Situations happen every day in every man, woman and child's life.
A mom knocks the milk jug out of her daughter's hand as she's rushing to get breakfast for everyone. The child grabs the jug, it turns upside-down and before it can be righted, all the milk is spilled on the floor. Mom has to get the kids to school. She has no time for this right now. She has a busy day running errands. Amidst making bank deposits, and chauffering children between soccer, school and ballet, she forgets to stop and buy a new jug of milk. She starts to prepare dinner and realizes she needs milk to make her fluffy biscuits to top off a really great meal she's made for her family of four. So she calls her husband and asks him to get some milk on his way home.
The husband fails to get the milk on the way home and the wife immediately assumes he doesn't listen, or doesn't care, or simply wants to be obstinate. Maybe it's all of these combined. The wife hadn't stopped to think that the grocery may have been out of milk, that he'd went to three stores and they had no milk either. Hubby knows she just wanted to make those fluffy biscuits he loves so well, and he figures he'll just tell her that she can make them another time. When hubby comes through the back door with no milk in hand, she doesn't even stop to think that they really don't have to have her fluffy biscuits to top off the meal. She doesn't even consider the stores were out of milk. Or that hubby had good reason to be empty-handed. Nope. She just plunges right in accusing, attacking and destroying any hopes for communication--all over a jug of milk.
Was it ever about the milk? Or was it about spilled milk from a previous time? A mess that couldn't be placed back into the jug and was never really cleaned up. Papertowels weren't enough to mop up that mess. So a dishtowel was used. And it was never laundered. So a lingering smell hangs in the air with feelings of discontent and bitterness. So when a child forgets to pick up her socks or bring her clothes to the laundry room, or take out the garbage, that child becomes the spawn of her father and has all his traits, and therefore, mom begins to list each and every one of them. You would think the child forgot the milk on the way home from work.
That's what sour rags can do to the heart of someone who never quite cleans up their own messes. They look at what others do or don't do, say or don't say and assume the worst of them. They look at all the situations, the events, the relationships they have and carry their soured cloth into every one of them. And when things don't go quite as they had planned, or quite the way they'd like them to go, they use the same old sour rag from before to try and sop up the mess they create for themselves.
If only we'd get to the point in life, that we clean up our own messes before trying to clean up someone else's. If only we'd take the time to wash our own laundry before trying to launder another's. The world would be much better off, don't ya think? selahV
[copyrighted, 2009, SelahVToday, hariette petersen]
