Irritants

“He always leaves the seat up on the toilet”

“She just can’t seem to park the car straight in the garage”

“He leaves his desk at home such a mess all the time”

“The kid always leaves his bath towel on the floor”

Irritants are little things about others and what they do or don’t do that can fester within us and can slowly build up to anger. They aren’t a reflection of the character of the “offending” person. They are just irritants, things that “bug” us. We know the earth won’t stop spinning on its axis because of them. Yet, if we aren’t careful, those little idiosyncrasies can become “big” things—to us.

It’s easy to pick up on those little irritants and do or say things we later wish we could take back. I went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and on the counter was a spray bottle of lens cleaner. Its normal place is on a shelf a foot and a half away—yet it seems that every time it’s used it’s left on the counter. It had become an irritant. As I muttered under my breath while I put the bottle away the other day, it dawned on me—it’s just an irritant—nothing more, nothing less. And, it caused me to take pause and think—how many irritants am I responsible for (like, my messy desk)?

Don’t we have a whole lot of better, more far reaching concerns than those little irritants to worry about? In my case, I couldn’t help but think that there are a lot of things about me that I need to be concerned about instead of that little bottle of lens cleaner. Like, for instance, how I reacted to it in the first place—a touch of smug anger—“she didn’t put it away again.”

I’m pretty sure that if God were closely watching me He would find lots of irritants about me. Oh—He is watching me. I think I have some work to do. He doesn’t let our irritants stand in the way of our relationship with Him. That’s enough reason for us to not let the irritants of others stand in the way of our relationship with them. They just aren’t worth it are they?

Bottom Line Thought: How do you react to those irritants that really don’t amount to a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things?