Rice and Beans...ish

This is Rice & Beans Month for Lahash, which is awesome...ish.  I love this event, and I love the impact it has in East Africa.  In fact, possibly one of my favorite things about this event is the opportunity it gives me to be the Rice & Beans Police.  That's only partly a joke, because I'm known for selling this event hard and minimizing the difficulties.  In general I don't suffer whiners gladly, and where R&B Month is concerned, I tend to flaunt my "Rice & Beans Year" or my "Rice & Beans for the rest of my life!" as credentials for riding herd, if you will, for the everyone else.

Like almost any police officer in the majority world, though, it turns out I am corrupt.  While dishing out the R&B justice with a wicked-edged tongue, I admit that I'm wussing out.  At this moment, I'm eating rice and beans for lunch, but what's that in my backpack? 

Yes, that would be an open bag of free ginger snaps from Trader Joe's.  When I went there to buy my lunch supplies (which will be a post on the R&B blog), they gave me a free bag of cookies for not using a bag to carry out my groceries.  Oh, and what's that next to my little snack of hypocrisy?  A DVD from The Justice Conference that says "What are you willing to die for?"  Apparently I'm willing to die for my kids in East Africa, I'm just not willing to give up cookies for them.  Truth is...I will probably eat that entire bag of cookies, because, as Doc Holliday says in the movie Tombstone "My hypocrisy knows no bounds."

I justify my half-assed approach to Rice & Beans Month a lot of ways, and if it was important to justify myself to all of y'all (grammar shoutout to Dan and Casey here), I'd list out my reasons, and most of you would probably let me off the hook.  I guess what I'm learning from writing all this out is that whether or not I eat rice and beans this month and how pure I am about it has nothing to do with all of you.  It has nothing to do with whether I get "caught" in my cookie gluttony.  It has nothing to do with kids in East Africa.  What I'm learning (again and still) is that I often fail to have grace for the people around me.  Chances are I'd have more grace for a thief than a R&B cheater...and how insane is that?  More insane is that when I "cheat", I'm taking advantage of the very grace that I refuse to others when they show weakness.  bleh.

So that whole convoluted "think out loud" process is to say this: next time I'm being harsh with or about someone else, just ask if I have any cookies in my backpack.