Because I'm the advanced ESL teacher at school, I get the opportunity to help students edit their personal essays for college applications. So I sat down tonight to go over one student's essay and I just about cried. Her life was so much different than I had imagined. I knew she came from a poor country. I knew that she was a motivated young woman. But I had missed everything in between, the whole picture of her life, the whole, completely devastating picture of her everyday existence.
It reminded me of how we tend to make judgements about people even thought we do not know the whole picture. A co-worker is snippy to us and we automatically tag them as a mean, spiteful person. A family member forgets to do something for us and we assume they don't really love or care for us.
We're not seeing the full picture. We're not seeing that the co-worker just came out of the boss's office discovering her workload had just increased 10 fold with no extra compensation. We're not seeing how someone belittled our family member so on the drive home all they thought about was the negative words said to them, not the list of to-dos.
But as you well may know we can't simply withhold judgement from anyone. That's impossible. But we can ask for the whole picture, ask the One who sees everything to give us His eyes and His ears. Something amazing happens when we ask for this...life becomes less about us and our feelings and becomes more about serving and loving and speaking life into the lives of those around us.
Lord, today I'm asking for the whole picture. I want to see with Your eyes and hear with Your ears.
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