Where There is Smoke

 

“It sure is hazy,” I said.  “If anything, it is worse than it is back home.”  The sun floated like an eerie orb, decorating a haze filled sky.

“I guess it’s the forest fires up in Canada,” Elaine said.  “I heard that some lawmakers from Michigan sent a letter to Canada telling them to stop the fires up there so that there was less smoke in Michigan.”

I laughed.  “That’s silly,” I said.  “I’m sure they are doing what they can, but a lot of Canadian forests aren’t really accessible by road and if you have to fly hundreds of miles to reach them, that will limit how much you can do to halt them as well.  It’s probably better just to pray for rain.”

We were driving and when we stopped at a gas station and got out, we discovered that the haze wasn’t simply in the atmosphere.  The air smelled strongly of smoke and would irritate your throat after just a little while of breathing it.

I have read many times the idea of Chaos theory and the difficulty of predicting the effect of tiny things on large systems.  A butterfly flaps its wings in North America and somehow this triggers a cascade of events that leads to a typhoon in the South Pacific.

Conceptually, this makes sense to me, but my feeling is that most of the time, the correlation is a lot clearer.  Forest fires in Canada lead to a smoky atmosphere in northern Virginia. 

The Apostle Paul wrote about the challenge of food offered to idols in I Corinthians 8.  In this passage, he spent very little time talking about whether or not it was sinful to eat this meat, focusing rather on the question of how eating such food would affect our brothers and sisters within the church.

The point clearly is that our actions affect others walk with God.  In an individualistic society it is easy to ignore this.  Many people believe that they should be able to do whatever they want and the people around them will just have to deal with it.

None of us lives in a vacuum.  We live in community.  We live with family.  The way we live our lives affects all of these people and – even if we don’t intend it to affect them. 

Even more challenging is the fact that our children will reap what we sow.  Whatever short comings we have in our lives will crop up in their lives to a higher degree.

Just as the smoke from forest fires in Canada doesn’t stay in Canada, but drifts as far south as Virginia, so too, our actions will touch and help (or harm) the lives of those around us.  Let them experience deeds of kindness and love that will encourage them to lives of faithfulness, not a mixture of anger and bitterness that block the sun and lead them to live with discouragement.