Shopping Carts | A Spiritual Excercise

I haven’t written much lately because I haven’t been overly inspired to do so. But tonight I have something to share. We had our staff meeting late tonight and we went out because Travis hadn’t had dinner yet. On the way back I saw 2 shopping carts from the nearby Stater Bros. on my street. I happen to know which family is responsible for this and even though I don’t understand their reasons for leaving them where they do, I know I don’t have to.

A couple of weeks ago at one of our iGroup meetings we were talking about anger and whether its right or wrong. In fact, this is a topic that comes up more than a little in our group, maybe we can discuss this more in depth later… Back to my point – this one night we were discussing what anger is about after watching a Nooma video narrated by Rob Bell. His topic was anger and he postulated why people are angry so often is because they have passion to be in a fight and they are not in one. He suggests that these people can use this passion to do good. So, as we were discussing this topic I had a fresh thing in my mind. The topic of my neighbors’ shopping carts. I try hard to make my home look presentable and make it an asset to our neighborhood and when someone else does not I tend to get frustrated. So when the carts are around from time to time I get really annoyed and naturally tend to get mad at my neighbor. But after our discussion that night I decided there needed to be a switch. So afterward I went out and grabbed the shopping cart, put it in my truck and ran it back to the Stater Bros. down the street.

This same thing happened tonight, when I saw the two carts I remembered to not get angry at my neighbor but to just collect them, put them in my truck and take them back. So what is the lesson? What is the spiritual exercise? Our anger can do lots of things in this world. It can cause us to be hateful, spiteful and impatient. I can cause unnecessary rifts in my relationships with people over my anger. But on the other hand it can cause us to act, cause us to do something to restore what we see wrong. So as I collected the shopping carts and loaded them into my truck I found myself thinking very deliberately about my anger: is my anger adding to the brokenness of the world, or is it causing me to add to the healing of the world. Its a good question for me to ask myself and the shopping carts make me do it. These days, I find joy in taking shopping carts back to Stater Bros.