Friday Evening Devotionals

Who Was the Rude One?

Tom Barnard

 

A friend sent me a poem written by Valerie Cox in the classic book, Chicken Soup for the Soul. The poem is entitled “The Cookie Thief.” The poem is about a woman traveling alone and waiting in an airport for her flight to be announced. To pass the time, she bought a book and a bag of cookies at the airport store.

 

Seated alone and reading in the gate area, she failed to notice a male passenger take a seat next to her. The bag of cookies separated the two travelers. To her astonishment, after she had reached into the bag for a cookie, the fellow traveler did the same. She was shocked, but didn’t want to make a scene. So, the two of them continued dipping a hand into the bag and removing the cookies, one-after-another, right up to the time of her flight. When only one cookie was left, she wondered what he would do. Not surprisingly now, the man took the last cookie. But he did something that surprised her. He broke the cookie in half, offering half to her. She concluded that the guy was both rude and ungrateful.

 

Still steaming after having boarded the flight and taken her seat, she reached into her carry-on bag for the book she had purchased. To her surprise, she discovered her unopened bag of cookies there as well. Here are her closing words:

 

If mine are here, she moaned in despair,

The others were his, and he tried to share.

Too late to apologize, she realized with grief,

That she was the rude one, the ingrate, the thief.

 

How many times in our lives,

Have we absolutely known

That something was a certain way,

Only to discover later that

What we believed to be true…was not?

 

Heavenly Father, how many times have I been rude to others, thinking one thing when another thing was actually true? How many times have I not been thankful after you transformed an ugly situation into a pleasant one? How many times have I taken you for granted and failed to tell you “thanks” for the serendipities you have sent my way? How many times have I been wrong while all the time insisting I was right? How many times have I been “the rude one, the ingrate, the thief”? Too many times, Lord. Thank you for correcting me today. Amen.