The first SUV was at a stop line in the parking lot but she hadn't stopped. The other SUV was driving through and had been nearly cut off by the first SUV. The woman who was driving through slammed on her horn a few more times before irately rolling down the window and shouting at the other woman, "That's a stop line! That means you're supposed to stop! Didn't you see it?" The woman who should have stopped proceeded to display some colourful hand gestures and some even more colourful language to her new friend before angrily honking her own horn and driving off.
And I just watched. It was kind of like a train wreck, something truly horrifying that you can't take your eyes off. These women were about forty or fifty, my elders. Yet I couldn't believe how immaturely they acted. Their behaviour was so deeply ugly and so unclassy. Somehow I could never see Audrey Hepburn rolling down her window and flying off the handle at another woman for not stopping at a stop line in a parking lot. Then again, there are few women with true class left in our society today.
But it's not really about classiness. It's about the depravity of our society, the depravity that has held every human society in its sway since Adam and Eve's descendants.
"None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. ... There is no fear of God before their eyes" (Romans 3:10-12).
And without Christ, that was us. We were those ugly, frustrated, cursing women in the parking lot, our identity wrapped in our sin. We were, as the song goes, "lost in darkest night, yet thought [we] knew the way ... [running our] hell-bound race, indifferent to the cost." But then in a mighty miracle of grace, God looked upon our helpless state and we were plucked out of the darkness by the power of the cross. We were saved from depravity, given new identities in Christ.
Yet the darkness still surrounds us - in our parking lots and workplaces and schools and neighbourhoods. We see depravity almost daily. That's part of living in a fallen world. But seeing that depravity reminds us where we were. That depravity reminds us where we are no longer. And that depravity spurns us to dissipate the darkness around us.
As Jonathan Edwards reminds us, we are sunshine to the dark world because we reflect the Sun of Righteousness. We are the good in the face of depravity.