The other night 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 and then the overpowering smell of smoke. 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, one of my other reactions was looking down at my work clothes and realizing 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 after a while, 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. 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 need to think before I think. I can obviously choose what I'm going to think about, so I can choose to complain or I can choose to be selfless and take a moment to pray for those who might have lost everything. 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 is worth it if we do think before we think.
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