There is an old computer saying that says ‘Garbage in – garbage out’. I remember this saying very vividly from my days in the computer lab during my college days. This was a time when you punched cards and run them through a card reader to make a computer understand your program. One typo or a simple space in the wrong place shut down the entire program until you researched every character and fixed it.
This is also true with our everyday life. When we allow situations to enter our thinking that are not correct or that are immoral, we are allowing garbage to enter our life and unless we correct it we are throwing garbage at anyone around us.
I once read a story about a New York taxi driver that picked up a rider. The driver pulled out in front of someone, which is the only way you get around in New York City, and he received a verbal lashing from the other driver and several hand signs with ugly meanings. The driver remained his calm self, waved at the other driver, said excuse me with no return utterances of a demeaning nature. The passenger was surprised and quite happy that his driver stated, “He must be having a bad morning or something unpleasant is bothering him.”
We all have days like this when things are not going to go our way and it is going to give us frustrations and make us angry. We tend to hold negatives in and pass them on to anyone that offends us or gets in our way until we make amends with our self and decide not to let them bother us. When we tend to hold on to bad experiences it affects our attitude, our language, and our actions toward others. It is going to create a bad day for us and we are going to try and make everyone around us miserable also.
In this modern day society we call this stress or anxious moments. When we tend to hold on to this type mentality we are only shortening our time on earth because it has been proven that stress will damage your health and eventually kill you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies with us.” For us that know Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior, we understand that these incidents we face on earth are temporary and will pass. We need to remember what Jesus told us in Matthew 12:34b, “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”
The New York taxi driver understood that people are going to face bad situations. Even though they are dragging their garbage around with them he wasn’t going to let their attitudes affect him.
The electronic world has changed so much since my college days and these personal computers of today will correct our errors automatically or they will let you know when you make a mistake. Our lives are still the same and if we continue to allow garbage to infiltrate us, we are going to spew garbage back out at those around us. For us that know Jesus personally understand that He gives us peace in our heart and where we have been or where we are going doesn’t matter as long as He guides out life.
GARY ANDREWS' devotional appears each week on the Church Pages of your Clarksdale Press Register. You can contact him at GARY@gadevotionals.com
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