It’s Not The Juice

It’s Not the Juice

A dear married friend shared a story that stayed with me for days. Even though I am not married. And I don’t drink grapefruit juice or share grocery-buying responsibilities with anyone. It doesn’t matter. Her story is mine, and I’ll bet it’s yours, too.

My friend likes grapefruit juice in the mornings. When she married her husband, he couldn’t fathom how anyone could want grapefruit juice every morning. But his wife’s habit has rubbed off, and now he likes it too! But they’re on a budget. And she’s responsible for the budget and the grocery shopping. So when he drinks the last of the juice, he doesn’t replace it. And when she reaches into the fridge in the morning and finds the juice nearly gone (or worse, the empty bottle sitting on the counter), she isn’t happy. At all. Now since there are two juice drinkers in the family, the agreed-upon budget doesn’t stretch as far, meaning something else has to give if the current trend continues.

She says the juice became a source of persistent irritation in their household, but it wasn’t really about the juice. The juice was just a trigger (or more positively a cue) for greater understanding or compromise or sacrifice or grace, hiding right there in her refrigerator! I get that. The “juicy” things that annoy me are cues too. They are reminders that I can be angry, resistant, or rude—or I can try to see beyond the immediate issue and move toward understanding. Because that’s what love does.

I confess I felt grateful that the troublesome juice issue was my friend’s and not my own, but I have a “juice problem” too. I am frequently too quick to take offense. I am often thin skinned and critical. I forget what I should remember and remember what I should forget. I struggle to forgive those who hurt me—even though I know I have been forgiven much. That’s the state of things in my refrigerator. How are things in yours?

This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience—it looks for a way of being constructive. It is not possessive: it is neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance.

1 Corinthians 13:4, PHILLIPS