Maybe you’ve experienced this: you’ve been on the 405 in the midst of prime, rush hour bliss. You have to pee, you’re late for the final episode of Lost, your iPod adapter decided to die on you, and you’re still 45 miles from home. At this point, you’ve probably already begun feeling the effects of pure, unadulterated rage. You’re seeing red, and the sight of the driver in front of you who you’ve been tailing for the past half-hour who’s forgotten to turn off his right blinker is enough to make you flip him the bird, pull a Michael Douglas in Fallen and bazooka-blast the next person who cuts you off. Instead, you sit. And wait - knowing that the next 45 miles will get you home by two a.m. at best. Life sucks.

At this point, even the slightest provocation is enough to cause you to fly off the handle, honking madly and cursing wildly at even the innocent child in the backseat of the minivan next to you, who is doing nothing but minding her own business and peering gleefully out into the vast and happy place that is the perfect world, going by at 5 mph, and smiling. You cringe.

However, there is one small sect of people that, no matter how bad the traffic, how long the forgotten blinker, or how many miles from home, that I just can’t seem to reprimand. And that is the driver baring the religious bumper sticker.

Call me crazy (seriously, it’d be justified) but going ape on the little church-going couple with “Jesus Loves You” staring back at me, just seems like the kind of karma I don’t need. I’m stuck in this traffic, so, already, I must have pissed God off somehow. I don’t know why, but I just can’t seem to bring myself to detonate my horn on them – even if they are driving 30 in the fast lane.

What stops me is this: seeing my demise (most likely either from an early stroke or the victim of road rage) and meeting “the man upstairs” at the pearly gates, only to have him present to me, video clips of all the things in my life I’ve done wrong that - what a relief!- he’s forgiving me for. Oh, but wait, what’s this? On a Friday afternoon on March 8, 2012 at 17:00, an incident transpired on the 405 freeway involving a young, hot-tempered female running – Wait, is that the Pebblestons?- a devoted, dependable volunteer couple from St. Agnes’s Congregational Church off the road in a firestorm of fury.

I see the dip of His head, and the disappointed shake as He tells me, on second thought, I’m not invited in after all. The murder he could overlook and maybe even the robbing of the Salvation Army in ’98. But this? No. Defaming the couple with the “Child of God On Board” sticker on their back window? Inexcusable.

Repenting, I turn away and go to Hell.

This is why I never, ever, ever honk at the “Child of God” in front of me.