to consider my thoughts and what I'm thinking.  I can choose to complain or I can choose to be selfless and take a moment to pray.  Granted that's not always easy.  We are creatures of sin by nature, and we are selfish by nature.  It can take a concerted effort to get rid of those selfish thoughts and replace them with selfless ones.  Still, it's well worth the effort to do so.  It makes us feel good and it honors God.  Two for the price of one, you can't beat that!

This post was originally published on Sunday, June 5, 2011.