Thoughts Before Bed 062908

Thoughts before bed:

1.) Psalm 119:92 “Unless Your law had been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.”

What it means to me: I would have died or killed myself if I didn’t have you, God. You saved my life!

2.) In his book, “Deliver Us From Me-Ville,” David Zimmerman asks a very interesting question about how two people who don’t know anything about each other make sense of each other. He answers his question this way, “Simply put, they judge everything in comparison to how they understand themselves” (28).

You see this all the time in electronic communication. I know some people who, for some reason, always e-mail in CAPS. “HOW ARE YOU TODAY?” I get an e-mail like this and I’m thinking, “He/She must be really agitated.” Why do I think this? Because if I had written an email this way, I would essentially be saying, “I’m incredibly irritated by everything and everyone right now, but I’m making an attempt to be positive, but at the same time, I want you to know that I’m about to punch someone.” As it turns out, my friend is very satisfied with life, really does want to know how I’m doing today but must do all his/her work in DST with the CAPS LOCK on (my friends at work can understand this annoying attribute of working with a DOS-based system), and is only in a hurry and just doesn’t want to bother hitting the CAPS LOCK before and after emailing me.

Other thoughts this provokes: When we look at others, we may not realize it sometimes, but we’re looking in a mirror. For instance, when I look in the mirror, I notice the dark circles under my eyes. When I look at other people, I look for dark circles under their eyes. If they have dark circles under their eyes, I feel an immediate connection to them without one word having been spoken between us.

I believe the same is true of the non-physical. Jesus said in Matthew 15:18, “But whatever comes out of the mouth comes from the heart…” When I judge others, I’m judging from the heart. If I don’t know the person, then where did my appraisal of that person come from? They couldn’t have put it there in the split-second that we’ve shared in life together, so it must come from my appraisal of myself. Therefore, I have to ask myself, “Do I hate that thing about that person because I hate that thing about myself?” The first time I asked myself this question was after I met my brother’s (now ex-) girlfriend. I immediately couldn’t stand, and so I expressed, that she was a know-it-all. A couple weeks later, I found myself butting into a conversation on a subject I happen to know a bit about in order to add my un-invited two (or four, ok…five…actually it was probably more like 25) cents. When my soliloquy wasn’t met with awe and appreciation, I had a mental “Doh!” and remembered the ruthless judgment I had made about my brother’s girlfriend.

Zimmerman makes an excellent point. So did Jesus when he asked, “Why do you stare from without at the very small particle that is in your brother’s eye but do not become aware of and consider the beam of timber that is in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3). Notice that both people had the same problem: they both had something in their eye. But the person who was doing the judging had the bigger thing in their eye…Selah….

Warning: If you’re with a group of people and you make a judgment about someone, you are likely revealing more to that group of people about yourself than you are about the person you’re judging. You might as well just take off all your clothes in public. It would probably be less humiliating….

3.) I really should get to bed…